Parker DavidEnvironment SectorHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I want to address the issue of fresh water. The annual review for the Ministry for the Environment is before me—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Sorry I am just going to interrupt the member and I am not going to take the call off him. I am going to say that I did look to the chair of the committee to take a call and he chose not to. I just want to put on the record that the Hon Scott Simpson is the chair of the committee until 9 o'clock in the morning.Hon DAVID PARKER: I was not trying to gazump anyone either. I was just worried that the vote would pass if no one took a call. Of course there is something to be said in respect of fresh water which is that 8 years after this Government took office fresh water quality still declines in so many of our waterways. Seventy percent of monitored waterways have increasing nitrate levels. We increasingly see pictures in the newspapers of rivers that are so polluted in summer—which is the time when people swim in our rivers in summer—not only are they not safe enough to swim in dogs die if they lap up water that contains some of the toxic algae.We have got the medical officer of health in South Canterbury telling mothers not to feed their babies bottled milk made out of the water that comes out of their taps that is drawn from bores. We have got some serious problems with water quality. We discussed this with the Secretary for the Environment from the Ministry for the Environment. We also discussed a petition that we are considering around fresh water as well which leads me to focus a little on the latest controversies in New Zealand which have been the very belated moves by the Government to have a standard somewhat higher than wadeability for some of our waterways.The Government got so panned for its ambition for waterways being set at the wadeable level that it thought that it would do something. The wadeable standard effectively meant you could walk through a river but you could not swim in it without having a serious risk of getting crook. The position in the Labour Party has for a long time been that we should have swimmability as our minimum standard for rivers except where natural events render them unswimmable.For a long time the Minister for the Environment Nick Smith said that was an impossible ideal and he quoted ridiculous examples like floods—well no one swims in their rivers in floods—and the acid wash of some of the volcanic areas increasing acid levels in rivers. And I think the third example he used was bird droppings and the Ashburton River because there were birds that nested on the banks of the river. All of them were ridiculous because we are not trying to have those rivers made swimmable; we just do not want rivers degraded below swimmable by human intervention.So the Government came out a couple of months ago with this proposed change to the national policy statement to up the levels a little bit and they tried to pretend that this was to a swimmable standard. What were some of the problems with that? I will not use just my own comments I will use some of what—just about the only environmental NGO left on the Land and Water Forum (LAWF)—the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) submitted recently. Others have pulled out of the Land and Water Forum because they have been so abused by the Government through that process—namely Fish & Game and recently Forest & Bird as well as Federated Mountain Clubs. This is what EDS which is still in it said. They said they do not support how these concepts that have been approved by Land and Water Forum have been incorporated in the proposed standard on swimmability". It says the "consultation document has taken the LAWF's recommendations manipulated them and watered them down". That is one of the Land and Water Forum's own participants.Then it goes through some of the problems with it. It notes that there are not appropriate controls on increasing nitrates where you have a river that is found to be degrading as evidenced by the little bugs in it—the macroinvertebrates—that sit on the bottom of the rivers dying away. There is nothing in the standard that makes you stop doing that. I think one of the obvious examples is in respect of slime—periphyton is how it is described in the document; and yet there is no adequate control on excessive rates of periphyton—slime growth—caused by nutrient enrichment or by artificially decreased flows which of course are caused by irrigation.Perhaps the two worst of them all—one is that National says it wants 90 percent of rivers cleaned up. But that 90 percent includes all of the rivers in our national parks; they are not the ones that need to be cleaned up. It should be the ones that are running through agricultural areas where there is intensive agriculture. The final and perhaps worst one is that it is going to exclude test results that are adverse 20 percent of the time. Twenty percent of the time would be from Christmas to 1 March which is the summer period which makes the standard ridiculous."