A select committee report released today demonstrates Coalition parties support law changes that would prevent local government from being able to control pollution even when it is causing serious harm, say freshwater campaigners.

“The damage these changes would cause must not be underestimated. This is not only an attack on the health of our environment but also democracy as the proposals seek to give greater power to polluting industries and write local government out of regulating harmful pollution of freshwater,” says Choose Clean Water spokesperson Tom Kay.

“It beggars belief when you consider that the National-led Government came to power claiming to be champions of localism - they’ve thrown that out the window completely.”

For freshwater, two parts of the Environment Select Committee report are most significant; the proposals on Section 70 of the Resource Management Act and changes to farm plans, including more Ministerial control.

Currently, Section 70 says that councils cannot allow pollution that would cause “significant adverse effects on aquatic life” as a permitted activity. This means regional councils cannot allow for potentially polluting activities to happen without them going through a consenting process to assess whether they can avoid, remedy, or mitigate their impacts, even where an environment they want to operate in might already be polluted.

The Coalition parties support doing away with this and allowing polluting activities to go ahead, as long as the place those activities are occurring is already polluted and as long as there will be some reduction in that pollution over time.

“But it doesn’t make sense. It is laughable that the report suggests you could grant a consent for an activity to add pollution to a place or continue polluting it now as long as it reduces its pollution by a bit, later. Why would we say ‘We’ll make a waterbody really sick now so we can nurse it back to health over decades’!? Make it make sense.”

Even with standards for these permitted activities, campaigners regional councils will struggle to ensure they are sufficient to reduce or avoid “significant adverse effects on aquatic life” and will face significant lobbying to minimise any standards.

“This opens the door to more and worse pollution. Pollution that harms aquatic life inevitably has an impact on human lives, either directly due to illness or through impacts on livelihoods or taking away the things with love about the places we live in.”

The Coalition parties in the select committee also support changes that would bypass regional councils' role in controlling pollution through farm plans.

Farm plans have been a largely unsuccessful attempt to reduce the impact of farming on the country’s freshwater over the last decade or more. In regions where they have been used, like Canterbury, they have been found to be unable to stop the degradation of communities’ waterways and drinking water sources.

“Not only is the value of farm plans in controlling pollution highly questionable,” says Kay, “the Select Committee’s proposal is to give Government the ability to support farm plans written and audited by polluting industries rather than regional councils, and to allow the Minister for the Environment to make the decision on which industry groups can play this role. This keeps regional councils at arms length from attempts to control pollution through farm plans, effectively writing them out as regulator.”

“This Government has demonstrated it has close and inappropriate relationships with some industry bodies. Having a Minister be responsible for such a decision opens the door to undue influence and allows for industry to capture the whole process around farm plans. We’re watching it happen now. This proposal effectively writes local government out of their regulatory role of controlling pollution.”

“It has never been clearer that the National-led Government is working for the polluters and not for the public. Our communities will pay for this through the impact on our quality of life, our drinking water sources, our opportunities to swim or fish, our pride in our beautiful environment, and our ability to be involved in local decision making.”

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