KEY POINTS:
The latest wake-up call about the health of the Hauraki Gulf couldn't have been better timed. It was released on Wednesday as Prime Minister Helen Clark stood on the shores of Lake Rotoiti, announcing central government's contribution to the $144.2 million rescue package for Rotorua's four most polluted lakes.
"This is an iconic tourism destination," she said. "If we have stinking, rotting lakes, that destroys what is a beautiful place."
How awful if in 20 or 50 years' time, a Prime Minister has to stand on Queens Wharf, her nose masked from the putrid odours of a dying Waitemata Harbour, announcing a similar package for Auckland's front-door "lake".
The Hauraki Gulf State of the Environment report notes the catchment is home to one million people and 410,000 cows. As far as humans are concerned, it's dirt from land development and heavy metals from urban Auckland road run-off and galvanised iron roofs that are causing unknown levels of pollution in our poorly flushing harbours.
Further south, it's the cows on the Hauraki Plains contributing "a vast amount of nitrogen" to the Firth of Thames each year that are the big worry.
Most alarmingly, the authors are forced to resort to hyperbole because they can't find the facts.
"In preparing the state of the environment report, it has become apparent that information on the environment of the gulf that we should know, and have easy access to, often does not exist ... or is difficult to obtain because of the way it is collected or because it is held by many organisations and not collated," they say.
No surprise there. This time three years ago, when the first-ever state of the environment report for the Hauraki Gulf was unveiled, lack of funds meant no primary research was commissioned. The report was a cut-and-paste of old academic and official files.
The Hauraki Gulf Forum - a consortium of affected councils, government departments and tangata whenua - which produced the report, pledged to do better next time round.
The new report repeats the need for more up-to-date information.
It concludes: "Effective, integrated management of the gulf requires first and foremost a much better approach to understanding the strategic picture of the gulf and that means making sure we have the best possible understanding of what is happening."
True enough, but even before that, there has to be a Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Board with the legislative backing to ensure a strategy is not just designed, but acted upon.
This is hardly an original proposition. Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee has been campaigning for more official recognition for the marine park since it was created by Parliament in 2000.
For years he's despaired that there isn't even a sign board anywhere proclaiming the park's existence.
A small, ministerially appointed board with a modest budget would, he says, ensure the park was promoted and the provisions of its establishment act observed.
The Rotorua lakes disaster highlights the perils of neglecting the familiar, however treasured it might be.
The first official recognition of the gulf as a special place came with the Crown purchase of Little Barrier Island in 1894 as a bird sanctuary.
In 1967, to help resist human developmental pressures on the gulf islands, the Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park was created as a sort of twin to the mainland national parks. The thrust was protecting native flora and fauna from human invaders.
In 2000, new legislation replaced the maritime park with a marine park, and the focus broadened from protecting just the birds and the trees to embracing the "inter-relationship between the Hauraki Gulf, its islands and catchments and the ability of that inter-relationship to sustain the life-supporting capacity of the environment".
The social, economic, recreational and cultural well-being of humans were to be sustained as well as the soil, air, water and ecosystems of the gulf. The area to be managed included the lands draining into the gulf.
So grand was this vision that everyone involved had to have a lie-down in order to contemplate their wondrous achievement. I just wish, eight years on, that they would finally wake up and start implementing it.
