Bruce Bisset: Water can pay to purify itself

Bruce Bisset, Hawke's Bay Today columnist.

Everyone's jumping on the water-quality wagon this election, even the farmers, proving it is indeed the country's number one issue.

But not everyone is jumping in the same direction. Well, everyone's jumping except National; they fell off that particular wagon some months back when they tried to conjure "wadeable" into "swimmable" with some sleight-of-regulation and fooled no one.

Perhaps wisely, they've decided crap-laden waterways are unwinnable so are quietly lying in the algae consoling themselves by counting their bottling dividends.

Labour is anything but quiet under Jacinda, and having stolen the Greens' levy idea have extended it to cover all commercial users, causing much angst and tooth-gnashing about $18 cabbages and other fantasy scare stories of the sort only knee-jerk right whingers could dream up.

That the concept has actually drawn either praise or cautious support from most farming sectors - after the projected impacts of a suggested 2c per cubic metre royalty were properly worked out and found to be minimal - shows it is far from the unworkable policy the Nats have always claimed it would be.

Sure, the devil may be in the detail, but it's more likely there will be even fewer devils once a regime that takes account of regional and industry differences (as Labour says it will) is determined.

The pity is what was a natural big tick policy for the Greens has, thanks in part to the distracting Metiria Turei debacle, been captured by Labour instead; justice would demand the Greens get at least a share of the electoral spoils for what should be a significant new form of both revenue-gathering and environmental enhancement.

Of course, there are other aspects that need to be worked through, not least in relation to Maori.

The Greens (original) policy has iwi and regional government sharing revenue from a water bottling levy 50/50 - which is a reflection of the partnership model. Labour says they welcome working through Treaty rights, and are also proposing some form of revenue sharing with iwi.

National doesn't want a bar of that question - a major reason they stick to their "no one owns water" line - and NZ First similarly thinks water is part of the commons, and not divisible. The Maori Party favours customary and Treaty rights over water, while The Opportunities Party supports both Maori rights to freshwater and a charging regime, but is unclear on how these fit together.

Regardless, it would be unfortunate if the decision on how our most precious resource was treated, and who rightly pays what for it, came down to an argument over Treaty rights. Because everyone owns water - and everyone should benefit from its use.

But as there seems to be a groundswell in favour of putting a price on water, hopefully there will also be support for a fair distribution of income.

If that means agreeing some form of partnership model for overall ownership, so be it.

The most important part of this debate, to my mind, is the inherent potential to use royalty monies to clean up our badly degraded lakes and rivers. That prospect alone makes it a no-brainer to vote for.

Remarkably, even stock farmers are getting on board with this, if the new Farming Leaders Group's stated ambition to help make rivers "genuinely swimmable" is to be believed.

So far they seem more focused on excuses than solutions; that needs to change, fast, else their intent proves to be another never-never apologist pipedream. But for now I'll give them credit for stepping up.

As we all must in support of this idea, if we want anything like healthy freshwater to drink and swim in in future.

• Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.

• Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.