Delahunty Catherine: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10519. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou o Te Whare nui i tēnei pō.[Greetings to you of the great House this evening.]Everyone always says it is a pleasure to take a call. I do not know whether it is a pleasure. It is an opportunity but sometimes it feels less than pleasurable because when we come to the environment of this country and the annual review of the Ministry for the Environment—which I am going to speak about—it is not really that pleasurable to discuss the state of New Zealand’s water.It is interesting because Scott Simpson the previous speaker was talking about the Coromandel which is where I also come from. Everything that we have in that place we fought for. Every bit of environment every beach every river and every mountain that was basically under application to be mined we have fought for. When I say “we” I mean me and my mates. So I do take pride in being part of a community that stands up for the environment and I know that the environment is only as good and as strong as the community.As for the annual review of the Ministry for the Environment I was not on the Local Government and Environment Committee but I did read the report on the annual review. The ministry has been focused on the environment but to what end? There was a lot of rhetoric a lot of talking a lot of slogans and a lot of discussion of fresh water. In the annual review the ministry said that one of its goals is to make sure that fresh water is well governed and sustainably managed for maximum benefit for the future and the present. Unfortunately in its national reporting it also had to be honest and admit that 62 percent of our monitored rivers are too polluted to swim in. So it is hardly an indication of the success of the Ministry for the Environment’s track record let alone of the Government of the day that we are at this rather parlous state with our New Zealand rivers.The ministry has spent a lot of time saying that it is going to provide national direction and yet there is a fight going on in this country. It is going on community by community river by river and freshwater consultation meeting by freshwater consultation meeting where the ministry has to sit there and watch the Minister for the Environment say that it is impossible to meet the goal of having swimmable rivers.When I read the report on the annual review discussion that was held at the select committee it indicated that members of the committee had raised issues around achieving swimmable rivers. The Ministry for the Environment officials said that it was a challenge and they were going to do their best to think about whether it was possible. It is a bit awkward for them because the Minister is going around the country saying that it is impossible to have swimmable rivers because of—guess what? Birds ah volcanic ash—these are the reasons being given for why we cannot have swimmable rivers.Aotearoa has always had birds. It has always had rivers that have some volcanic ash in them. That is not the issue. The issue that has led to 62 percent of monitored rivers being unswimmable—which the Ministry for the Environment is saying that it is proud of but is also saying that it is recording with regret—is that we have created land uses and we have trashed the environment. We have trashed our rivers through intensive agriculture we have trashed our rivers through ways of disposing of sewage that are far from optimum and we have treated rivers as drains. So if the Ministry for the Environment is going to change this it is going to have to tell its Minister to step up to swimmable.Swimmable is what everybody outside the ministry and the Government wants. They want their mokopuna in that water they want it clean enough to put their heads under they want national standards and they want the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management to be amended so that we have a goal of swimmable and not boatable or wadeable. All around the country the ministry officials who participated in this review have had to travel with the Minister and listen to the community—tangata whenua in particular—telling us either at the meetings or on the hīkoi that came to Parliament less than 2 weeks ago: “We want swimmable. We don’t want wadable.” In fact the people would really like to be able to gather the food again. I am very lucky that I live next to a river where the tuna are healthy but I have not seen a native fish for some time and I think that this is the issue.The Ministry for the Environment needs to be the guardian of these resources. It is meant to provide a pathway for achieving this taonga to be passed on in terms of fresh water to future generations and it does make great play of how important water and fresh water is to its strategy. But while we have a national policy statement that talks about having just a non-aspirational low-level standard of boatable and wadeable we are really not going to get there.So it is with some concern that I read the rhetoric of the collaboration that it is talking about. A lot of resource has gone into holding Land and Water Forum meetings and what they call providing education—