Nick Smith's Waterloo?

Nick Smith is desperately trying to dismiss the growing concerns from many New Zealanders that our water has been undervalued and over-exploited. While farming intensification has caused a major strain on our natural water systems he has firmly stood his ground against putting a value on water and expecting businesses to properly account for their operational impacts on water quality and supply.

The fact that overseas companies can extract water for free and profit from the exported resource became a tipping point for many. Smith is quite right when he claims that water bottling plants take a miniscule amount of our country's total supply, however he deliberately ignores the impacts on individual catchments and anger of communities whose own water supplies have been compromised.

Over twenty people gathered outside the Environment Southland building on Tuesday to join a nationwide protest. It was a damp, grey day but many of those who made the effort to come were not people already active in the local environmental communities. Fishermen, mothers and children and grandparents wanted to express their concern about the degradation of our rivers.

A Southland Times Editorial ignorantly accepted Smith's arguments and suggested that the national protests about water quality were misguided and should have been more concerned about the use of plastic bottles. This is my published letter in response:

Nick Smith’s desperate attempt to water down the growing concerns about the commercialisation and industrial use of our water at the expense of ordinary New Zealanders and our environment doesn’t wash with me.

Those who met with Environment Southland Councillors on Tuesday were a diverse group who wanted clean water for their children to swim in, healthy rivers for fishing and for our waterways to be treated with greater respect and care.

The mission of the New Zealand Water Forum that organised the action on Tuesday is: “To advocate for water quality, the preservation of our waterways and to lobby for change to ensure those who manage our water are held to the highest standard in doing so.”

New Zealand is blessed with a large overall supply of water but to talk in terms of total volumes is disingenuous. The management of our water should be considered at an individual catchment, stream or aquifer level. In our lowland, pastoral and urban areas we are experiencing major crises of supply and quality.

The rivers and streams near where the majority of New Zealanders live are mostly unswimmable. Many of our aquifers are being infected with E. coli and our estuaries are rapidly eutrophying from a continual inflow of polluted sediment.

When whole communities are struggling to have clean drinking water the fact that any quantity is being given away from the same catchments for commercial profit doesn’t make sense. It is also the principle, rather than the quantities, that anger us. We need to properly value our water if we want to restore and preserve it for all.