Sage Eugenie: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: General Debate[Sitting date: 16 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17328. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): The Green Party knows what New Zealanders care about. We know that as well as clean Government they want clean rivers and that is because thousands of Kiwis wrote submissions on the Minister for the Environment’s draft proposed changes to the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management asking for standards in it that would deliver rivers that you can swim in—not just rivers that you wade in but ones that you can swim in without having to ring the regional council or check a website to check that you are not going to get sick.That is why the report and the decision that the board of inquiry delivered yesterday on the Tukituki Catchment Proposal is very interesting because potentially that decision could stymie theRuataniwha Dam and the massive expansion of irrigation and dairying in the Hawke’s Bay which this Government is so keen on. Although it was disappointing that the board granted consents for the scheme and for a dam that would be only 16 metres lower than the Clyde Dam in its decision it is imposing much tougher limits on nutrient pollution than the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council and its dam company wanted and it is imposing much tougher limits in terms of water quality and nitrogen than the Government is proposing in its National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management.That creates a real conundrum for the Government because the board has effectively said that you cannot have irrigation without actually safeguarding water quality and the health of the Tukituki Catchment. Yet this Government in all its policies is about sacrificing the environment in order to promote short-term economic growth. Here under this Government you have the Government tightening the criteria for small communities like the Tokomaru village to get access to the Ministry of Health’s Drinking-water Assistance Programme to help upgrade its drinking water supplies. On the one hand those criteria have got much tighter so that they are available only to the most deprived communities. Yet on the other we have the Government playing fast and loose giving major handouts through its Crown Irrigation company to agribusiness and irrigators.We saw $6.5 million given recently to Central Plains Water and we have the Crown Irrigation company lining up to give another big subsidy to theRuataniwha Water Storage Scheme in Hawke’s Bay. Given that this Government set up the board ofinquiry and hand-picked the members of that board it has got to read the board’s decision—look at what the board is saying about the nutrient limits—and it has got to get its hands off any further involvement in decisions around the flooding of the forest park. Even though the scheme potentially has got quite major costs for the region the board did not decline the dam and it did not look in enough detail at the ecological impacts on the river from the flooding in our view.Yet when we have the Minister of Conservation suppressing the submission of the Department of Conservation suppressing its ability to get in front of the board of inquiry to present information on ecological values and to present information about the forest park we do not trust the Government when it comes to the other decision that could frustrate this dam which is whether 200 hectares of the forest park would be flooded. Nick Smith’s paws were all over the decision to suppress the Department of Conservation’s submission and we suspect that he will be all over the decision around whether that land should be flooded. So the Government needs to take stock. It needs to read the decision carefully and actually wind back its aggressive promotion of more dairying and more irrigation because this dairy juggernaut is not sustainable. It is simplifying the economy and it is sacrificing the environment.A Green Party in Government would make sure that we made our “100% Pure New Zealand” brand real. We would not be giving big handouts through the Crown Irrigation company to irrigation. We would put in place strong national standards and bottom lines to ensure that our rivers were clean enough for swimming. We would strengthen our major environmental laws like the Resource Management Act not gut them as National is doing not reduce the opportunities for the public to have a say. We would ensure that regional councils focus on their critical role of independently managing water not promote irrigation as the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council is doing. That council now has to look really seriously at the changes to the plan that the board of inquiry is making.