Stuart Nash: Water bottling needs price tag

Stuart Nash

I have said in this paper that underpinning everything I do as a Member of Parliament will be the region's economic development.

While different campaigns on important issues will come and go, well-paying sustainable employment creates wealth and prosperity for the region and its people, jobs alleviate poverty, fosters ambition and aspiration and breed success in myriad ways. This is the key.

There is one recent business arrival, however, that I have real concerns about. This is the bottling of our amazingly fresh water under the current regulatory regime. There are two operations undertaking such an activity in Hawke's Bay.

The plant in Whataku (opened by the Prime Minister) and another just getting under way in Awatoto.

The concern I have is that those who bottle and sell our water are getting it for free and making a profit. This is wrong on a number of levels.

In order to draw water from the aquifer, a company needs to obtain a resource consent, as specified under the Resource Management Act. Resource consents are about sustainable management of our natural resources, and their application is assessed on the basis of allocation after considering a number of variables.

A consent does not assess commercial viability as this is up to the business owner to determine.

I have always believed water should be free to those using it to meet the necessities of life; for example, for cooking, drinking, cleaning and washing and so on. There is no commercial imperative in this instance, but rather a health and well-being application.

I also believe that if anyone uses water to create economic value (as a factor of production) they should pay for this water; and nowhere is this argument easier to make than those who commercially bottle water.

In this case, there are two reasons why water must have a price. Firstly, because without a price a good has no value, and as such, there is no incentive to optimise usage through innovative technologies or smarter processing.

This is economics 101: the higher the price, the greater the perceived value; the greater the value the more the incentive to minimise wastage and optimise usage. No price assumes no value, and this isn't true for a scarce resource like water.

The second reason is because privately owned bottled-water operations take a free product, market it under the New Zealand brand, and profit. They should pay for the product they take from our aquifer. Free public water should not equal high private profit margins. Future wars will be fought over water and we are giving ours away. Madness devoid of any economic credibility.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about it. There is no legal right to charge a royalty for water being extracted, bottled and sold. This needs to change. Councils need to be given the ability to charge a royalty that is fair and equitable for the bottling business and for the community; a charge that represents the value of the water from a commercial perspective.

In our supermarkets, bottled water is more expensive than Coke, but Coke costs money to make; NZ water doesn't.

If I was a Government MP, I would be pushing for such legislation under the "public good" mandate. As a Minister of the Crown, Craig Foss has an opportunity to champion this in the Government caucus.

I would be willing to work with him in order to give cross-party support to a law change that I know has wide public support because it is the right thing to do for our communities and the Bay. And that, after all, is what you elected us for.

-Stuart Nash is MP for Napier.

-Business and civic leaders, organisers, experts in their field and interest groups can contribute opinions. The views expressed here are the writer's personal opinion, and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz