Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki Te Whare. Right now a community is struggling with a very unpleasant water contamination issue that is affecting their health. It is not the only time that this has happened in this country but it is probably the largest in our memory and the most serious. If we cannot sort out drinking water how on earth are we going to get to swimmable rivers again? Remember that swimmable not wadeable is the goal despite the weakness of the Government's national policy statement on fresh water. Wadeable is not an Olympic sport. Swimming and diving are Olympic sports but wadeable is how you cross a river or wadeable is when people wear those rubber clothes and go fishing—a very legitimate activity. Great except if the river is contaminated there will not be any fish for them to catch in their waders. So we need to change the goal for water and make it swimmable not wadeable. It would be a gold medal if we could return to that and that is going to take some leadership which is absent at the moment. Swimmable is not about the Ministry of Health standard; it is about a whole lot more. It means safe for kids for native fish for insects—for all life forms it should be swimmable. Swimmable is not about subsidising big irrigation to suck up water to the point at which rivers are beyond their life-supporting capacity. It is not about sewage overflows which contain a range of E. coli ending up in our waterways. We have got a lot of work to do which can be done with political will. Swimmable means kids bombing off the bank into a clean pool of beautiful fresh water. It means tangata whenua getting up and doing their pepeha with pride because their river—their awa—is not contaminated. Swimmable means a river where people can be without having to check the Land Air Water Aotearoa website to see whether it has been contaminated this week; or without having to read the sign that says Toxic algae—beware"; or without having to wonder whether this piece of paper nailed to this post by the river which says it is a health risk is true or not and whether they should risk putting their head under the water when they have come to the river for an experience to renew their hearts. We love our rivers and we want to be safe in our rivers. It is worth noting some of the issues around this challenge. One is that according to Statistics New Zealand we now have 10 million cattle across the country—6.4 million dairy cows and 3.6 million beef cattle. That is quite a lot of large animals considering that each one of them produces 15 times the effluent of a single human being—and that effluent is not treated. That is quite a lot of waste per animal. Even with the best will in the world—and we have got farmers planting protecting waterways and dealing with phosphorous and other issues—nitrates are a massive issue in terms of the swimmability and the health of our rivers because they lead us towards contamination of all of the elements of that water column including the risk of toxic algae. As climate change kicks in we are going to get warmer water and more algae; mix that with nutrients and we have a problem. So all the great work might be being done but this Government is not leading it. It has created many collaborative process models to water down the issues so that powerful stakeholders can dominate the debate and so that business as usual ends up with more voice than iwi and community. The Government has subsidised big irrigation. It has allowed wadeable to win over swimmable. It has ignored iwi when they have said very clearly that this is a Te Tiriti issue and that they have a proprietorial relationship with water. It is not OK to say no one owns water and to then let it be sold off in bottles overseas or taken commercial advantage of without anything being paid for it which is what is happening at the moment—an issue that this Government refuses to face. Swimmable is about standing with great water policy. The Greens have great water policy and right now we are touring our communities and talking with people who want that pollution to stop. We are talking about solutions that will really work not just talking to each other about the lowest bottom line. That is why I am on the water tour and fighting for swimmable because wadeable is not an Olympic sport."