Mike Williams: Tauranga's bronze dogs timely pointer

Mike Williams

I WENT to the Bay of Plenty last week to stay a night and to catch up with an elderly relative who lives in Tauranga.

I had difficulty finding a place to stay and ended up in an apartment at Mt Maunganui. This town was hopping, with large numbers of tourists, an enormous cruise liner in the port and sublime weather.

Dining at a restaurant on The Strand, the Tauranga Street which faces the sea, I became aware of something across the road and railway line which was attracting many people.

My interest in Hawke's Bay causes me to speculate on what attracts tourists to provincial centres, so I was fascinated to find out what exactly was so appealing to so many visitors. After dinner we went to have a look and discovered a group of bronze statues of the dogs and their friends (and enemies) who feature in the hugely popular "Hairy Maclary" books.

For those who are neither parents nor grandparents or who have been under a rock for the last couple of decades, Hairy Maclary "from Donaldson's Dairy" is a story book dog who has adventures with his friends who have rhyming descriptions and include dachshund Schnitzel von Krumm "with a very low tum", Bitzer Maloney "all skinny and bony", English sheep dog Muffin McClay "like a bundle of hay", Dalmatian Bottomley Potts "covered in spots", Hercules Morse "as big as a horse" among other characters including the dog's enemies, two cats.

Well in excess of five million Hairy Maclary books have been sold and the author, Dame Lynley Dodd, who lives in Tauranga is, in my view, a national treasure.

As Hawke's Bay Today readers will be aware, one of my passions is literacy and Lynley Dodd has done more to promote kids' reading than any other human currently living on the planet.

The Hairy Maclary books are brilliant for parents who want to read to their kids and I think the government should issue a set to every newborn baby on the registration of a birth.

I have no idea what this would cost, but the downstream benefit of literate kids and engaged parents must be worth its weight in gold.

With Napier apparently considering building a velodrome, I wonder if there isn't a better (and cheaper) attraction, particularly given what I saw in Tauranga.

The Hairy Maclary statues cost Tauranga less than $1 million and the upkeep will be minimal. Given that there is a state-of-the-art velodrome three hours up the road from Napier in Cambridge I'd challenge the Napier people to come up with something as good as I saw in Tauranga.

I'm watching developments around the proposed Ruataniwha dam with great interest and it seems to me that the project with its current funding structure is dead, having failed to attract a cornerstone investor in the prescribed time window.

My old friend and Hawke's Bay Regional councillor Peter Beaven has drawn my attention to another oddity concerning water.

Apparently regional councils can authorise bottling companies to take water from our aquifers and make a profit, but cannot charge a royalty for such a right which in these water-constrained times can be alicence to print money.

How is it that something the region clearly "owns" cannot be sold or leased?

Peter has drawn my attention to the case of Fiji Water, a company that was bottling water in Fiji for sale in the USA and paying a third of a Fiji cent per litre for the right to extract the water.

In 2010, The Fijian Government increased this royalty to 15 cents per litre. The company bridled at this impost and threatened to decamp to New Zealand but ultimately caved in and paid it.

In recent years two large water bottlers have made the headlines in Hawke's Bay. Elwood Road Holdings at Whakatu has been granted the right to extract 304 million litres from our aquifer and One Pure at Awatoto has consent for a further 400 million litres.

Let's assume that the 15c a litre royalty getting paid to the Fijian Government is sustainable and apply this to Hawke's Bay.

On the same basis, Hawke's Bay Regional Council, were it able to charge royalties on our water, would have an additional revenue if $105 million.

Even if the royalty payment was set at the same rate as petroleum extraction at 5 per cent of the sale value of the water, perhaps a fairer way of charging, the Regional Council would still be doubling its modest income.

With that kind of money financing the dam would be a breeze, as would a decent tourism promotion campaign.

Our local MPs should be nudging the Cabinet to change the law and make this possible.

-Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former president of the Labour Party. He is a political commentator and can be heard on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon programme, at 11am Mondays, and Sean Plunket's RadioLive show, 11am, Fridays. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.