Brian Fallow: Government's water plan making waves

The more charitable view is that the country needs to earn a living without sacrificing swimming and fishing in our rivers. Photo / Alan Gibson

The Government announced a water policy package this week.

The narrow-eyed, curled-lip view of it would be that the Government is happy to spend millions of dollars cleaning up polluted waterways, but much more on activities liable to befoul them.

The more charitable view is that the country needs to earn a living as a trading nation and the package is a valuable first step towards a regime that facilitates that, without sacrificing the swimmability and fishability of our rivers.

Farmers have long clamoured for more investment in water storage and irrigation.

The problem is not that New Zealand is running out of water, they say, but that water is running out of New Zealand.

In summer when demand is highest, flows are often at their lowest.

The Government says it wants to take pressure off aquifers and make greater use of the very large flows in alpine rivers.

The amount of water that can be taken for commercial uses - 75 per cent of it irrigation - has doubled over the past 10 years, but still represents only 2 per cent of the total fresh water resource.

It points to work by the Institute of Economic Research which sees the potential for 340,000ha of additional irrigation, which could boost exports by $1.4 billion a year by 2018 and $4 billion a year by 2026.

Agriculture Minister David Carter announced a $35 million grant scheme to enable groups, typically of farmers, to develop irrigation infrastructure proposals to an "investment-ready" prospectus stage.

The Government would have the option, if a scheme stacked up and went ahead, of taking a cornerstone shareholding of up to a third.

It is considering investing up to $400 million.

This is an immature investment class, Carter said, and Government participation would give confidence to private investors.

"We have been talking, at a high level, to banks and iwi," he said.

"Unless you do it right it can lead to environmental degradation and that's not in New Zealand's interest from a reputational or environmental point of view."

Which brings us to the other part of the package, which is the Government's initial response to the Land and Water Forum's hard-won consensus on a more systematic and sustainable, and less adversarial, approach to managing water.

Environment Minister Nick Smith issued a national policy statement on water - an instrument under the Resource Management Act designed to guide decisions by regional councils.

The forum had urged it to move quickly on this.

But it has substantially rewritten the draft policy statement drawn up after consultation by a board of inquiry chaired by Judge David Sheppard.

Greens co-leader Russel Norman said the Government had removed the parts that would have made the most difference towards cleaning up rivers and lakes. "Nick Smith has removed the provision from the draft [statement] which requires a resource consent, as a discretionary activity, for land use intensification.

"This is despite the fact that nearly every report on water quality identifies land use intensification as the main cause of water quality decline in New Zealand," Norman said.

He sees the hand of the dairy companies in this.

How the policy is working is likely to be reviewed within five years.

Professor Jenny Webster-Brown of Canterbury and Lincoln Universities' Waterways Centre said: "This may be too short a timeframe to detect any significant change in water systems attributable to the policy changes - particularly given the fact that the [policy statement] will not be applied retrospectively to consents awarded or applications lodged before July this year."

Until these consents came up for renewal or review, and could be changed to align with the policy, improvements in fresh water quality were likely to be marginal, she said.

Smith also announced additional funding for the clean-up of waterways which will lift the spend over the next five years to $94 million. Over the decades that daunting task is likely to take, the funding would be some $265 million. The policy requires regional councils to set quality limits for fresh water, but is silent on what those limits should be.

Gary Taylor of the Environmental Defence Society said: "The whole thrust of the [forum's] recommendations, if they can be distilled in a sentence, was that there needs to be much more national direction to regional councils on freshwater management. We have still got a lot of fuzziness in that space. What is needed is a national environmental standard which would provide the specificity that is lacking."

The European Union has a directive that requires its member states to achieve "good" water quality and quantifies what "good" means, he said.

"If they can do it across Europe with its massive diversity, we can have that kind of specificity here."

The differences in regional circumstances and starting points could be addressed by varying the timeframes for reaching compliance with the limits set, Taylor said.

The policy's objectives also include maximising the efficient allocation and efficient use of water - subject to such limits as minimum river flows and lake levels.

That would include making rules for the transfers of permits to take water.

Decisions on an allocation regime are likely by October next year, Smith said.

The Government also has to decide on the future role of the forum or some successor body.

Under Alastair Bisley's chairmanship it gathered together just about everybody who is anybody in the water world, so to speak, and adopted with startling success the Scandinavian approach of thrashing out issues and seeking consensus among parties more accustomed to being on opposing sides of adversarial legal processes.

It has 58 members drawn from industry groups, environmental and recreational organisations, iwi and others with an interest in sustainable land and water management.

"I would be astonished if the good will and engagement capital that has been built up there was just dissipated," Taylor said.