Ewan McGregor: Compromise needed over water

Ewan McGregor.

The balanced and thoughtful Talking Point by Martin Williams in Saturday's paper makes a welcome relief from the increasingly divisive discourse that has come to characterise the debate on water in this region.

Water, we all know, is essential to life, and no nation is more water endowed, and blessed with a favourable growing climate to go with it, than New Zealand, especially Hawke's Bay.

Over the last decade the politics of water has a sea-changed. Abundance, or at least the perception of it, has since become the reality of scarcity. The physical shift is not great, but the political manifestation is profound. This has motivated ecological and recreational interests to organising their resources to advance their claims on the one hand, while on the other, irrigators and other industrial users are demanding greater access. But the resource remains finite.

These increasingly conflicting claims prompted the Regional Council to explore opportunities for large-scale water storage, capturing winter flows for use in summer for irrigation. The outcome of that has been the Ruatanawha dam project. This would offer substantial and lasting economic opportunities, but the cost is great - perhaps too great. This debate has come to divide the Hawke's Bay community like no other since the location of a regional hospital.

Hindsight offers clarity that foresight denies, and I now believe that rather than the council driving this project, it should have facilitated it, subject to it being accepted and, if so, led by the landowners.

If they didn't freely commit themselves to the project it wouldn't have fledged, and its future determined some time ago. The numerous successful schemes in the South Island have been farmer driven.

It is not just the community that is divided, though, but the council itself. This has gone beyond the conflict of issues and philosophy, which after all is what democracy is all about, but increasingly it has become personal.

One councillor even engages the internet to mock the chairman. This he obviously sees as entertaining political theatre, and it may be so to some, but it can only open further the personal fractures that thwart effective governance. The public deserves better.

The reality is that this contest for water is here to stay, and will only deepen as factions further entrench, become more organised and fund the campaigns of sympathetic candidates. But compromises need to be made as we collectively develop water management structures that recognise that better ecological and recreational water is being demanded by the public, while at the same time irrigation is increasingly an essential part of agricultural production, driven by population and commercial pressure, and ensuring more reliable yields of better quality produce. One just needs to see what irrigation does for the economy of the Heretaunga Plains. This region's land-based economy is inexorably moving from dryland pastoral farming to irrigated horticulture/viticulture and field crops.

It is all very well for the Plains producers to want more emphasis on their water supply, but there is much productive flat land in the region beyond and the irrigation frontier is expanding all the time.

We need to explore all possibilities to increase the effective - and judicious - use of irrigation. Maybe smaller-scale water storage, if the dam does not proceed. But this is easier said than done as you need suitable geology combined with sufficient winter flow. This is the strength of the Ruatanawha proposal.

But what of the fresh water that flows hourly into the vast Pacific Ocean? Can this be utilised by pumping it back to irrigate? Not that that would be much help to the Ruatanawha.

This and other water conversations we must have in the spirit of understanding the various dimensions of the water issue, and with an absence of extravagant and populist rhetoric. Or, as Martin Williams says, "reboot" the debate.

- Ewan McGregor is a former deputy chairman of the Hawke's Bay Regional Council.

- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz