The Government wants 9 per cent of rivers and streams kind of swimmable for much of the time 23 years from now, Forest & Bird chief executive Kevin Hague says.
Last month Environment Minister Nick Smith announced a draft consultation document on freshwater. He wanted to make 90 per cent of New Zealand rivers swimmable by 2040.
The Government is consulting on the document and intends to add it to national policy on freshwater.
Submissions close on April 28 and can be made online on the Ministry for the Environment website.
Mr Hague said the proposal fell far short of what most New Zealanders wanted.
The Green Party has pointed out its definition of swimmable had been changed, to include levels of faecal bacteria that used to put rivers in the "caution" category.
Now Forest & Bird has said the rules would only apply to larger lakes and rivers and other fresh water would not be subject to them.
Some tributaries might be cleaned up, to contribute to a larger river, while others could be left because their water would be diluted with water from the cleaner tributaries.
The rules also apply only to waterways at least 40cm deep.
Mr Hague believed only about 10 per cent of water would be covered by them. And he was disappointed with lots of other aspects of the proposal.
He said it ignored the recommendations of the Land and Water Forum, a mixed-interest group that has been working on water quality for a decade.
It asks for instream life to be measured, something regional councils already do, but doesn't set any standards for it.
It wants pigs, deer, cattle and sheep progressively fenced out of waterways. But that will only be a partial help, Mr Hague said.
"The larger part of the problem isn't cows going in streams, it's the massive load of nitrates from livestock urine and fertiliser that's making its way through soil into waterways. A fence isn't going to stop it."
Only the Whanganui region waterways coloured blue in this map would be subject to Government's proposed water quality standards, Kevin Hague says.
There were no standards set about the level of nitrogen and phosphorous in waterways, or about toxic algae or algal blooms that make swimming dangerous.
The document includes a "get out" clause, which instructs councils to balance economic wellbeing against environmental and swimmability considerations.
"The state of the environment is already hugely compromised. So calling for further compromise is really way over to the economic considerations end of the scale."
There's nothing in the document about how swimmable rivers can be achieved. Intensive farming, especially dairy, is causing much of the pollution and still getting consented.
