Delahunty Catherine: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: General Debate[Sitting date: 04 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10760. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. Our rivers are not canals. Our rivers are not concrete structures for intensive agriculture. Our rivers are life. Our rivers sustain life they create life they sparkle when clean and they are the centre of our identity as a country when we look after and protect them. That is the Green Party’s commitment: swimmable rivers. So it is somewhat sad to hear as I did in the House yesterday the bizarre description of rivers by yet another Government Minister who is ecologically illiterate when the Minister for Primary Industries described rivers when they are not used for storage—when water is not used for storage—as simply running out to sea. Newsflash: that is what rivers are for and that is what they do. Our rivers run to the sea and in that process they sustain life they sustain the land they sustain the life within the rivers and they give us a place where we can experience what it is to be natural and wild.Instead of that the Government intends to create yet another dam the Ruataniwha Dam which it is supporting and which the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council is supporting which will actually damage yet another river. If our rivers are to be sustained in this country we have to understand their function and it is pretty disturbing to see that people with decision-making power at both regional and national level do not understand that rivers are life. They do not understand that rivers are the whakapapa of the tangata whenua the home of the tuna and the remaining tiny percentage of native fish the source of joy to so many and the future for our mokopuna. Instead of this we have the Ruataniwha Dam and because they cannot find investors for it they are spending $80 million of ratepayers’ money in the Hawke’s Bay and now are trying to persuade ACC to front up with the rest. No one wants to invest in a white elephant—except it seems Hawke’s Bay Regional Council and this Government. This is because they do not have any concept of what a river is and they are prepared to sacrifice the Tukituki and other awa across the motu for the sake of a form of agriculture that is not sustainable.Even more extraordinarily we are going to see this Ruataniwha Dam managed by Hawke’s Bay Regional Council which I have reason to know from going and seeing a tiny dam in that area the Waihī dam it could not manage. It has allowed the private company Eastland Group since 1979 to have a water right with no modern resource consent which it breached and it allowed that river this summer to turn into a drain full of silt at the expense of local farmers who have lost their pumps and at the expense of local community who had their summer stolen. That is how it was described to me when I went up to Wairoa and I saw what Hawke’s Bay Regional Council had allowed Eastland Group to do with no consequences no penalties for breaches of that 1979 water right. So how can we have confidence if that is how the council deals with a tiny dam in how it is going to deal with a vast irrigation project? And that is with the full backing of the Government.This Government fully believes in damming rivers and creating canals because otherwise it is just water running out to sea. But the Green Party has a vision which includes changing the national policy statement to go from boatable and wadeable to swimmable rivers. We have a vision of recognising that agriculture can be totally successful without being so intense that thousands of—millions now—dairy cows will keep producing diffuse nitrogen that runs into our waterways and fills them up with nitrates. So the issue is nitrates. It is not that rivers are a problem; it is that nitrates are a problem from intensive agriculture. It is the problem in Canterbury it is the problem in terms of the Tukituki River and it is the problem in terms of Ruataniwha—in that we cannot keep treating our rivers like drains or pretending they should be canals. They are a source of life and if we cannot understand that we cannot make good decisions about it. The Green Party will restore the 62 percent of monitored rivers that are too polluted to swim in. We will stand up for life we will recognise life and we will love and protect our rivers. Kia ora koutou katoa.