Environment Southland's now operative Water and Land Plan has less than 7 days for affected ratepayers to give feedback on elements within that plan.
Most Southlander's won't know much about the plan content and they will have even less knowledge about its significant economic effect on provincial bankability. The RMA decrees that Council must consider more than just economic effect of their regulations, but to me such a high stake element should have been addressed to the minutiae; it hasn't been. My gut feel that if such a rigorous analysis was done it would show the largest destruction of value and therefore bankability of the farming sector ever seen in this country; back of the envelope calculation being billions of dollars.
The flow on effect to the wider community must be a concern and seems a massive contradiction to the task of the Southland Regional Development Strategy of expanding our population. It is important to have sensible environmental aspiration but any new regulation, contrived by staff, deliberated over with political haste, made operative without robust debate and without rigorous fiscal analysis says to me the cultural well- being element of the RMA is alive and well within Environment Southland.
Except it's the wrong culture for ratepayers, innovators and investors. It's the cant do culture, it's the economic constraint culture, it's a culture of expropriation by regulation, it's a culture mistrusting of evolution of good ideas and it's a culture of command and control authoritarianism.
Don Nicolson
You can listen to Don and Dean in the Soundcloud embed below:
