Also, let's not forget that the so-called "financial close" for the dam has been delayed seven times to date, because HBRIC has been unable to sign up enough water users to make it viable. Pot calling the kettle black, Mr Dick?
It's likely to be delayed at least once, if not twice, more in an attempt to make the 45 million cubic metres they need. Or will it be tortuously extended until the magic figure is reached? Please, advise ratepayers when the final "final close" date will be?
Secondly, he accuses us of being ideologically opposed to farming - really? I'm a farmer, Alan, and I love it! What we do oppose is toxic farming - pollution of groundwater and rivers for profit, and the ideology that this water is there for HBRIC and its mates to exploit, regardless of how it affects other water and river users downstream. Neither are we anti-irrigation. After all, grape growers and horticulturalists irrigate their vines and orchards but need vastly less water than dairying, which uses 800 to 1000 litres of water to make just one litre of milk. We need smarter, targeted irrigation, not more dairy farms. In fact, without dairy the dam is not viable, so the argument can be made that HBRIC is promoting farming methods that use vast quantities of water wastefully to reach their target.
Thirdly, he spins the tired illusion that the dam will offer "major environmental gains" - this is quite laughable, to be kind. There's a list of ecologists and environmental scientists as long as my arm who will disprove Alan's claims. The only gains that there might possibly be is to reverse the environmental damage done through HBRIC's over-allocation of groundwater to irrigators.
Has anyone noticed the proliferation of pivot irrigators in CHB over the last five years? Whatever "gains" will be more than outweighed by the environmental destruction the dam will cause - destruction of rare braided river bed, already rare and threatened native species, and biodiversity which will take several hundred years to recover, if ever.
Fourthly he says 2500 new jobs will be created. He's more optimistic than Andrew Newman, whose latest estimates have reduced to 2000.
Can you please advise in greater detail, Alan, which is true and where in the region these jobs will appear? How many in CHB, and where, if "mostly not on farm"? How, exactly, will CHB benefit from this economic miracle?
He concludes by calling us "doomsayers". It's a pity that he has resorted to name-calling, which is the usual tactic when someone can't come up with rational and factual arguments.
One thing which I do agree with him on is that rational decisions will be made fairly soon, and later, this year.
The sooner, the better.
- Dan Elderkamp is co-chairman of CHB Forest & Bird.
- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz
