I may be wrong but . . . .

I may be wrong but . . . . there are a number of worrying aspects to the moves by the New Zealand government to get rid of Ecan (formerly Environment Canterbury) and replace it with government appointed commissioners to manage demands on Canterbury’s abundant but precious water.

For those not following these developments, a rough background. Ecan is a body elected by the people of Canterbury to develop and enact policy around all sorts of environmental issues in the region, including water, air, soil, transport, rivers, etc. Most ordinary residents don’t have much to do with it, but developers, farmers and environmentalists certainly do.

For all sorts of reasons, the NZ government chose to act on complaints from mainly developers and local government mayors about Ecan’s governance and performance. It appointed an ex-politician of its own persuasion, Wyatt Creech, himself a director of a dairying firm, to investigate and report back. No one was surprised when he said Ecan should be sacked and replaced by people who would be, almost certainly, more sympathetic to development and dairy farming.

Creech said Ecan has been too much focussed on the environment at the expense of the easier use of water, particularly for dairying. Hello . . . . isn’t that what Ecan means? Environment Canterbury?

Ecan has been criticised for years for being tardy in granting consents to developments that depend on the supply of water, from dams, rivers and wells. These criticisms, of course, have always been from developers – most people concerned about the environmental impacts are glad that someone is taking time to investigate and act cautiously. The wish of developers and many farmers has been (and from Creech, still is) that Ecan should be more like a rubber stamp, simply checking that an applicant can show the water exists and giving the tick.

Dairying is now huge in Canterbury, and demands for more irrigation are building all the time. Unsurprisingly, we’re told that Ecan has to deal with many times more resource consent applications than any other similar body in New Zealand, while the resource itself, the water, remains finite – and more limited with each application approved. No wonder they’ve been finding it hard to fulfil demands placed on them.

Without some care being taken, the whole region could easily become one giant dairy farm and every drop of available water allocated for industrial dairying (plus all the new electricity to power the pumps). Someone needs to make sure a proper balance is kept.

I am not against development, as long as it’s sustainable and balanced. I am against development purely for the sake of it. I am against the economic prerogative outweighing the environmental prerogative.

Until recently I lived for many years near the Heathcote River in Christchurch, and I had seen year by year the decline in water levels in that river during drier months. I’ve heard and read concerns about many other Canterbury waterways, both the flow volume and the quality, but the Heathcote I know of directly. It’s a signal that all is not well, and that water use inland is affecting areas beyond the immediate places of abstraction.

My concerns about the government’s attack on Ecan are several.  In no particular order:

1.  It’s bad for democracy that a government can replace a democratically elected body with its own appointments, especially for a body which has such a vitally important role for the whole of the Canterbury community. All public bodies have flaws, inefficiencies, political infighting, just as all large corporations do. It’s part of being a democracy and a free economy.

Taking the alternative to its logical limit, all we need is one elected god to run our country and we all do as told by the people he/she subcontracts. That’s efficient – so was Nazism. I’d rather have flawed but human representative government than efficient dictatorship.

2.  The over-emphasis on dairying in New Zealand genuinely worries me. Dairy products are commodities, the prices and costs for which go up and down with world supply and demand. It suffers from booms and busts. It’s doing pretty well right now, but only a year or two ago we had dairy farmers fretting about prices dropping to the point where their operations were becoming unprofitable.

Today more than ever we need to be developing a balanced economy, where booms and busts can smooth each other out as much as possible. Some Canterbury land may not currently be kind to perhaps sheep farmers or croppers, but there will be times when the pendulum will swing. To me, it’s plain daft to rely too much on dairying. Haven’t we yet learned the lessons of the boom times and the bad times in all sorts of industries?

3.  I will believe and aver to my dying day that there is no point in making great economic gains if the environment in which we want to enjoy their benefits is spoiled. Balance is the keyword.

4.  One of Ecan’s jobs is (or should be) to try to ensure all development is sustainable. By this I don’t mean the common, sloppy use of the word “sustainable” as a synonym for “green” or “environmentally friendly”. I mean it literally – the activity or development can be sustained into at least the medium future. It can keep going, in the good times and the bad. It doesn’t depend on the latest boom or bubble (such as house trading or borrowing as a way of making us richer).

To my mind, building more and more and more bigger and bigger dairy farms across the landscape of the region leads eventually to an unsustainable economy, as well as an unsustainable environment.

For all these reasons, and for a few others that I can’t think of right now, I believe Ecan should be encouraged to continue its work and further develop its water management strategy which, from all reports, is a most promising development in itself.