Rationing water

This country's appreciation of the true value of its most valuable natural resource - fresh water - has been limited at best for the whole of its developed history and only now, after decades of warnings, is there the beginning of understanding about its increasing scarcity, and its deteriorating quality.

So when a government determines that the time has finally arrived that the resource needs to be "managed", after 160 years of largely unlimited exploitation, we can be certain a crisis point cannot be far away and that commercial and large user interests principally have seen what "managed" might mean for them.

It was, therefore, not at all surprising when the Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith, made his announcement on Monday, that one of the business lobby groups promptly proclaimed "millions in new business opportunities will result from a concerted push for early water reform".

The overall tone of Dr Smith's speech was unsettling because of its emphasis on economic development and growth, the need to manage water resources to maintain it, and for his misconception that "last century's politics equated environmentalism with more regulation, big government and anti-capitalism".

That he also prefaced those of his remarks dedicated to water management by pronouncing the Government's objective to be "good environmental outcomes without costly bureaucracy", which is also claimed to be his justification for reforming his bete noir, the Resource Management Act, suggests the minister has had a bright idea but has not yet thought through the possible consequences.

He also talked soothingly about "a more collaborative approach to environmental governance" which, on the basis of what has transpired this past decade or so, ought to deeply concern the environment movement.

The minister believes "New Zealand's environmental debates have been characterised by polarised, adversarial campaigns with politicians picking winners and losers" - which is precisely what his own Government proposes doing, and not necessarily to the environment's advantage.

Dr Smith's priorities should be plain enough: the preservation of the ownership of all our fresh-water resources in the hands of the Crown on behalf of all the people; a determination to ensure fresh water is just that - fresh; that it has a commercial value for which commercial users (in the broadest sense) should be required to pay; and that every private citizen is guaranteed access to it.

It should not be the preserve, in part or in whole, of Maori under some fanciful Treaty of Waitangi obligation; rights to it should not be able to be traded commercially excepting through an agency of the State; and the best efforts should be deployed to conserve it, even if that means limiting or prioritising its use.

He proposes that time-honoured method of using a committee to "establish common understanding on fresh-water management strategies", and has given the committee a year to produce a plan.

He believes it is difficult balancing decisions between environment, economic potential and other values but really, leadership of the degree required should not make such a task Herculean providing the Government has clear and publicly acceptable goals.

Reliance on New Zealand being marketed internationally as "clean and green" infers the question: why is New Zealand "clean and green"? The answer is fresh water, without which the environment as we and visitors know it would not exist, and without which our primary producers and industry would not exist.

Yet the balance between the one and the other is way out of kilter in several regions, and it has been permitted to reach that state because the priority of successive governments, bolstered by a lackadaisical attitude from local government, has not been preservation but exploitation - in the name of economic progress of course.

To quote Dr Smith: "New Zealand's abundant fresh-water resources are the envy of many other countries and the key to our competitive advantage in agriculture and renewable energy as well as being essential to our environment and lifestyle.

The problem is that our system of management has not kept up with the extra pressure on our water system."

"Our system of management" has been a notable failure in the preservation of water quality, quantity, allocation and storage, and is an indictment of the pursuit of "development" at any cost, and a frightening legacy for future generations.

It alone should provide a sufficient degree of urgency for Dr Smith's committee to reach the conclusion that the preservation and protection of the environment cannot be achieved if large parts of it continue to be sacrificed on the altar of infinite economic growth.

Dr Smith believes "marrying together successful economic and environmental policies is the new paradigm", a notion that wrongly assumes "growth" can be maintained infinitely despite the clear evidence resource limits, including fresh water, are being reached.

Thinking smarter about resource use within the economic growth "envelope" we already have must be a large part of the solution Dr Smith and his committee need to search for.