Cabinet last week decided to move ahead with replacing the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS), a centrepiece of the former government’s 2020 policy package. Photo / Andrew Warner
Cabinet last week decided to move ahead with replacing the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS), a centrepiece of the former government’s 2020 policy package. Photo / Andrew Warner
Fifty freshwater experts and leaders have urged the Government not to roll back New Zealand’s bottom-line standards for our lakes and rivers, many of which remain in an unswimmable state.
For councils, the existing NPS set strict bottom lines for certain pollutants while requiring them to create new plans and give effect to “Te Mana o te Wai” - ensuring the life-supporting capacity of freshwater.
Cabinet’s about-turn now means councils will no longer have to draw up plans by the end of next year.
Effort would instead be directed toward developing an “enduring and workable” new NPS with communities over the next 18 to 24 months, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay said.
Environment Minister Penny Simmonds said the NPS had become “extremely complex and expensive to implement and will not deliver the outcomes for freshwater that New Zealanders expect”.
The move has already brought a backlash from a list of community and Māori leaders, as well as academics working across areas such as freshwater ecology and public health.
“To remove, replace or rewrite our country’s national freshwater policy at this time, so soon after it has been brought in, would be a terrible mistake,” they said in a just-issued open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Cabinet ministers.
“The progress made to date on national policies for freshwater, while still inadequate, are a major improvement on what we had and are a major progression to where most New Zealanders want us to be,” said the letter’s organiser, freshwater scientist Dr Mike Joy.
“This freshwater policy has involved a huge amount of work, collaboration and expenditure, and losing all that would be a huge backward step.”
Another signatory, Otago University epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker, noted it’d been just seven years since Havelock North’s disastrous gastro outbreak – and that “safe fresh water for drinking and recreational use is a fundamental building block of public health”.
Forest & Bird’s Tom Kay said his group supported enduring and workable rules for freshwater, “but to us, ‘workable’ means rules that actually clean up our rivers and lakes and protect our wetlands”.
In contrast, Federated Farmers’ Colin Hurst called for a regulatory revamp to come sooner, describing the NPS as “without a doubt the most damaging regulation for farmers introduced by the previous government”.
“The rules completely undermine the viability of our rural communities.”
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
