Government changes to national direction relating to the country’s resource management, expected to be announced this week, will advance ACT Party extreme ideologies at the expense of the health of the public and our environment, say freshwater campaigners.

Campaign group Choose Clean Water says a close reading of the Coalition Government’s cabinet paper on resource management reform provides a strong indication of what will be in the Government’s national direction announcement, and shows the National-led Government is adopting the extreme and incoherent views of ACT in their approach to environmental policy.

“The changes to national direction signalled in the cabinet paper cover more than freshwater policy but what’s proposed for freshwater is indicative of what’s coming across the board.

“The Coalition Government is making sure commercial interests can trump the public’s interests, and that supposed private property rights can trump the rights of everyone else in our communities to a safe, healthy environment to live in,” says spokesperson for the group, Tom Kay.

Choose Clean Water says the cabinet paper’s prioritising of ‘the enjoyment of private property rights’ in public policy is straight out of an extreme libertarian ideology and becomes incoherent and dangerous when applied to communities’ needs and the natural environment.

As the cabinet paper emphasises, the Coalition Government intends to ‘replace the RMA with resource management laws premised on the enjoyment of property rights as a guiding principle’.

It goes on to say, ‘land use effects that are borne solely by the party undertaking the activity would not be controlled’.

“The cabinet paper ignores reality. Prioritising ownership as it exists right now ignores the fact that property changes hands over time—so one landowner’s actions will affect a future property owner or community.

“The reality is that most land use activities will have an impact on the rest of the community and wider society, even those that may be confined within a property boundary.

“That’s why we have rules about what people can and can’t do, so that the needs of everyone—including future generations—can be managed and communities aren’t harmed by one person’s poor decision making.”

Additionally, Choose Clean Water says any national direction announcement that highlights ‘environmental limits’ should be met with skepticism.

It appears as though the Government has already agreed to take away existing essential environmental limits for freshwater.

The cabinet paper states, ‘Limits to protect human health would be set nationally, whereas limits to protect the natural environment would be set by regional councils, who may incorporate sub-regional perspectives (such as catchment groups)’.

“We have existing protections for rivers and lakes in the form of national bottom lines (environmental limits). The National Party introduced these in 2014 and they’ve been refined since.

“But the cabinet paper proposes to remove these existing bottom lines and throw this decision-making back to regional councils again. This means communities will be vulnerable to more pollution of their rivers, lakes and drinking water, such as from another predicted ‘dairy boom’ in Canterbury.”

“It’s dangerous to disconnect human and environmental health, and unrealistic to imagine you can protect people’s health without protecting the waterways they swim in, fish and collect food from, and rely on for their drinking water.”

Kay also says the group can also see the influence of commercial interests over public policy, such as allowing catchment groups to set limits as another way of weakening or removing limits.

“It just opens them up to industry capture, where agribusiness exerts massive influence to set weak standards that work for them. Catchment groups are currently largely dominated by these interests and aren’t set up to allow for what downstream communities might want or need to protect their health and livelihoods.”

“This is only a small example of what’s in the cabinet paper and there is more to be alarmed about in the Coalition Government’s proposals for our environmental policies. ACT’s dangerous ideology should not be the basis of our resource management system, and National Party leaders must push back on them.”

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