An opinion piece in the “FARMERS WEEKLY” July 8, 2024 by Gord Stewart, a sustainability consultant was titled “We have to get serious about nitrates” in which he wrote “Independent Kiwi scientists suggest that some 800,000 New Zealanders have water supplies with potentially hazardous nitrate levels. Rural residents on bore water supplies are particularly at risk —An oft-cited Danish study reported in 2018 followed 2.7 million people over a 23 year period—found an increase in colorectal cancer risk—the same analysis said that nitrate could be attributable to an additional 100 colorectal cancer cases a year and 40 deaths in New Zealand -“ Gord Stewart’s article is pretty balanced.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the extreme views held by the leaders of Federated Farmers and the current Coalition Government.
These leaders are letting themselves, farmers, and the country down by sticking to spiel rather than science.
I live in Central Canterbury and have made an effort to learn about the uncontrolled nitrate leaching that is occurring in my district of Selwyn.
Apart from assembling and reading a mass of peer reviewed literature as well as press articles, I have spent the last four years conducting my own monthly nitrate tests across the lower Selwyn water Zone.
My results confirm that the senior managers at the Canterbury Regional Council, (Ecan), are under reporting just how serious the nitrate pollution has become. Because you do not have the means to manage a problem should not give you license to “manage the story”.
Ecan reports their nitrate monitoring as 5 years means. They have inadequate monitoring sites where high nitrate result are likely to be present. The “reductions” in nitrate leaching Ecan promotes are modelled reductions which have little connection to reality.
In essence Ecan are feeding ratepayers “tobacco science”.
In a 2023 paper, Dr Bryan Jenkins stated that the natural capital of Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere may be beyond recovery due to the ineffective and delayed responses by Ecan.
Hardly surprising when with Ecan oversight the Selwyn Water Zone Committee adopted a (non enforced) “bottom line” for nitrate in their rivers of 8.5 mg/L NO3-N.
Sadly two major groundwater connected rivers I monitor regularly exceed this “bottom line”.
The Canterbury nitrate story in a nutshell
In response to a 1998 drought, the Ministry for the Environment and MAF with the help of a Wellington PR firm established a “steering committee” of irrigators and business interests to develop the Canterbury Strategic Water Study. The name was later changed to the Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS) which is sponsored by the Canterbury Mayoral Forum to give it a veneer of legitimacy. The pragmatic decision was made not to consult with environmentalist or consider the fate of Canterbury’s lowland rivers and lagoons during the development of the CWMS.
There was no attempt to address the economic inequity of awarding the regions’ freshwater to farmers.
The non-notified CWMS was given statutory authority and primacy over critical parts of the RMA 1991 through the enactment of the Environment Canterbury (temporary commissioners) and improved water management Act 2010.
The Ecan Act enabled the government to run Ecan for a decade in order to massively increase the area of irrigated land in Canterbury.
In essence this was a pragmatic FAST-TRACK device designed to circumvent existing environmental protections.
Farmer buy in was purchased with the $435 million irrigation enhancement fund.
The newly irrigated land lent itself to industrial farming notably large dairy herds on light porous soils known to be vulnerable to nitrate leaching which indeed took place.
Ecan issued the necessary consents to use massive amounts of river and groundwater for irrigation and to discharge pollutants onto land without the regulations or means to manage the inevitable nitrate leaching.
Irrigation consents and consents to discharge onto land have become de facto “property rights” to be traded among water users. The large irrigation schemes hold single consents, the rights to these consents are divided into irrigation scheme shares. These can be reallocated or traded.
The Rakaia River National Water Conservation Order 1988 was amended under the term of the government appointed commissioners to take an additional 70 cubic meters of water / second from the once protected Rakaia River. This additional water is conjured under the non consented Lake Coleridge Project where a subjective 350 million cubic meters of “warehouse stored water” is somehow held and recovered from the inaccessible level of Lake Coleridge for sale to contracted irrigation schemes. Manawa Energy will continue to profit from this device for as long as Ecan turns a blind eye.
The values of the Rakaia River are no longer protected by the WCO.
Fast-Track Approvals Version II
The present Coalition Government is presently attempting to apply the Ecan pilot across the whole of New Zealand by adopting the strategies used by the John Key National government in Canterbury from 2010 to 2019; Ignore science, enact under urgency fact-track legislation to achieve pragmatic economic gains disregarding the loss of natural capital for future generations.
“Expert independent commissioners” now have little credibility with cynical Canterbury residents who are left to decide whether to accept bowel cancer, premature babies, and “blue babies” due to methaemoglobinaemia or pay for costly filters to remove nitrate from their drinking water.
Polluting a region’s groundwater is not a property right. Many would argue that with rights come responsibilities.
Regulations whether “green” or “red” are the only means to attempt to manage this wanton pollution.
Ironically Canterbury ratepayers fund 80% of the cost of the consents that Ecan issues so farmers may profit from the use of pristine public water and return it to groundwater in a polluted state.
It is far from reassuring that the consents are largely “self-monitored”
The Select Committee Process.
The select committee process is the time between the first and second reading of Bill where there is a cross party effort to consider the wider implications of proposed legislation.
Normal democratic convention allow the public to have their say in the form of submissions.
Unfortunately for democracy this government is short changing its citizens by gaming the submission process through restricting both the time to prepare, write and speak to a Bill under impossible time constraints. Citizens are being treated with contempt.
Two executive member of the NZFFA experienced first hand how badly the submission process can be abused when they attempted to make a submission to the RMA Amendment (freshwater and other matters) Bill.
The Primary Production Select Committee, i.e. the Primary Production Subcommittee ‘B’ of Miles Anderson, Jo Luxton and James Meager, on 9 July, spent their time turning this important piece of the democratic process into a circus.
These three South Canterbury National Party MPs decided not to take the submission process seriously but instead used the opportunity to fire cheap questions at numerous informed and concerned submitters to score points in an unfair setting where the rogue ministers controlled the “talking stick”.
Clearly they did not want videos of the submissions to reveal just how badly Canterbury’s freshwater pollution has become. The unchecked and uncontrolled nitrate pollution of the groundwater beneath Central Canterbury is neither “pragmatic” nor a “property right”. It is the direct consequence of the John Key National Government’s constitutionally repugnant Ecan Act 2010 and the Ministry for the Environment and MPI’s inspired “Fast-Track” Canterbury Water Management Strategy.
Facts and science should not be countered by ignorance, bullying, or theatre, as was the experience of the two NZFFA executive members who attempted to make a submission on the Bill yesterday.
Nitrates in water is out of sight but should not be out of mind. It is a strong message from Peter Trolove and the NZ Fed. Freshwater Anglers. More good advocacy from NZFFA. Politicians in ECan and local bodies and parliament – take note please.
The select committee process has been meddled with by successive governments and now is an insult to consultation and democracy. The Fast Track Approval Bill devised my ministers Messrs Jones, Bishop and Brown and currently under discussion, completely eliminates democracy.
Dr Trolove makes several important points about the big question, “How did we get here.” And by here, I mean the crisis of freshwater management. Canterbury is Ground Zero, though one could argue Southland, Taranaki, Otago, Waikato and Hawkes Bay have similar problems. The result is polluted source water, dying rivers and native birds and fish, a growing health crisis, with the worst bowel cancer rate on earth and elevated birth risk, and a black eye for our tourism industry.
John Key chose this path when he sacked the democratically elected government of New Zealand’s second largest city. Now he and his Axis Network minions are advising the current government to follow the ECan template again. That’s what the Fast-Track Development bill and the coalition’s RMA and “freshwater reform” package is all about. Marginalize the public. Exclude scientists and recreational groups from the process. Then make asinine statements like we need to remove trout from rivers if we care about source water.
If you ask this government how they think they know better than the High Court, the Environment Court, regional councils who’ve tried to address the issue in their land and water plans, or farmers doing their best to reduce nitrate use, the Coalition has no answer. It’s because their position is indefensible.
Similarly, they have no answer for the simple question, “Why do you think you get to pick winners and losers in this economy–when you guys tell us you’re the party of business?”
Before COVID, ecotourism earned more foreign currency than the dairy industry. But ecotourism isn’t in debt to Australian banks, where John Key and Bill English immediately sought employment after leaving office.
This week, the OECD ranked New Zealand the fourth worst country out of 38 for failing to control lobbyists’ infiltration of government. Our conflict-of-interest laws are pathetic. Nicola Willis is a former lobbyist for Fonterra, the nation’s single biggest polluter. Chris Bishop used to lobby for Big Tobacco, which kills 11 million people a year. David Seymour has deep connections to right-wing group the Axis Network. And our associate environment minister is Andrew Hoggard, the former president of Federated Farmers.
Now Key, who has recently been accused of insider trading in the US stock market, is advising Luxon.
That’s how we got here. These guys see no separation between the levers of political power and self-dealing to get rich at our expense. There’s no distinction between our current government and the special interests of the dairy and irrigation and fertilizer industries and Big Tobacco.
The merger of political and corporate power is the very definition of fascism, according to Mussolini.
The m
Thanks for this. Basically we have large scale corruption driving so may political decisions, and Chris Bishop is utterly naive about the fast-track consents process.
Thanks for your comment, Amy. Chris Bishop has a big future ahead of himself as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, Dairy, Irrigation and hydro. Clearly he’s the NeoLiberal Lucifer. This coalition’s best ideas are from the 1980s. Muldoonism and Think Big got resurrected as the ECan Temporary Commissioners Act. And that was the template for the Fast Tract Act and the rape of freshwater they plan.
In the Canterbury region as Dr Peter Trolove states, dairy livestock concentration on the region’s farms have contributed to unsafe nitrate levels in drinking water sources. The drinking water of a multitude of people living in that region is contaminated by dangerous amounts of nitrates as well as coliform bacteria from fertilizer and manure. Peter Trolove’s research, and ongoing monitoring, reveals that water systems serving people in the area were cited for excessive nitrate levels. Though their rates, many people who live in this area pay for the contaminated water coming out from thier taps, as well as buying bottled water to drink if chosen as a nitrate free way of having good water, and yet no one in local government really seems to care about their concerns and having to pay for contaminated water that poses serious health risks. Nitrate-related contamination comes from fertilizer for crops and manure. The body digests nitrates and turns it into nitrites, which inhibits red blood cells’ ability to carry oxygen and it is suggested that drinking water with high levels of nitrates increases the risk for gastrointestinal and urinary tract cancers. The other major source of water contamination from dairy farming is total coliform bacteria from raw, untreated manure. When rain falls on recently fertilized paddocks, it pushes contaminants from the surface deeper into the soil, and eventually into groundwater from which people can often see and smell the brown water from their taps. But in the days before or after, water can continue to be contaminated even if the water runs clear. Drinking water with total coliform bacteria can cause gastrointestinal illnesses, which are linked to diarrhoea, stomach cramps, nausea, and fever.
Mzny dairy farmers take the liquid manure from cow sheds and apply it to their paddocks where crops are grown to feed their cattle. But when too much manure is applied for plants to absorb, the rest finds its way out. Bottom line for Peter Trolove is that he cares more about drinking water than any of the councillors and many other people do. He, and his family, are all drinking this water. Which is why he cares and why we all should for ourselves.
The NZFFA supposedly had ten minutes to make its oral submission on the RMA (freshwater and other matters) Bill last Tuesday.
The Primary Production subcommittee directed that oral submissions should be brief to enable the committee the maximum amount of time for questions.
We complied.
We got one question “…………would you accept regulation for the removal of trout and salmon from New Zealand’s rivers”?
This from lawyer trained, first term list MP James Meager, who has only three years experience with a law firm. The rest of his short career was as a press secretary for various National Party Ministers such as Bishop, Bennett, and English or attached to Otago University.
I am still struggling to understand the point he was attempting to make in the context of the Bill. If he wished to give offense, he succeeded.
The subcommittee then decided they had no more questions.
I asked if I could ask one of my own of the subcommittee.
This related to the 1958 WHO MAV for drinking water (11.3 mg/L NO3-N).
I pointed out this limit should be reviewed in the light of current science and asked if the government had plans to due so. After a pause I was advised that this was a question for the Ministry of Health and that our time was up.
This was the pattern of the day for the other submissions that I watched on video.
The most experienced MP Jo Luxton, contributed little. She could seen making continuous repetitive short scratching with her pen and kept turning over pages. Was she simply acting for the camera?
It seemed pointless submitting to a subcommittee that simply did not want to take part.
I can confirm what Peter is saying about the Select Committee process, and that it is simply a box-ticking exercise with no intention of actually listening – it is now a simple but deadly farce.
A couple of years ago, the Council of Outdoor Recreations (CORANZ) was granted 15 minutes to appear before an Environment Select Committee – that was simply curtailed abruptly after just 5 of those precious 15 minutes. No questions were forthcoming. So much for democracy!
It’s a pity the High Court cannot have influence over the Select Committee farce:
“Consultation” is defined by the High Court decision of Air New Zealand Limited v Wellington International Airport Ltd. This decision summarised the relevant considerations for consultation to be as follows:-
The essence of consultation is the communication of a genuine invitation to give advice and a genuine consideration of that advice. The effort made by those consulting should be genuine, not a formality; it should be a reality, not a charade. Sufficient time should be allowed to enable the tendering of helpful advice and for that advice to be considered. The time need not be ample, but must be at least enough to enable the relevant purpose to be fulfilled. It is implicit that the party consulted will be (or will be made) adequately informed to enable it to make an intelligent and useful response. The party obliged to consult, while quite entitled to have a working plan in mind, should listen, keep an open mind, and be willing to change and if necessary start the decision-making process afresh. The parties may have quite different expectations about the extent of consultation.
Air New Zealand Ltd v Wellington Airport Ltd HC Wellington, CP 403/91, 6 January 1992
Faculty of
Law
Te Kauhanganui Tātai Ture
Faculty of Law Research centres New Zealand Centre for Public Law Publications Regulations Review Committee Digest Chapter 13
Chapter 13: Non-Compliance with Notification and Consultation Procedures: SO319(2)(b)
A: Standing Order 319(2)(h)
319 – Drawing attention to a regulation
(1) – In examining a regulation, the committee considers whether it ought to be drawn to the special attention of the House on one or more of the grounds set out in paragraph (2).
(2) – The grounds are, that the regulation—
…
(h) – was not made in compliance with particular notice and consultation procedures prescribed by statute:
Hist: SO 315(2)(h) (October 2011 to August 2014), SO 310(2)(h) (September 2008 to October 2011), SO 315(2)(h) (August 2005 to September 2008)
Regulations can have a significant impact on the rights and liberties of individuals and organisations. Notification procedures allow those that may be affected by proposed regulations to be made aware of their existence. Consultation requirements are designed to give individuals and organisations the opportunity to offer their opinions on proposed regulations, and for those opinions to be considered by the body responsible for making the regulations. Consultation can also allow any problems or issues to be dealt with prior to the regulations coming into force.
For these reasons, a statute may specify that certain notification or consultation procedures must be undertaken as part of the regulation making process. Two issues may arise when the Committee considers Standing Order 319(2)(h); namely, what notification or consultation requirements did the empowering statute contain, and were those requirements met? Each issue will be examined separately.
B: When is Consultation Required?
An Act may contain an express requirement to follow certain notification or consultation procedures. The duty to consult may be framed in several ways. Consultation may be required with specified individuals or groups. Alternatively, the individual or body exercising the power may be given a discretion to consult with ‘appropriate persons’ or ‘those that may be affected by the regulations’. An Act may simply provide that ‘consultation must take place’, while others will set out in some detail the various steps that must be undertaken before a regulation can be made. Section 5 of the Marine Reserves Act 1971 provides an example of the latter. It sets out extensive notification and consultation requirements before an Order in Council can be made declaring an area to be a marine reserve. These include:
the notification of an application for an Order in Council to be published in various newspapers;
a requirement to notify adjacent property owners, local bodies, and harbour boards, the Secretary for Transport and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries;
the preparation of a plan available for inspection free of charge;
a requirement that the applicant answer any objections to the plan; and
a duty on the Minister of Conservation to consider all submissions and objections and to uphold an objection if he or she finds that declaring an area to be a marine reserve would have an undue impact on such matters as commercial fishing interests and the recreational use of the area.
Having established what the consultation requirements in the empowering Act are, the Committee will examine whether they have been complied with. In this case, the Committee found that all obligations as outlined above had in fact been fully discharged.[294] The complainant had argued that the Department of Conservation, as the applicant, had failed to undertake sufficient non-statutory consultation with local interests. Whilst the Committee did express concern as to the level of general consultation, it did not find this standing order to have been breached. This was because the Department was only required to undertake the formal procedures set out in section 5 of the Act.
An issue that has arisen is whether there can be an implicit requirement to undertake consultation notwithstanding that there is no express requirement to do so. The Committee has adopted different approaches.[295] On the one hand, the Committee has indicated consultation is required even when there is no express requirement to consult. The Whitebait Fishing (West Coast) Regulations 1994 changed the length and timing of the West Coast whitebaiting season. Part IIIA of the Act required extensive consultation procedures to be undertaken prior to the making of regulations. However, the regulations in question were made pursuant to a separate part of the Act that contained no such consultation requirements. This was despite the whitebaiting season being a matter that could have been dealt with under Part IIIA. The issue then became whether the consultation requirements in Part IIIA of the Act should have been adhered to when making the regulations notwithstanding that they were made pursuant to a different part of the Act. The Committee stated that this was ultimately a matter for a court to decide. Interestingly, however, it did make the following statement:[296]
It is the Committee’s view that the question of whether consultation is necessary requires the department to look further than the express wording of the empowering provisions.
The Committee’s observation was based, in part, on the unique statutory framework in which these particular regulations were made. The Committee found that Parliament would have intended there to be consistency between the extensive consultation procedures set out in Part IIIA and the making of regulations under different parts of the Act that affect matters also dealt with under Part IIIA.
On the other hand, in its more recent interim report on a complaint relating to an increased marine safety levy imposed under section 191 of the Marine Transport Act 1994,[297] the Committee was not prepared to find an implicit consultation requirement in relation to the levying power. The Committee nonetheless expressed reservations about the consultation process actually undertaken by Maritime New Zealand. Its concerns included that the consultation was run over the Christmas period, that the consultation period was only extended for those who asked to meet Maritime New Zealand or for those who asked for an extension, and that Maritime New Zealand had advised that the increase would be phased in when in fact the initial increase was 96 percent of the total increase. Further, the Committee recommended that the Marine Transport Act be amended to provide for a statutory consultation process in relation to the levying power. The government response accepted this recommendation, and indicated that an amendment inserting a statutory consultation process would be included in the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill.[298]
C: What Constitutes Consultation?
The Committee has previously adopted the common law definition of consultation established in the High Court decision of Air New Zealand Limited v Wellington International Airport Ltd.[299] The Committee has summarised the relevant considerations to be as follows:
The essence of consultation is the communication of a genuine invitation to give advice and a genuine consideration of that advice.
The effort made by those consulting should be genuine, not a formality; it should be a reality, not a charade.
Sufficient time should be allowed to enable the tendering of helpful advice and for that advice to be considered. The time need not be ample, but must be at least enough to enable the relevant purpose to be fulfilled.
It is implicit that the party consulted will be (or will be made) adequately informed to enable it to make an intelligent and useful response. The party obliged to consult, while quite entitled to have a working plan in mind, should listen, keep an open mind, and be willing to change and if necessary start the decision-making process afresh.
The parties may have quite different expectations about the extent of consultation.
In this publication, several years ago, Fish and Game Councilor Rex Gibson published similar revelations about the nitrate issue in Canterbury (and Southland in particular or any region on alluvial gravel bases). It would be worth revisiting them. Sadly there was no real result at the time.
I have made several submissions over the decades to parliamentary select committees. In the 1970s over the trout farming issue I spent about an hour presenting some 40 pages of submission and then about half an hour answering questions. Then came the Maori Fisheries Bill about 1990 where I spent some 40 minutes with some aggressive, hostile behaviour by two Labour MPs Bill Sutton and Ken Shirley. Winston Peters arrived late as I was responding to the arrogance of the two Labour MPs, sized the situation up in a flash and really got stuck into Messrs. Sutton and Shirley putting them in their place.
The Conservation Law Reform Act select committee jointly with John Henderson we had at least three quarters of an hour.
Now the politicians/governments have restricted submitters mostly to five minutes. Select committees are a nuisance to MPs it seems. But they forget one thing, all MPs are publicv servants, the prime minister is not our leader, but the most senior public servant in New Zealand.
They need strongly reminding that they are there to serve the public interest and listen to the public.
As I said in an earlier posted comment (above) the Fast Track Approvals Bill completely by-passes the select committee process. As such, the rejection of democracy has reached such arrogant heights or should I say depths?
Peter Trolove and Casey Cravens are to be congratulated on their submission on behalf of the NZ Federation of Freshwater Anglers and trout and salmon anglers nation-wide.
Seems absolutely astonishing that the New Zealand Government, given all the evidence provided, can still fail to act on the appalling levels of preventable cancers attributable to high nitrate levels in drinking water.
Sadly, the change of our government to a rabble of right-wing hawkish politicians is only going to see a repeat of the Key-style of profit-at-all-costs policies.
Don’t expect any changes any time soon.
It is said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The same applies to the National Party. It would be inconceivable for them to admit they are wrong.
It’s not as thought the government doesn’t know about the dangers of nitrates in our water. Dr Vernon Coleman wrote warnings about the problem years ago.
Successive NZ governments have poisoned our water, poisoned our wild places with 1080 and even our bodies with mandated Pfizer experimental gene therapy and still has the audacity to refer to “Clean, green New Zealand.” Shame on them.