Editorial: Two sets of rules really irritate

Farmers are allowed to have bonfires while city folk aren't allowed wood burners.

It was my middle daughter's birthday on Sunday so we decided to go to Napier for the afternoon.

We drove on the back routes from Havelock North, through countryside that always reminds us why we live here.

And then we saw him - well, actually we saw the smoke first. A landowner had built this big bonfire of vines and greenwaste and was having a burn-off a mere 20 metres or so from the road. There he stood, his entire focus on the smouldering, smoking pile before him.

I may not have cared if I had not recently had to fork out about $4,500 to replace my perfectly good woodburner, but for some reason it stirred a little frustration inside of me.

You see, the Hawke's Bay Regional Council decided that those of us who live within the Hastings and Napier city limits of Hawke's Bay were polluting the environment with our old-fashioned woodburners.

As the majority of us (I presume) are decent, law-abiding citizens, we did it even though many of us could probably not afford it and the subsidy we got from the Regional Council (mine is in the post/online banking version apparently) is not that great (about $700).

When I was first confronted with the realisation that I would have to change my sturdy, dependable, heat-giving woodburner, I was a little bemused, but I soon got over it and worked out a plan to get it replaced. The new one, by the way, is fantastic and heats the downstairs beautifully. But that is not the point.

It really irks that us city folk have to go to huge expense to fix what was not broken, when our country neighbours appear to haveslightly less onerous requirements to stop pollution of the environment. It takes me back to the frequent texts and letters we got during the drought a couple of summers ago. With tough water restrictions in Hastings District, many of our readers were maddened by the sight of big sprinkler systems watering farmlands for days on end. It did not seem just.

So, to the councils out there who control our lives, it is not the rules we have a problem with, it is having two sets of them that make us slightly annoyed.