Catherine Delahunty: Ruataniwha - the price of white elephant

Green Party MP Catherine Delahunty

The Ruataniwha Dam saga has fascinated the whole country but has been paid for by the citizens of Hawke's Bay, irrespective of their support for or likely benefits from this proposal.

It has been extraordinary to witness the Hawke's Bay Regional Council create an investment arm paid for by the people to promote a project which has not secured a site, has not convinced economists, has not won environmental approval and has cost citizens $20 million to date.

Call me old fashioned but I thought the regional council was meant to look after water for the regional good of all, not promote white elephants.

It has been punished for this failure by consistent challenges in the courts, starting with the tangata whenua, Ngati Kahungunu, who won against them in the Environment Court on behalf of aquifer sustainability, which would be threatened by the Ruataniwha dam.

This challenge via the courts would not have been cheap and there are many other urgent priorities for iwi.

The national environmental organisations have spent many thousands fighting to protect the Tukituki river as well. They forced a legal debate on nitrate levels that was important for all rivers, not just Hawke's Bay. The Green Party was proud to be a submitter in this process.

The latest legal victory is the Supreme Court decision in support of Forest and Bird's challenge to the Department of Conservation on the land swap for the dam site.

DoC, under orders from a vandalistic Government hell bent on development in the wrong place, was ready to sacrifice native bat habitat for some farm land so Ruataniwha could proceed, but they lost big time.

But the biggest slap in the face to the white elephant was at the ballot box.

The voters of Hawke's Bay changed the balance of power on the regional council last year, electing enough people with a strong critique of the dam to change the game.

Suddenly the spend-up of public money via the Hawke's Bay Regional Investment Company is under fresh scrutiny with hard questions being asked - as they should have been from day one.

The cost of all this has been huge, and not just financial. It is a lesson which should be learned in Wairarapa, Waimea and anywhere else where big irrigation is being assisted by central Government, regional government and some district councils to sell the pup to the public.

There is a place for some irrigation schemes in horticulture and agriculture but each case should be assessed on strict criteria of water protection and sustainability. Ruining rivers while promoting the myth that they need augmentation with water from elsewhere is not going to cut it.

Rivers need protection and land users need to plan for a climate-changed world where we grow different things differently, without increasing a dependency on more and more water we won 't have.

Living within our means without destroying natural values is our first responsibility and white-elephant dam projects need to be placed on a strict diet of independent scrutiny based on fiscal and environmental rigour.

The Ruataniwha saga has shown the cost to the Hawke's Bay communities of an irrational fervour for a project that does not stack up.

As the anniversary of the Havelock North drinking water contamination approaches I am sure many people would have preferred the council to focus resources on an oversight of public water supply and river water quality.

It is to be hoped that the lessons of Ruataniwha are embraced by other regions before more public money and energy is wasted.

Catherine Delahunty is the Green Party MP and the party's water spokeswoman.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz