Sage Eugenie: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12161. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):In this brief call on the estimates for Vote Environment I would like to continue from the previous speaker Nicky Wagner and talk about state of the environment reporting. This National Government has failed to implement its election promise to put in place independent state of the environment reporting. That was promised by the previous Minister for the Environment in about 2011 or before that in the manifesto. The current Minister told the Local Government and Environment Committee that she preferred indicative reporting in the meantime rather than consolidated reporting. That means we get the information only in dribs and drabs.But this week we got two quite significant indicator reports: the suitability for swimming indicator and the river condition indicator from the Ministry for the Environment. Certainly the Government and Federated Farmers are spinning these Ministry for the Environment reports to try to hide the seriousness of our water crisis. The first of the reports on swimming suitability shows that 61 percent of the monitored sites on rivers are unsafe for swimming. In the House yesterday the Minister tried to argue that it was safe to swim in rivers that were graded “fair”. The Minister might want to swim there. I certainly would not because in relation to those sites with a “fair” grading her ministry notes “the presence of significant sources of faecal contamination” and the ministry encourages people to avoid swimming there during or after rain or when the water is discoloured. For anyone who has swum in a waterway that is contaminated with faeces whether human or bovine it is a very unpleasant experience to get sick. I certainly would not want to swim there even if the Minister does.Within a generation we are losing the right to be able to swim in our local river or stream without the fear of getting sick. We have a freshwater crisis on our hands and what the National Government is doing is going to make that worse. That is because itis opposed to smart regulation it is gutting the Resource Management Act of its environmental principles it is not putting a resource rental on the commercial use of water and it is subsidising irrigation.The Minister can talk—and the previous speaker Nicky Wagner did as well—about how much the Government is spending on cleaning up waterways. Of course that is continuing programmes by the previous Labour Government in relation to the Rotorua lakes and LakeTaupō. Certainly the Ministry for the Environment is proposing to spend about $9 million on the Rotorua lakes this year but at the same time as that money is going for clean-up the Minister’s colleagues by subsidising irrigation to the tune of $80 million in this Budget and potentially another $400 million from the proceeds of asset sales are making the problem worse. That is because irrigation leads to land-use intensification. The science is very clear. The more animals and the more fertiliser you put on land the more water pollution you get.Although the Minister and Federated Farmers President Bruce Wills might want to deny the seriousness of our water crisis and might want to put the focus on urban streams again that is spin. Urban streams although they might have the highest concentrations of nutrients and bacteria comprise only 1 percent of the total length of waterways in New Zealand. It is the 99 percent of rivers in our rural hinterland that we should be most concerned with.We need to heed the warning in the Ministry for the Environment’s river condition report about the increase in nitrate levels at a quarter of the sites that were monitored in the 10 years to 2010. How do we get nitrate in our waterways? It is because of animal urine. The soil bacteria break down the ammonia in the urine and convert it to nitrate. What happens when we get nitrate? We have for example the medical officer of health in Canterbury issuing warnings about the increasing levels of nitrate in Canterbury aquifers and talking about that putting newborn babies at risk of blue baby syndrome. The effect that nitrate has is in compromising uptake of oxygen.The Green Party wants to protect Kiwis’ right to swim in our local rivers. We would refocus the Ministry for the Environment back on sustainability. We would ensure that crucial environmental laws like the Resource Management Act and like the exclusive economic zone legislation really promoted sustainable management had a precautionary principle at their hearts and looked more closely at cumulative effects. We would focus on sustainability rather than the exploitation of nature. The Green Party would keep our energy companies.