Bill Sutton: Water protection vital in Bay

Bill Sutton

The politics of fresh water has become more important, in the lead-up to this year's election, than ever before in my lifetime.

And the reason is obvious: even in "clean green" New Zealand, clean fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce and valuable. Those who have it, want to keep it. Those who don't have it, want it.

The glib assertion made by a former Prime Minister that "nobody owns water" is no longer credible. Those who own water are the ones who currently have a legal right to use it. That they may never have paid for it doesn't reduce that right.

Water for drinking purposes is of course widely available. Local bodies collect and reticulate both fresh water and wastewater as core responsibilities. Regional councils have responsibility for monitoring and regulating fresh water use. Central government has the power, only recently invoked, to set wide-ranging rules for water use under the Resource Management Act.

It also has the power to impose Water Conservation Orders on significant water bodies. District Health Boards have powers to monitor and enforce water quality for health-related purposes.

Most of our fresh water is not used as drinking water. It is used as a raw material for industrial purposes like food processing, farming and horticulture, and as a convenient place to dump agricultural, industrial and human wastes.

The individuals and corporations who own the rights to do this are well aware of water's value to them, and they are determined to retain their rights for as long as they can. Collectively, they make a very powerful lobby group.

In Hawke's Bay the farming, horticulture, viticulture and food-processing industries are all major users of fresh water, and of course they have many shared interests. They also have political power, because their support or opposition can either make or break both individual politicians and political groupings, as demonstrated in several Hawke's Bay Regional Council elections.

In principle there's nothing wrong with such lobbying: the industries named above provide jobs and income for many thousands of Hawke's Bay families, so their success is important to all of us.

But when these industrial interests come into conflict with other objectives important to all of us, like clean healthy drinking water, clean rivers safe for swimming in, and a stable global climate allowing for our people to stay free of tropical diseases and our native plants and animals to survive for centuries to come, that's when the fireworks start.

It's no coincidence that the water lobby groups have become very vocal in the lead-up to voting later this month. And that's just the public aspect: behind closed doors, some very hard words are being spoken to both new candidates and sitting MPs.

We'll only know how effective this has been after all the votes have been counted and the make-up of the new government has been announced.

My personal hope is for a reversal of the trend I've seen in the last 30 years, of our Hawke's Bay water bodies becoming steadily more polluted. But I also wish to see our major industries retaining access to the resources they need to keep going.

If that "win win" outcome requires more government funding, it should go into helping landowners to clean up our waterways, rather than promoting more intensive farming practices at the expense of our shared environment.

Bill Sutton was Labour MP for the former Hawke's Bay electorate and later served as a Hawke's Bay regional councillor.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz