Cameron Mark; Parker DavidMARK CAMERON (ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. Minister if we could just go back to Vote Environment again carrying on: essential fresh water and $35 million spent for farm plans. It's sort of come to my attention that 60-odd percent of those farm plans have been enacted and/or enabled and that suffice it to say leaves a fair old percentage that are not. Is he concerned about the overburden in that regard and how that is reconciled? Then for the love of all things common sense how do you that in play so that by 21 November—as you can imagine—these winter-grazing realities to do with those winter farm plans can in fact be enabled? I've heard anecdotally that many councils are now concerned that they are going to have to go through a whole lot of consent regimes and the sanctioning or granting of those consents because of that. How does he reconcile that with the exorbitant amount of money that's being spent and is he concerned that this will then by virtue of the fact create an animal feed shortage especially for those farmers that use it? Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): In respect of farm plans more generally as opposed to the intensive winter-grazing module having farm plans as an alternative to resource consents was an idea that was promoted by the farming community which Government accepted. It allows a farm-by-farm solution to local issues. The farming community wanted this and in the end the regional council sector and Government officials agreed that that was the way forward. In order for them to be a substitute for legally binding resource consent conditions to control adverse environmental effects they do have to have some rigour about them and people have to be held accountable if they're saying they're going to do something a certain way to for example reduce sediment load. Now we have serious problems in New Zealand with sediment load getting into our rivers to the point where we haven't just got clogged-up estuaries without any flounder left and dead cockle beds; we've also got degraded inshore fishing areas. We have kelp beds that are far far smaller than they used to be and the kelp beds that are remaining are much thinner. An example was given to me recently by a fisherman who is in his late 60s or 70s now. He said that when he started fishing you couldn't drive through kelp beds in your fishing boat at low tide; now you can because they've thinned out so much. This is because of a lack of photosynthesis in deeper water caused by increased turbidity which is caused by more land-based sediments getting into the water and I think most people in New Zealand including farming groups want to do better on that. Now you can try and do that by way of rules and plans but you'll end up over-regulating some things and under-regulating others and it can become more complex than it need be. So we're going to use farm plans as a substitute for that. A farmer might say Look these are the critical areas that are the source of sediment on my property. It's that face over there. I know that we all need to do our bit. I'm going to fence that off so that the cows can't get in there"—or the sheep or whatever—"and we're just going to let a bit of vegetation regrow in that and plant a wee bit extra." Now that will be recorded in a farm plan and someone will give it the tick as saying that this is an adequate farm plan and then someone one day will come back and check that it actually has been fenced because otherwise it's less likely that it will be. So that farm plan regime is being stood up including with assistance from central government. Now these systems aren't new to the country. Some regional councils already have similar systems so we're just trying to take best practice and push it out to the rest of the country. In respect of the issue about intensive winter grazing we know that in the parts of the country that are reliant on supplementary crops or fodder crops grown in winter if that's done in the wrong way—and it has been at times in New Zealand—then that creates a lot of sediment. We've all seen the pictures of cows just about up to their udders in mud in a way that's not good for animal welfare and it certainly can spoil adjacent rivers all the way down to the estuaries. So again we developed a standard. The standard was said to be impractical so we pulled the plug on that and pushed it out another year. We worked with industry groups to develop an alternative winter-grazing module which we've landed and that's intended to be in place by the end of this year. For those people who don't meet the terms of that intensive winter-grazing module they can still apply to the council and say "Hey I can't do it that way but I can do it this way and that's fair enough. Can I have a consent for it?" and there are some who say that that's inappropriate and that you have to get a resource consent outside of the intensive winter-grazing module. That at the moment is the law as it currently applies. I've had some representations as it happens just today from Federated Farmers saying that we should look again at whether we need to just delay that implementation to enable full farm plans to come in. I'm not yet convinced that that is necessary but I will consider it."