Bruce Bisset: What is wrong with this picture

Seems to me whenever improving performance and productivity and the general lot of J Public gets discussed the first thing that falls off the back of the truck is the environment.

There've been quite a few trucks losing their environmental load of late. Including some whose drivers supposedly hold their jobs for the environment's sake.

Take the elitist push for "accountability" that's seen tens of thousands spent on an ad campaign designed to jog Hawke's Bay's councils into unified action - though the campaign appears a thinly-veiled push for amalgamation rather than genuine efficiencies.

But what did the group A Better Hawke's Bay request? A study on the economic social and governmental performance of the region and how to improve it.

And what did the Hastings Napier Wairoa Central and Regional councils agree to? Just that.

Ah, hello! There are four wellbeings both the Resource Management Act and the Local Government Act require councils to sustain and enhance; arguably governance could be "cultural" (the third one), but I see no mention of the fourth - environment.

As the RMA rightly makes plain, you cannot tinker with one or two aspects in isolation and ignore the others.

And surely climate change alone dictates that any consideration of socio-economic planning must be integrated with environmental concerns in a robust and prudent way.

Our councillors seem - for the moment - to have forgotten that fact. Trouble with trucks being harried from behind by some flash yahoos in a sports coupe: some drivers tend to speed up and get reckless.

Not good enough. And not nearly safe enough. But perhaps when they've had a comfort stop the terms of reference will better reflect their elected responsibilities - with environment not just a hasty add-on, either, but considered as an integral and equal part of the study.

Another group who should have a clear roadmap to ensuring the environment is top priority are the farmers. After all, the health of the land is their livelihood, so you'd imagine they'd be doing all they could to sustain it.

Sadly, many - dairy farmers in particular - still seem to have a "get what you can out of it" attitude to land management, often using practices that actively degrade it.

Overstocking, indiscriminate application of agrichemicals, no effluent controls, poor fencing, and leaving hill country clear-felled and thus prone to erosion are commonplace examples that suggest many farmers actually have no idea what impacts they are having on the land - or simply don't care.

Part of the problem is farming is the only major industry that's essentially self-regulated. Compliance and monitoring tasks are mainly done by the farmers themselves - and if they say it's all good, who is there to check and counter that?

Only when independent studies are done does the truth come out.

For example, based on self-appraisals Fonterra has made much of compliance with its Clean Streams Accord, suggesting 84 per cent of dairy farms exclude cattle from waterways.

But a new MAF survey halves that figure: only 42 per cent of dairy farms (57 per cent in the Bay) have achieved complete stock exclusion. Leaving an awful long way to go to the target of 90 per cent exclusion by 2012 - next month - and suggesting very few dairies are doing anything to comply.

They are telling porkies, and wantonly continuing to pollute. Logically, given the worsening state of our rivers, you know that's true.

Similarly farmers are generally still allowed to manage their own water-take consents, with independent monitoring the exception not the rule. Again, if a farmer takes excess water at the wrong time and says otherwise, who is to know?

Yet Federated Farmers continues - as recently as two weeks ago - to moan about compliance costs and argue that farmers should be exempt from certain consent processes or fees.

In other words, continues to protect the bad guys while denying the problem, and so allows it to compound.

These examples tell us both our councils and our farmers continue to let economics trump environment, even though councils are charged with protecting it and farmers intimately rely on it.

That has to be turned around. If it isn't sustainable, it doesn't add up. A false profit at the expense of the ecosystem is not economic, and it's dangerous nonsense to pretend it is.

That's the right of it. Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.