Delahunty Catherine: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 07 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11733. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. He mihi nui ki a koutou katoa. It has been an interesting week and it was an interesting Budget. It is great that the National Government has got something to focus on. I would rather its members talked about our fantastic agreement with the Labour Party than pretend to be the heroes of the housing crisis. Before I start talking about fresh water in the Budget I really have to express my actual nausea about children sleeping in bushes and about hundreds of people sleeping in cars and garages in winter in the country I grew up in and the sense of shame that I feel when seeing the conditions in which people are living in this country at this time and then to hear that everything is great the Budget did great we are looking after our people and it could not be better. It does make me feel quite unwell because we know it is not true and everyone else knows it is not true especially those people living through that experience.However to focus on the Budget in my portfolio area of water—today the Prime Minister said he had a preference for swimmable rivers. Well that is very nice is it not? Rather than a preference a reality would be a good thing. We know how that reality can be achieved and how it cannot. It will not be achieved by putting a mere $100 million in a freshwater fund over 10 years that does not start until 2019 and when each really polluted major river costs more than that to clean up. Lake Rotorua costs $144 million—one lake. This is the great fund that is going to fix our waterways when we know that 62 percent of our monitored rivers are too polluted to swim in. So it is very disappointing to see the Budget put such a limited amount of money into this fund and also to open the fund up to the irrigators. It is a bit like saying: “Come on Dracula. Come and drink the blood bank.” Actually the fund is supposed to be a clean-up fund but those members are opening it up to major irrigators as well. Go figure. The people who have wrecked the Canterbury rivers who have sucked up that water are going to be able to apply to the clean-up fund which is very bizarre.Let us take an example of that. Let us take Ashburton where I have had the privilege of working with a very concerned local community. They are talking about selling the fresh water from the aquifer for free and then taking the water from the Hakatere River which has already been contaminated by intensive dairying and recharging that water back into the aquifer as well as continuing to support irrigation impacting on those catchments. This is a recipe for the saddest-looking waterways in the country in Canterbury.Unfortunately there is not just Canterbury. From throughout the motu from top to bottom we have rivers in dire need of more than a token discussion and a token bit of throwing money at it while on the other hand we are promoting dairy conversion.Todd Barclay: How much will it cost?CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: My colleague asks how much it will cost. I can promise him that every day that we delay this it will cost more. The Minister’s commitment is that there are too many birds and too much volcanic ash. He is quite happy for that cost to clean up the real issues that he does not want to talk about to go on to the next generation. So the next generation will have to pay. Once you have dumped your externalities on to communities we have to pay and $100 million is not going to cut it. Lake Rotorua took $140 million so let us think about what it really takes to clean up rivers and make a start make a real commitment.But the reason why we are not making progress on rivers is the standard—the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management. The real reason is that we need swimmable rivers. Unfortunately the Government with its preference for swimmable rivers actually only talks about it. Its real commitment is to boatable and wadeable.At the Greens conference a wonderful man from Waikirikiri Selwyn who cares about his river and whose 10-year-old child has never been able to swim in her river—never—put it straight. He said: “I don’t want to hear about whether it’s dairy cows or golden unicorns. Fix our river. Why do we pay rates and taxes? We pay them to fix our river. But the Government will not curtail the dairy industry and therefore the rivers will continue to be too contaminated for Rosie to swim in. That’s a disgrace.”However the Green Party has a vision of swimmable rivers. That is what we are taking to the country. That is what people will support. We are very proud that we can do a whole lot better than this Budget. Kia ora koutou katoa.