That it is a local body appears to mean it can pollute with impunity.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
Auckland lets the equivalent of 400 Olympic swimming pools of unprocessed crap onto Auckland beaches each year and will be doing it for years to come.
Wellington has regular discharges into the harbour and no-one gives it a mention.
In addition, Nelson, Porirua and Dunedin have polluted with no penalties and never a harsh word.
When the Palmerston North City Council polluted the Manawatu River the Manawatu-Wanganui Regional Council, which trades as Horizons, didn’t take it to court because it would be costing its own ratepayers.
So, farmers either aren’t considered as ratepayers or they don’t count.
I’m sure we can all remember the Hastings water pollution where farmers were accused relentlessly of causing the problem. Dirty dairying was the issue even though there was little dairying in the area.
That it was a local body issue fair and square did little to stem the criticism.
Now we have the Lake Taupo sewerage incident where 800,000 litres of sewerage went into the pristine lake and the Waikato River.
Was there a word of condemnation from anyone? In a word, no?
I’d have expected Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage to cry pollution with the theatrical indignation of Juliet’s nurse.
Greenpeace, which has a finger on the trigger whenever farmers do anything it thinks is wrong, factual or not, was strangely silent.
My take on that is you can’t farm donations from sewerage polluting a pristine lake no matter what the rights and wrongs are.
Fish and Game, having spent good money on a survey with leading questions, piously told us77% of Kiwi’s want clean waterways.
Lake Taupo and the Waikato River are huge fishing areas but they’re just not interested in taking on local government.
Farmers must be an easier target no matter what the reality of the issues are.
You might also remember the Choose Clean Water Tour with Marnie Prickett that was funded by the Tourism Export Council and came across as anti-farmer.
Interestingly, the tourism industry, again happy slagging farmers, didn’t seem to worry about the Taupo problem.
It was all a massive exercise in hypocrisy.
It is worse than that.
In 2017 there were two Taupo wastewater spillages in a week because of pipe failure and a blocked pipe so it’s happened before.
As a result the council told the nation it checked and maintained its pipes.
In January last year wastewater again entered the lake. It was blamed on contractors failing to restart a pump following routine checks.
The council chief executive was upset human error was the problem but confessed it did happen from time to time.
Can you imagine a farmer getting away with that excuse?
The problem of 800,000 litres of raw sewerage flowing into the lake and river for a full 12 hours was the result of a burst pipe. A massive 70% of Taupo’s sewerage was flowing into the lake.
Have we heard even a whisper of censure? No.
The Department of Internal Affairs website is explicit. “It is an offence under the Resource Management Act 1991 to discharge contaminants such as treated or untreated sewerage into Lake Taupo.”
Has it done anything? Again, no.
Laughingly, in my view, the Taupo mayor blamed the contamination on earthquakes. He suggested a swarm of earthquakes could have done the damage.
There were no reports of any earthquake swarms that I could find.
The Waikato Regional Council, always litigious when it comes to farmers, was full of bonhomie over the Taupo pollution doing its best to assure people everything was all right and it was business as usual.
In 2016 that organisation told us farming needed to change to restore the Waikato River.
It seems to me farming is the least of its problems.
Consider the reality.
Farmers have been fined and considerably so for a minor leak caused by a pump breaking down.
In March this year the WRC had a farmer fined over $130,000 for over-irrigating effluent. Reprehensibly, in my view, DairyNZ then did a Pontius Pilate on the farmer.
In October last year the WRC took another farmer to court for an overflowing sewerage pond. It resulted in a conviction and fine of $30,000.
There are many more examples.
My point is farmers are environmentally conscious. They use their own money to mitigate pollution, tens of millions of dollars of it.
Local government, using other people’s money, should be called to the same high standards farmers are.
Anything less is rampant hypocrisy and proves, beyond all doubt, clean waterways aren’t the issue, bashing farmers is.
