Thursday, March 28, 2024

ALTERNATIVE VIEW: Let’s level the playing field

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Last year the Prime Minister correctly stated that it would be the primary sector, that’s you and me, that will get New Zealand out of the mess that was covid-19.
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I believe we can and will but a lot must change, starting with the need for a level playing field.

A simple example is that if a farmer pollutes an infinitesimal amount they get pilloried, conversely local government and the business sector can seemingly pollute at will.

Radio NZ recently ran a story about how “hundreds of companies have dumped contaminants into sewers in breach of their trade waste consents”. In total, at least 270 companies have been guilty of pollution – none were fined. Realistically, that is a fraction of the breaches as many councils don’t monitor the problem.

Ridiculously in Auckland you can’t find out about any breaches because of “privacy reasons”. Why farmers can’t be accorded the same protection, they didn’t say.

It gets worse as “over 100 municipal wastewater plants are breaching their consents”. The pollution is considerable, infinitely more than a dairy farm, but they get little media coverage and no prosecutions. Farmers are fair game, no one else seems to be regardless of what they do.

Wellington and Porirua send uncut sewerage into the harbour on a regular basis. They are neither criticised nor fined. Combine it with Auckland’s 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools of sewerage going into the harbour every year, and you have considerably more pollution into our waterways than the entire dairy industry does.

Why do politicians go on about swimming in rivers while ignoring the sea where the majority of Kiwi’s swim? It beggars belief.

Pressure groups are also highly selective in their anti-farming rhetoric. Recently Greenpeace urged the Government to have us all change to regenerative agriculture. As well as bankrupting the country, it will bankrupt farmers.

Recreational fishers, never one to let facts get in the way of good stories, published an article claiming Canterbury waterways were a “disaster”. Last week’s Fish & Game news had the waterways pristine and fishable.

Statistics NZ (StatsNZ) tell me there are 2668 dairy farms in the Waikato and the local council has prosecuted just seven, or 0.3%. That seven were named, shamed and their fines made public by some sanctimonious prig from the council. What he was doing about both business and local government pollution, he didn’t say. 

Local government claims it can’t afford to fix its pollution so that seems to make it okay. Farmers spend billions protecting the environment and get pilloried for it.

The lack of a level playing field becomes starkly obvious in papers and submissions from the Ministry for the Environment (MfE). Whether they’re politically sycophantic or just incompetent is hard to tell.

Elisabeth McGruddy is a well-qualified, highly-experienced policy analyst for Federated Farmers. She completed a thorough analysis of MfE’s Freshwater 2020 and it provides sobering reading.

McGruddy presents a highly professional, factual, unemotive and hard-hitting document.

She starts by telling us that “Freshwater 2020 falls short of being a robust and authoritative source of national statistics and apolitical interpretive analysis”. You can’t get much more damning than that.

It goes on: “It presents headlines which are not supported by the evidence relied on. It highlights minority findings, not majority findings. It presents selected and misleading statistics and graphics.”

I don’t remember reading any of that in the media.

“The effect (of the MfE/Stats Report) is to significantly distort public and political understanding of national state and trends,” the analysis said.

In the 2019 report, the MfE/Stats headline was “Freshwater species are declining and freshwater habitats are downgraded”. That was not supported by evidence. In 2015 when Nick Smith was minister, the MfE/Stats headline was “Water quality is declining”. Under pressure they agreed that statement also wasn’t supported by evidence. 

The entire report is shonky, unprofessional and downright dangerous. It showed that the majority of rivers running through native vegetation were polluted. The summary doesn’t mention that. 

Swimming was omitted from the report, as was coastal and estuarine water quality, which is surprising. We only had modelled data on lake water quality, which is entirely unsatisfactory.

My issue is that governments and others make decisions on reports that affect us all. We can surely expect a truthful document that reflects reality.

I think it is wrong and irresponsible for a government department to play free and loose as both MfE and StatsNZ have done. 

Democracy relies on politicians getting factual, unemotive, non-political and honest input from the bureaucracy.

MfE is providing none of the above and we, the primary sector of NZ, are paying disproportionately for that.

If the Government wants the primary sector to lead the economy into prosperity post-covid-19, there needs to be a levelling of the playing field along with immediate change starting with MfE.

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