O'Rourke Denis: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
O'Rourke Denis: Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7819. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First) 
: 
 Mr Speaker will I need a separate microphone or are these working? 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: It may pay yes. 
DENIS O’ROURKE 
: Thank you Mr Speaker. First of all I would like to say that I felt that Nicky Wagner’s claim that the majority of Cantabrians would support this bill the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill was utterly baseless poppycock. Nobody can possibly know who would vote which way on that issue. I can say this. Nobody I have spoken to—and I have lived in Canterbury all my life—would support this bill. Nobody I have spoken to would do so. So I am convinced as a resident that this bill is not supported by them. 
The bill does two things. It extends the commissioner’s special water management powers and delays the date as we know for an elected Environment Canterbury council to 2016. New Zealand First firmly opposes the Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Amendment Bill. Having said that I would have to say that I was relieved when in 2010 the Government removed the elected Environment Canterbury council and replaced it with commissioners. Many people in Canterbury at that time felt the same. 
I was then and still am the chair of the Central Plains Water Trust which holds the consents for the Central Plains Water scheme. At that time great concern was held about the irrational behaviour of Environment Canterbury on some irrigation issues. The elected Environment Canterbury council was itself very hostile to all irrigation development and was driven by public and political perceptions about irrigated farming rather than by robust policy and planning. 
 The Central Plains Water scheme was and is about sustainable farming not about first-generation old-style irrigation. Central Plains Water Trust developed a sustainable farming protocol and supporting contractual arrangements—a first for New Zealand on this—and demonstrated a genuine commitment to environmentally sustainable agriculture in that way. The Christchurch City Council and the Selwyn District Council established the trust to ensure that the Central Plains Water scheme was always a community scheme with no alienable water rights and that resource consents would be held in trust permanently. 
Environment Canterbury in 2010 was virtually impossible to deal with. It had unreasonable political hostility towards irrigators and farmers—not good government—and it exacerbated the town-versus-country divide for purely political ends. It had developed a them-and-us mentality so Central Plains Water Trust and other irrigators were treated as enemies whereas Central Plains Water Trust wished to collaborate. This also extended to Environment Canterbury management which in fact sought to change plans even while the trust’s Resource Management Act process was still being finalised and it always failed to genuinely consult on those issues. 
Environment Canterbury has always had a poor attitude to water issues. Early in the 1990s when I was a city councillor in Christchurch I know from attempted meetings with Environment Canterbury that it would refuse to collaborate with the city council on water issues. It then complained about insufficient resources and its actions by 2010 were then 10 years too late and badly formulated. In the meantime during those 10 years the city council and Selwyn District Council got together and had to act alone without Environment Canterbury to set up Central Plains Water Trust and make their own plans on water issues with a genuine attempt to balance the need for economic development based on irrigation and economic development of the central plains with environmental sustainability. 
The best hope now for a consensus is the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and that especially now concerns storage issues. Environment Canterbury wasted time during the previous years on impossibly impractical proposals like in-ground storage and it needed a balanced collaborative approach not a dictatorial one to establish achievable environmental standards—especially for example on nitrate levels. The commissioners have done that and their job is substantially done. 
I note that in the bill’s policy statement it says: “In order to enable the commissioners to adopt a second-generation Land and Water Plan and other plans and to fully implement the Canterbury Water Management Strategy the commissioners will continue to be provided with additional resource management powers.” and so on. Does that mean if they are going to be around to fully implement it that they are going to have to be there for the next 20 years? Because that is how long it will take to fully implement it. Does that mean that 2016 is not actually the date when we will get an elected Environment Canterbury? Is it actually going to be some further extended date in the future? 
Although the original decision to insert the commissioners was necessary for the reasons I gave that never meant I thought it was right or ever would be right to delay the elected council’s reinstatement beyond 2013. The commissioners themselves say this and I know that from having private conversations with some of them. The decision to add another 3 years until 2016 before the election of a new regional council is unnecessary. Everything the commissioners needed to do has been sufficiently done and the decision is unhelpful. The strategy now needs community buy-in and active support and that requires at least a majority of Environment Canterbury to be elected. The decision is an affront to democracy. 
Along with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority and the Christchurch Central Development Unit there is altogether too much central government in Canterbury and not enough community governance. Community representation may be inconvenient for a National Government but there is a real sense of loss and grievance felt by Canterbury people over their loss of adequate say in local governance. The perception now is of Government manipulation in Canterbury for its own ends perhaps with a secret agenda. Commissioners are perceived as tools of central government not as representatives of the community and the Government is perceived as having commercial imperatives through its shareholding in TrustPower with its Rakaia and Lake Coleridge interests in power generation ostensibly for the supply of water for irrigation schemes. 
So what should the Government do now? First of all it should stick to its promise broken by this bill to hold elections for Environment Canterbury in 2013 and should immediately identify top options for a new Environment Canterbury and not wait until next year to do so. The Government should be asking whether Environment Canterbury should be fully elected or part elected and part appointed; whether the old Environment Canterbury as it was should be reinstated; and in fact whether there should be a unitary council or unitary councils in Canterbury. Those are the things it should have been doing last year and they should be well advanced by now so that Cantabrians could actually decide what should happen to local government and in particular to Environment Canterbury in the future. 
Finally local government arrangements must be the people’s choice and not the Government’s choice. Water management issues must no longer be a political football for the main parties. National has broken its promise and it should now reverse that and allow elections for Environment Canterbury this year along with all other local government organisations.