Saturday, March 30, 2024

ALTERNATIVE VIEW: Local councils a greater environmental hazard

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There was a recent Stuff headline that read “$1.2 million in fines imposed for dirty dairying”. That must be a serious breach I thought, but no.
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Reading the story, the reality was that the 2019-20 year saw 11 companies and 17 individuals sentenced for their part in just 26 cases.

The offences were for dairy effluent entering rivers, streams, wetlands or on land where it could have entered waterways or groundwater.

Then came the kicker, fines of $1,227,104 were imposed, 90% of which went to the regional council taking the prosecutions. That’s a good income stream for regional councils, the cynic in me suggested.

We read further about a 10-year investigation where the average number of prosecutions was just 24.

You’d think Stuff had something better to do than beating up on dairy farmers.

Simply, it was all an anti-farmer headline grab and to say it annoyed me would be an understatement.

The harsh reality is the facts just don’t support the story.

There are 13,000 dairy farmers in New Zealand. That means 0.2% of dairy farmers have been prosecuted for offences over dairy effluent. 

You can’t label an industry as being dirty when just 0.2% have been before the courts.

There are 34,000 people working on dairy farms in NZ. Anyone could have inadvertently been responsible for a leak, let alone equipment failures that do happen. 

Putting the figure in further perspective, there were 737 homicides in NZ between 2007 and 2017. By my maths, that means you have a three times greater chance of getting murdered in NZ each year than you do of suffering dairy effluent discharge, yet we still have the selective headline about dirty dairying.

In 2018, there were 379 road deaths so your chance of getting killed on the road was 14 times that of being convicted for dairy effluent discharge.

It doesn’t make sense.

It is just so minor in our overall environmental pollution that concentrating on the dairy industry is nothing more than sheer bloody-mindedness.

For example, just last year we had over 100 wastewater treatment plants breaching their consents. That resulted in just two prosecutions. That’s unbelievable.

Here’s the rub. We’re told that regional councils don’t like fining their colleagues at a local level.

They don’t want to prosecute their ratepayers, so prosecuting dairy farmers is just fine, even though the dairy problem is a fraction of that of local councils. That’s rampant hypocrisy in my view.

Further, in the case of Porirua City they’ve had sewage overflow in Porirua Harbour 10 times in the last twelve months.

Almost 52,000 people live in close proximity to Porirua Harbour, so suffering sewage 10 times a year is serious, and Porirua City is just one of many polluting the waterways.

In addition to that, there are a lot of local councils still operating with impunity under expired consents.

The large Wellsford treatment plant in Auckland didn’t have a valid consent for 18 years.

Ridiculously, there is only official data on half the country’s wastewater plants and just over a quarter are compliant.

I would humbly suggest a non-compliant wastewater plant can do far more damage to the environment than a dairy farm ever could yet dairy farms get hammered and local councils get ignored.

In Waikato, over half the region’s wastewater plants that discharge into fresh water were non-compliant.

So Stuff reports the Waikato Regional Council prosecuting 17 farmers for discharging effluent, yet it ignores the greater environmental problem of Waikato wastewater treatment plants discharging into rivers.

Putting it in perspective, there was a 379% increase in human sewage entering the environment last year. That’s a national scandal and totally ignored by the media.

We have a new water regulator entitled Taumata Arowai, which sounds grand. The issue with it is that it will not monitor wastewater networks for at least two years.

That tells me that the councils running the wastewater plants will be able to pollute at will and with impunity for that time.

Getting back to dairying, we have our old mates from Fish and Game climbing yet again onto the anti-farming bandwagon.

Their chief executive Martin Taylor claimed the prosecutions “were unlikely to represent the true level of offending”. I’m sure he would know.

The quotes get better: “One thing we know is that regional councils are not good at making farmers comply with environmental obligations,” was one earth shattering statement.

The reality is, as figures show the local councils provide a far greater environmental hazard than farmers do. Trout swim in those rivers so please be consistent, accurate and honest.

Of greater concern, however, is the media fixation with dairying while ignoring far greater environmental damage by other sources.

It is biased, bigoted, scandalous and above all lazy and unprofessional reporting.

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