Parker David: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Environment Canterbury (Transitional Governance Arrangements) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10872. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Nuk Korako is a member of the Māori plutocracy in favour of dictatorship rather than democracy. I mean that is typical of the National Government is it not? It really is losing touch when it thinks that after 6 years without democracy the answer is still “not democracy”. I think that that sort of says it all about the National Government—increasingly out of touch with what New Zealanders want.I do not think this is unique to New Zealand. Actually people around the world eventually march in the streets when they are denied their right to control how their lives are run through democracy. I look around this hall here and I have heard other people say this before—but all the people who fought in these battles around the world what were they fighting for? They were actually fighting for democracy because democracy in the end is what causes societies in the longer term to be prosperous and peaceful because the sorts of accommodations that need to be made between people are made. The environment is actually better protected in democracies around the world than it is in countries that are not democratic.So the aberration that we had in Canterbury where there were problems with the management of resources including water resources justified only the shortest of interventions. I do agree that there were problems with Environment Canterbury. I also agree with Eugenie Sage that the problems were less serious by the time the Government put in commissioners than they had been earlier. The earlier regional council had been quite remiss in not having a water plan for the management of the resources. It is also true that the council was pressured by this huge change in the technology and economics of irrigation that meant there was a real push towards intensive land practices that were polluting the waterways. But the sadness is that 8 years on from this Government saying it was going to fix this sort of thing including through its intervention in Environment Canterbury and through national policy statements water quality in Canterbury is still getting worse. It is a terrible thing.About 2 months ago I was fishing in the backblocks of Canterbury in a pristine river. I was with a fishing guide whom a friend of mine was using and he used to until about 2 years ago regularly take visitors to the mid- and south-Canterbury rivers—to the lowland rivers like the Ōpihi. He no longer does that. He has given up on that completely because they are too dirty to fish. They are sucked dry. The water that is left in them is dirty and we have seen those photographs recently.Those things have got worse under the National Government and they continue to get worse because it has not grasped the nettle that needs to be grasped and it has made increases in land use intensity and land use. What is the cause of most pollution now? More intensive land practice and more irrigation. It is a higher-cost system. You need to have more output therefore you need more livestock per hectare therefore you need more fertiliser and therefore you have more nutrient run-off and livestock effluent getting into our rivers. It is that simple. And the only way you can stop that is by having rules that say increases in land use intensity are no longer a permitted activity because they have to be controlled in some way so that our waterways do not get dirty. The Government still has not done that and actually with due respect to the commissioners in Canterbury they have not done that either. Maybe elected ones would.The other thing that this extension of this legislation does other than make it so that there will be 9 years without full democracy in this region is that it overrules conservation orders and conservation orders that were in process. The Hurunui River water conservation order had been made. It was going to go to the Environment Court eventually. The Environment Court has over the years in New Zealand made very wise decisions in respect of conservation orders so that at least some of our rivers have been protected from damming and have appropriate minimum environmental flows and sometimes—not often but sometimes—have some decent controls on water quality. The Government cut across that. It was clear that one of the reasons it was imposing these commissioners was to cut across it because otherwise it would not have put these specific rules in the legislation about conservation orders; it would have just put commissioners in there and left the other laws intact. The Government cut across it because in the face of this enormous pressure on Canterbury rivers it is not even willing to allow there to be exploration in court as to whether there should have been a conservation order on the Hurunui River. And it pretends to be in favour of improving our water quality.The Government says it is in favour of water quality and what is its minimum standard? Wadeability. Wadeability—you can walk through it but you cannot put your head under. It has all of these weird excuses from Nick Smith saying: “Oh well you know rivers in flood can’t be swum in.” Well they cannot be waded in either—they do not even make the wadeability standard. No one was ever suggesting that that minimum standard should apply to rivers that are in flood. The next excuse from him was: “Well look some rivers are naturally dirty sometimes. Sometimes there are a lot of birds nesting on the bank.” That was one of the examples he used—seagulls on the bank of the Ashburton River. No one is suggesting that natural causes of river degradation can be regulated away; we are just saying human intervention ought to not be allowed to take dirty rivers to below a swimmability standard.In truth the objective of this Government—and it comes up with every National Government we have had in recent decades—is that it has got this two-class mentality for rivers. It is willing to protect a few rivers. They are generally large rivers that rise in national parks and they are so big it is very difficult to put so much pollution in them—they get dirty anyway. The rest of the rivers—the small rivers and particularly the lowland rivers—well it lets them be polluted. It turns them into drains. That is what it has done in Canterbury and it has stopped it being—and now I am going to hear Sarah Dowie get up next and defend the Government and she will say what she said in respect of her last speech which is: “In Southland there are all these wonderfully protected rivers.” It is not true—it is not true. I was counsel for the conservation orders on the rivers that have conservation orders in Southland. I regret that when I was counsel in those applications because water quality was not a pressing issue we did not get decent minimum water quality standards in those conservation orders. We got flow protection because the big threat generally was to flow; it was not to quality. Since then rivers like the Mataura have become filthy—filthy—and worse than they used to be. I have had people report to me that they come down and they walk across tributaries and drains that lead into the Mataura River and they are full of cow—what comes out of the end of a cow.Grant Robertson: “Excrement” I believe the word is.Hon DAVID PARKER: Excrement—that is right. I was going to use a shorter word.There are complex problems behind rising pressure on waterways. It has been driven by a change in the profitability of different farming types. Rising commodity prices meant that increasingly intensive and expensive farming systems became economic. More irrigation could be supported more fertiliser and more livestock. That is one of the problems and regulation has not caught up with it. One of the other pressures has been changes in technology things that were not there 30 or 40 years ago—you know K-Line irrigation enabling irrigation of rolling country. We have had other causes—for example we have run out of land to develop. We used to break in land that had never been farmed. We have done all that now. Therefore if you want to increase output you have to further develop the land that has already been developed and therefore you have more pressure on waterways. All of these factors are playing a part but the sad truth is that 8 years after this Government came in having killed the Judge Sheppard national policy statement which would have controlled increases in land use intensity and stopped our clean rivers getting dirty the National Government has allowed it to get worse.To me the most important river is the local river that I want to swim in. I think that is true for most people. And if their local river is clean and my local river is clean then all our local rivers will be clean and all our rivers will be swimmable. We are a long way off that. It is going to take a generation to get back to that but one of the ways that you get that back is to listen to the voice of the people.Canterbury people are sick of their rivers being polluted. They want democracy. I pay credit to the existing commissioners. They have improved the plan. They have taken out a lot of the irrelevancies and they have made some progress in Canterbury rivers. But now 6 years after they were appointed it is time to go back to full democracy. I oppose this bill.