Taranaki regional councillors discussed freshwater at last week's council meeting.
Taranaki Regional Council will try to embed Te Mana o te Wai into its new freshwater plan before the Government rewrites resource laws.
The Government has pledged to overturn freshwater regulations and resource management laws to favour easier development. The coalition deal includes Act’s policy to replace freshwater policy and standards “to rebalance Te Mana o te Wai to better reflect the interests of all water users”.
At last week’s Taranaki Regional Council (TRC) meeting, councillors were told those law changes would take at least two years — so the council had to continue work on its new freshwater plan under the existing law.
Council policy manager Lisa Hawkins said the Government intended to write a specific law to remove Te Mana o te Wai from resource consenting processes, but had said nothing about changing its place in planning laws.
Te Mana o te Wai, an idea introduced by John Key’s Government in 2014, is at the core of the present rules.
Labour beefed up Te Mana o te Wai in 2017 to make the health and wellbeing of waterways the top priority in freshwater regulation, with human water needs second and other users third (commercial, cultural and social).
Councils must protect the mauri or life force of waterways and actively involve tangata whenua in making freshwater decisions, policies and plans.
TRC’s first Māori constituency councillor, Bonita Bigham, said people were worried Te Mana o te Wai was being diluted.
“If [consent] applicants aren’t expected to be able to respond to Te Mana o te Wai provisions, what effect will it really have?”
Lisa Hawkins described how in a few years, Te Mana o te Wai considerations would be baked into the freshwater plan, alongside other council environmental plans that govern consenting.
“We should have all new plans in place, and [if] they’ve given effect to Te Mana o te Wai as it stands at the moment — or whatever that might look like going forward with the new Government — then that plan has automatically kind of addressed those considerations.”
Bigham said it was “implicit rather than expressed”.
Hawkins replied: “It’s implicit, exactly.”
Presented alongside a startlingly blunt assessment of the declining health of Taranaki waterways [see sidebar], Hawkins triggered objections from the farmers’ lobby at the council table.
Federated Farmers Taranaki president and representative to TRC Leedom Gibbs accused officers of coercive consultation.
“It is my understanding that quite often consultation is very directive in the way that it goes out. Like, with the consultation that was done in September, it was very hard to not agree with statements … There’s not a lot of room in there to say ‘but’.”
Dairy farmer Donald McIntyre has been a regional councillor for 16 years, during which time he, too, served as Federated Farmers Taranaki president.
He said things couldn’t be too bad, because people still swim at his on-farm wedding-and-events venue.
“I live on a lake and don’t see any diminishing amount of people coming and swimming in the water that comes into my lake, which has come off a farm and catchment. It’s not as dramatic as what you’re putting down on paper here.”
First-term councillor and, until lately, Taranaki Federated Farmers executive member Donna Cram — last year’s Fonterra Dairy Woman of the Year — agreed with McIntyre’s lament.
McInityre said they were improving water quality anyway.
“The plan will make it a lot easier to do that, but we are already on a journey towards there, aren’t we?”
Cram responded: “And industry of course, leading that, through us.”
McIntyre warned council staff would struggle to get support from farmers sick of “silly rules”.
“Over the last two or three years, that goodwill has been burnt pretty severely.”
Policies that have been attempted until now have been not workable or fit for purpose, he said.
“And so people have switched off.”
Bigham had the opposite view of council relationships on the ground.
“This council’s gone a long way to building trust and good faith within our community and I think it’s critical that we look at whatever it takes to make sure that our communities can participate in those conversations.”
The Government extended the deadline for freshwater plans by three years to 2027 so councils wouldn’t be forced to reset local rules before the yet-to-be-written laws are passed.
But TRC chairwoman Charlotte Littlewood said the overdue renewal of the 22-year-old plan had already been delayed many times.
“The fact that we haven’t implemented any of the National Policy Statements yet, including two from the National Party, is quite a significant statement … but there is a point where we have to draw a line in the sand and actually do this.”
After a quarter of a century at the council table, ninth-term councillor Neil Walker is Littlewood’s deputy.
The former senior Fonterra scientist waited until the end of the debate for a quiet request of the chair.
“Get the communications working properly too, to indicate that we’re taking [a] sensible, measured approach to all this.”
Taranaki’s regional councillors were also given a startlingly blunt presentation on the region’s freshwater by their environment quality director, Abby Matthews, last week.
For decades Taranaki Regional Council has said looking after rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands is really hard in such intensively farmed lands — but that over time with help from farmers and industry, things were slowly getting better.
Not anymore.
Matthews told councillors efforts to improve waterway health do work, but traction is slipping and things are getting worse as the climate changes.
She said people had had enough.
“We’ve heard from our community that the current state of freshwater is unacceptable to them.”
“What we need to do now is continue working with the community and figure out what’s achievable, what’s workable, what we can actually do on the ground.”
“The longer we leave that and the longer we take to do that, the bigger the problem becomes.”
Here’s why she says we need to fix our wai:
Matthews reckons even with action on farming practices, it will take up to three decades to restore rivers to community expectations.
“They want to see the rivers in the state where they’re more swimmable more often.”
Intensive dairy farming uses lots of nitrogen fertiliser to grow enough grass for swelling herds.
Between 2011 and 2020, nitrate concentrations have increased at four out of every five Taranaki monitoring sites.
“We see [nitrates] making way their way into surface water … We do see changes not for the better in the short term as well as the long term, so we do have degradation in terms of nitrate across the region.”
More water needs to be left in the rivers because freshwater ecosystems aren’t protected enough, much less in the face of climate change and the suite of other freshwater problems Matthews outlined.
“This means that we’re going to need to make some changes to how much water we can allocate.”
After some gains over time in ecosystem health, there are again fewer bugs in the streams. Over the long term, nearly two-thirds of TRC-monitored sites were likely or very likely improving.
In a total flip, nearly two-thirds of the sites were likely or very likely degrading over the past 10 years. Matthews says it’s hard to know why, but increasing water temperatures aren’t helping.
Native fish are also under pressure with many species threatened or at risk.
As many as 30,000 culverts, weirs, crossings and so on need checking to see if fish can get through. Some eastern hill-country rivers may never meet national bottom lines for sediment loads, even with action.
Matthews said when used, erosion control measures had been successful, reducing sediment by almost a third.
Ongoing soil conservation spending is needed to lock in gains and offset climate change impacts.
“This is one where we have to work hard just to keep the status quo, let alone make improvements.”
Winter weather can make keeping the kids entertained even harder than usual.