KEY POINTS:
Urgent law change is required to stop cellphone companies forcing towers upon communities wherever and whenever they want, MPs were told yesterday.
Sue Grey, of Ban the Towers, told the select committee considering the group's 3100-signature petition of eight neighbourhoods with unwanted celltowers that often "only find out about them when workmen are climbing on the roof".
Residents of Waiheke Island's Surfdale Beach found out about a Vodafone tower only when a woman recovering from breast cancer asked workers in "unmarked white vans" what they were doing.
Ms Grey, a Nelson environmental lawyer and scientist, said companies could put up towers as long as they were within New Zealand electromagnetic exposure limits. She questioned the standards, saying Austria's, Russia's and China's were more than 100 times stricter.
Ms Grey said the law needed to be changed so people could have a say about towers.
She said the proposed National Environment Standards for Telecommunication should be amended so all cellphone towers and phone masts within 500m of any house, school, preschool or hospital were designated as non-complying and communities would have to be notified before they went up.
Ms Grey said cellphone towers were highly contentious and terrified people, which was an effect in itself.
"If we want to build a deck on our house or build a fence that's 1.8m instead of 1.75m we've got to go through all these processes. If [cellphone companies] want to put up a celltower or a phonemast, they can do it as of right. One day it is not there, the next day it is and nobody can do a thing about it."
The hearing was interrupted from the public gallery by Vicky Webb, who emotionally told how her family chose not to use a microwave and made limited use of cellphones but returned from holiday to find a tower being put up 45m from her children's window.
She said they wanted to move, but Quotable Value had told them it could knock 5-10 per cent off the value of their house, "so who reimburses us?"
National MP Nick Smith asked why cellphone towers might have controls put on them if the actual electromagnetic effect might be similar to what people tolerated when taking dinner out of the microwave.
Ms Grey said: "You can choose if you want to use a microwave or cellphones. If Telecom or Vodafone put a celltower next to your house you've got no choice at all."
Ms Grey said her group started when the Nelson playcentre her child attended found out Telecom was putting up "a 22m celltower with six transmitters about 5m from our sandpit", and was now spreading quickly through communities with similar concerns.
A written submission from Telecom said it handled "community engagement" on a case-by-case basis, with some communities desperate to get sites to improve coverage, while others had concerns about property prices and perceived health impacts.
