Delahunty Catherine: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionDelahunty Catherine: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2977. Text is subject to correction.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):I am pleased to be able to take a call on this issue although I have not sat for much time on the Primary Production Committee. I want to talk about the annual review of Landcorp for 2013-14 and about its statement of intent which also looks forward from 2013-14 to 2017.There is an odd disconnect between the rhetoric in these documents the rhetoric that it came to the select committee with which my colleague Steffan Browning was part of and what actually happens on the ground by Landcorp. Believe it or not I was at the A and P show the other day in the Waikato talking about the statement of intent which may not seem like something you would expect the public to be interested in. But I had a petition about Landcorp and the public were very interested in the statement of intent. They live with the downstream effects of the statement of intent which is the pollution of the Waikato River and the increasing contamination of the waterways downstream of Landcorp’s dairy conversions. And so there is actually a great deal of public interest in what Landcorp which is the biggest farmer in this country says it is going to do in the annual review in terms of the environment in terms of downstream and in terms of what it is modelling.In the report to the House from the select committee about environmental sustainability for the annual review of 2013-14 Landcorp asserts it is an “environmentally savvy farmer” and says it is serving the interests of both the environment and the industry. But when I took these quotes to the people who were signing my petition at this A and P show they were saying: “But why is it converting volcanic soil forestry into dairy farms that are going to increase the loading of nutrients to the point where farmers downstream will not be able to meet their own budgets?”. And so we have the unique situation of Federated Farmers Waikato and others saying that Landcorp—the leading Government agency around farming and the actual biggest farmer in the country—is failing the farmers downstream.It was quite extraordinary to hear the people in the Waikato talking about their understanding of the statement of intent which was that Landcorp intends to convert more and more land into dairying up on the volcanic plateau and that Federated Farmers there wanted a conversation on a moratorium. They have read the statement of intent and they know that anything between 17000 which is Landcorp’s figure and up to 70000 which is some of the local’s figures more dairy cows are going to be at the head of that catchment. And the Waikato River just cannot take too much more of this.Landcorp in its statement of intent said that it is interested in community engagement by fronting up to concerns about the environmental impact of farming. This is not fronting up. This is the worst role model from a Government agency for good farming practice that we have seen in a very long time. I mean we could talk about the commodity price we could talk about reliance on selling milk powder to China we could talk about all those vulnerabilities but what is even worse is that we are selling out water quality not just for now but for many years to come.If you know anything about how it works in the environment you know that the contamination of waterways in upper catchments takes years years and years to filter through. That is why Federated Farmers Waikato is saying: “Hang on what about us downstream who are trying to balance the nutrient budget?”.It is not acceptable to put these kinds of rhetorical devices about being environmentally savvy in a statement of intent while being the main culprit in the continuing destruction of long-term water quality in this country. There is a responsibility when we review Landcorp to actually make sure that it is doing role modelling best practice. This is worst practice. This is 60 percent of monitored rivers being no longer swimmable. This is a nutrient budget for Waikato farmers that will blow out not because of their practices but because of the practices of the Government-owned Landcorp farms and Landcorp-managed farms in the Upper Waikato. The people are signing the petition because of this statement of intent. The intent to continue to destroy the environment for the sake of a monocultural and agricultural intensification in a catchment that simply just cannot take it is irresponsible on behalf of Landcorp.If we look at Landcorp’s rhetoric it has got this saying “leading the way” which some poor person had to make up. “Leading the way” was something that some poor person in the department had to make up as a new phrase for what Landcorp is doing. It says its bottom lines are “volume value efficiency people and the environment”. Environment of course is the last one. It also says it has an aspiration from 2013-14 to now to go from 1.5 percent to 5 percent pastoral livestock which is more than tripling the number of current pastoral livestock on Landcorp farms. So forget about climate change and forget about the fact that it is going to cut down the forests that would have mitigated some of that and turn them into dairy farms that no one wants.Why are we doing this? Why are we cutting down forests and converting land to a polluting greenhouse gas-emitting industry when our climate targets are a joke already and it is a Government department in its own statement of intent that is leading the way on this?I went to a public meeting the other night at Lake Karapiro. There was a famous rower there Mahe Drysdale. He said: “My lake is turning pink as a result of the corporate intent of Landcorp in this catchment. My lake is turning pink.” He may not have used the words “statement of intent” or “corporate”—maybe that was me hearing it—but he was very concerned about what was happening in the upper catchment. He was saying: “I’ve been rowing on this lake for many many years and all I can see is degraded water quality and what’s happening upstream.” Unlike the farmers in the Lower Waikato who are actually trying to meet nutrient budgets and are trying to manage what is now acknowledged as a damaging approach to farming when there is no fencing when there are nutrient loads that rivers cannot take and when there are phosphorous nitrates and sediment—they are trying to modify and to meet those agreements—Landcorp is not. Mahe Drysdale can be assured that Landcorp will continue according to these plans to convert the Upper Waikato—and we will not even talk about the Manawatū because that is still pretty much a disaster—into more pollution.Instead of just talking about being awash with milk we are actually awash with cow urine pollution and a Government-owned enterprise that plans to do that more. It plans to do that more. I cannot even get sense out of Landcorp as to how many more cows it is going to put into that area but one thing is for sure: we cannot keep adding to the nutrient load which is what it plans to do in all of its documents. It is leading the way. It is leading us away from a solution. It is going to be a huge cost. It is going to cost us an enormous amount of money because if you look at what the Government is already spending on Lake Taupō Lake Rotorua the Manawatū River and Lake Wairarapa these are multimillion-dollar clean-ups because of the long-term bad agricultural intensification practices in the catchments. Now Landcorp is going to make that worse.The Green Party believes that Landcorp should be saying in its statements of intent and in these plans that go from 2013 and look ahead—it should be coming to the Primary Production Committee and saying: “We will role model best practice in the following ways. We will actually set up a farming system that is non-polluting—a farming system that rather than being based on the permanent excessive growth model is based on proper management of dairying and other industries that will not convert land that should stay in trees and that will protect the environment for the long term.”Landcorp should be the leading agency that is doing that. But these documents these reports that I have here are all saying to us that Landcorp is way back in the 1950s and it is not supporting the farming sector let alone the water quality of this country. If a Government agency is incapable of planning for or modelling protection for water quality in these documents everybody downstream is going to suffer. Everybody downstream is going to pay the price—they are and they will.When you get Federated Farmers the Green Party Olympic rowers and community groups all saying the same things these statements of intent need to be reviewed. They need to be taken apart. We need to tell Landcorp that it does not have a mandate to pollute this country. It does not have a mandate to contaminate water with its bad agricultural practices. This is a disgrace.