22 February 2010 Lets Screech to a stop - water management needs a legitimate voice in Canterbury

For a welcome 'once', I am in considerable agreement with Federated Farmers and some of their publically expressed views regarding aspects of the Creech review of Environment Canterbury and its management of water resources in Canterbury. Progress has been occurring over the past year and the largely community inspired Canterbury Water Management Strategy can be seen to hold particular promise - it holds promise environmentally, economically, socially and culturally. So, this begs a question. If a broadly supported community strategy exists, why would government go along with the Creech report and establish a commission and authority that is unlikely to be at all representative? And worse, a commission that is likely to be very heavily oriented toward development at all but tokenistic cost, and thus greatly put at risk the relatively high level of community cohesion the Water Strategy has so far created?

First, lets quickly look at some parts of the Creech report. We should acknowledge the good in ECan. Internally they are clearly, and the report is reasonably positive on this, a very well run organisation, albeit they needed to, and have, picked up their game on
consenting and there is work to do in bringing planning and consenting together. They are acknowledged as leading the country in some areas and probably do. They also clearly have a focus on the environment - this is seen as somewhat of a negative in the Creech report. But, given a 40-50 year legacy of poor water resource management leading to poor environmental outcomes, this seems appropriate although not at the expense surely, of economic sustainability.

Unfortunately, despite all of this good work, they suffer from a siege mentality - ECan is almost constantly the meat in the sandwich, so much so that even after the report's release the mayors of Christchurch and Timaru could not stop putting 'the boot in'. Why, despite the good internal management, does such political negativity still persist?

Clearly water in Canterbury is a complex issue, much bigger than any of the relatively smaller issues the district and city councils are involved in. And, it is an issue that affects us all. And unfortunately, it has become clear over at least the last two decades that many council politicians have not been up to the level of decision making responsibility that is required in these circumstances - hence the lack of a natural resources plan for freshwater, and for the inadequate state of some of the already existing plans. Of course the same criticism could be made nationally - there is no real sustainability leadership in the area of freshwater from this level either. This all leads to frustration, but to the hope offered by the Canterbury Water Management Strategy.

The Strategy offers some hope for those of us who are fishers, kayakers, bird lovers and the like - we have suffered a half century or more of habitat and value loss across much of the region - losses that continue to mount. None of this is acknowledged in the Creech report, yet there is a mountain of peer reviewed scientific and other ~ evidence to show such is the case. These are nationally important values.

The Strategy offers hope also to farmers - those without water are frustrated. They naturally see opportunities that they cannot now access - there is no decision framework in place that would allow strategic and integrated decisions to be made, and decisions that would potentially benefit us all. Instead we are still in 'a race for water' beset by 'first in first served', a race that for commercial fish we stopped in 1986 with the world leading quota management system. We have failed to learn and to be led by these lessons.

So here is the risk now. The government is clearly into 'think big' mode: mining in national parks, and the apparently unfettered removal of the impediments to water storage and irrigation in Canterbury. As Guyon Espiner pointed out, such could be the recipe for a huge environmental movement reawakening. It will likely result in street protests increasing, direct action potentially, and a considerable worsening of what was once a relatively legitimate 'clean and green' image of New Zealand abroad - such a worsening will undoubtedly have economic consequences and these are real consequences to our high end niche market goods that our current government seems absolutely oblivious to.

These are big enough risks in themselves. But what will happen when the very considerable proportion of the population that values freshwater for its recreational and intrinsic worth sees their rivers being despoiled, lakes like Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere suffering even more from the effects of poorly thought out development, didymo and other algies plaguing our waterways. What will they think when those who want the development infrastructure (the dams and canals) cannot afford to pay and it is those others, many of whom live in urban environments, who will subsidise and carry the costs through their rates and taxes?

So, literally now, a plea. Lets 'not throw the baby (e.g., water conservation orders, minimum flows on rivers, the Canterbury Water Management Strategy) out with the bath water (i.e., a somewhat dysfunctional political arm of the Council)'. Rather, lets take the gains made through development of the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and recent improvements in ECan's performance and begin to deliver on these. Such will not be the case if, in disempowering democracy, the government appoints a ruling elite with a pure development agenda - such would surely be a recipe for a huge environmental backlash here in Canterbury, including an almost total loss of trust in processes already heavily invested in by the very people most likely to be disenfranchised, and most likely to be paying for much of the development bill.

My answer then - retain, but keep the political arm of Environment Canterbury 'on critical care watch', implement most of the other 'tidy up' recommendations from the Creech report, and lets get on with implementing the 'win-win' Canterbury Water Management Strategy.\

By Dr Ken Hughey
Professor of Environmental Management, Lincoln University