Alliance Party candidate for Christchurch Central, Greg Byrnes, says the ‘Our Freshwater 2026’ report released this week by the Ministry for the Environment and Statistics NZ confirms a disastrous trajectory for the country’s water systems.

Byrnes, a former Environment Canterbury (ECan) Councillor, says the report’s findings on the combined pressures of land use and climate change are the inevitable result of policy failures.

While Waikato University associate professor Nicholas Ling has accurately described the report as “sobering,” Byrnes says that the ongoing deterioration of New Zealand's freshwater is a predictable consequence of the commodification of a natural resource.

He points to inconsistent leadership and the failure to entrench cross-party consensus legislation in the last decade alone as primary drivers of the crisis.

“We have watched a decade of political manoeuvring, from the ‘swimmable rivers’ debacle where E. coli standards were simply loosened to make polluted water appear acceptable, to the current shifting between ‘Three Waters’ and ‘Local Water Done Well’,” says Byrnes.

“These failures, along with the recent repealing of the hierarchy of obligations in Te Mana o Te Wai, have consistently prioritized economic development and user needs over the fundamental health of the water itself.”

Byrnes says the Canterbury region serves as a national benchmark for these issues, containing roughly 70% of New Zealand's irrigated land and having declared a “Nitrate Emergency” during the last Council triennium.

Byrnes says without a move away from the over-commodification of water, the life-sustaining resources of the planet will continue to be taken for granted until it is too late.

The Alliance is calling for a fundamental shift in water management, advocating for entrenched cross-party legislation and a dedicated annual budget for infrastructure.

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