Bruce Bisset: Disturbing level of compliance

Bruce Bisset.

Perverse as it may seem, the Hastings District Council, under scrutiny as possibly culpable in the Havelock North campylobacter outbreak, is rather heavy-handedly shooting down protest at the more likely villain: stock farming.

Surely, following 5000 infections from contaminated water, the council would want to be careful not to muzzle concerns over possible cause or flow-on effects.

After all, HDC has had many righteous fingers pointed at it suggesting shonky infrastructure was to blame.

Everyone from Environment Minister Nick Smith to Federated Farmers to Irrigation NZ has baldly claimed, on no evidence, that stock farming is not the cause - despite it appears most likely given "ruminant DNA" in the bore water samples.

Regardless, that's a matter for the Government inquiry to decide. All such speculation does is frame HDC as culpable by inference, since some sort of leak at the wellhead is second cab off the blame rank.

Now HDC's own officers may be muddying the waters.

First, despite a number of reports of "blue water" causing irritating effects, which may or may not be a side effect of post-event chlorination, HDC says its testing shows there's no cause for alarm.

But I'm told independent testing has shown a high concentration of copper in such "blue" samples and, like any mineral, copper in higher-than-incidental amounts can be toxic to humans.

Is this a case of being too quick to dismiss concerns?

Then, given it's not HDC's job to regulate land and water use and quality, you'd think it would be happy to see Greenpeace pointing up the fact stock farming is a major source of water pollution.

Especially when the regional council - whose job such regulation is - has rushed in superfluously to conduct an investigation in parallel with the official Government one, inferring HDC may be at fault (or at least that it, HBRC, is not).

But no. Acting on a complaint, council compliance officers told Greenpeace to immediately take down the pointed but rather comical cow-with-tap-instead-of-tail "Dam Wrong" billboards it had erected around the region.

Why? Because the officers decided it was "advertising" so required a resource consent. Lacking one, down they came.

This really irks me. Surely a cartoon image not obviously associated with any form of goods or service is not advertising, so cannot be held to be an "advertising device" as defined in the district plan.

That definition begins: "includes every sign or advertising matter of whatever kind". That phrase must be taken whole; it can't be partitioned and interpreted to mean every sign, of any sort, is an "advertising device" but that's how it seems it has been read.

That would mean someone painting "Go the All Blacks" on their barn, putting a "Jesus Saves" sticker on a window, or making (as in this case) a political statement such as "No Nukes" in their front yard where passers-by can see it, is committing an offence. That's nonsense.

In contrast, Pure Hawke's Bay's anti-GMO signage got round the rules by being assumed to be for an event (the Feds challenging HDC's GE Free stance in court), which gave the signs a 12-week life. Someone complained when they remained up and they've now been taken down.

But it's slightly disturbing Pure HB was apparently granted some discretion, presumably because it suited HDC to have support for its own anti-GMO stance, while Greenpeace gets no such leeway, even though logic says its signs also support the council.

Surely preventing any form of inoffensive non-advertorial message being displayed on private property is an attack on freedom of speech and expression.

The council officers concerned should contemplate the message and re-evaluate their response.

- Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.

- All opinions expressed here are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.