Water is not the only precious resource we seem intent on giving away without public benefit. Land, too, is being bought by foreigners and locked up for their personal fiefdoms, restricting Kiwis from accessing some of the best parts of our own country.
When the laws around managing the seabed and foreshore were revised, much ado was made over acknowledging Maori "ownership" and the imagined restrictions that could result, but little of the fact two-thirds of the coast is in private hands, or that there are dozens of cases of owners preventing public access, even for traditional iwi purposes - even where public access rights are supposedly guaranteed.
And while the new laws may have given Maori a sniff of gaining better access to the coast for food-gathering or ceremonial purposes, in practice very little has changed, with many hapu still battling with recalcitrant landowners and no one in either central or local government making any real effort to assist them.
Similarly there are huge swathes of land, particularly in the South Island high country, where owners (or in many cases, leaseholders) have, for whatever reason, spent decades fighting off the public over rights of access.
With the rush to establish billionaire boltholes now in full swing, and the high country in demand for same, it falls on the Overseas Investment Office to approve purchase and negotiate terms. Which provides opportunity for such access disputes to be properly resolved.
