Is this resource management by decree?
Many are saying the government has let us down on maintaining fresh water quality in New Zealand. Is the same thing happening with marine water quality?
As far as the Marlborough Sounds is concerned there seems to be no doubt.
The latest move is a proposed ‘National Environmental Standard’ for aquaculture.
Oddly the focus of this isn’t the setting of environmental standards for aquaculture to reach up to. It’s closer to the opposite. It’s about enabling existing aquaculture to bypass resource consent renewal processes without any substantive environmental effects assessments under the Resource Management Act – including water quality effects.
And, in my opinion, it’s about denying the public’s right to contest for the use of public water space and to participate in most aquaculture consent renewal processes.
One of the reasons given for this is cost.
I’ve publicly questioned the pertinence of trading off public rights and environmental effects assessments on the basis of process costs before. It’s wrong. Moreover, it’s hypocritical to triumph an industry for its economic benefits as an employer and then turn around and cut off the substantial labour element of that industry that is engaged on RMAand environmental assurance processes.
Aside from some new biosecurity proposals, the effect of this proposed ‘environmental standard’ looks largely to be no more than the abrogation of public rights and a direct transfer of returns away from industry environmental sector workers and into the pockets of aquaculture resource consent holders.
This government move comes hard on the heels of the much publicised proposal to relocate salmon farms in the Marlborough Sounds. There is no such thing as a ‘relocation’ of coastal permits under the Resource Management Act. Like all coastal permit holders, NZ King Salmon has no entitlement to transfer its activity to somewhere else just because it turns out to be no good where it is. It should be required to do what anybody else must do - follow the prescribed RMAprocedures and apply for plan changes and/or new coastal permits in the new areas that it now wants to farm in. But the government-sponsored NZ King Salmon proposal uses ‘relocation’ to justify using a ministerial power to bypass the normal RMAprocesses. The effect is the annulment of the public’s right to contest the use of the public water space and to protect public and environmental values in the targeted areas through the normal RMAprocesses, including the Environment Court.
Water quality is of course a significant environmental risk with the NZ King Salmon proposal. Taking away open and democratic processes to avoid proper scrutiny is Government by decree. In our view these moves represent undemocratic environmental subsidisation of aquaculture in the Marlborough Sounds. deliver nuclear weapons on the
US, but millions would die in both parts of Korea. With luck, the Chinese would stay out even as their North Korean ally is reduced to rubble, but who knows?
It’s just a scenario, but it’s one that keeps many people awake at night – including many senior people in the US military. That’s why reports have been surfacing recently that the US Secretary of Defence, General James Mattis, the National Security Adviser, General HR McMaster, and Trump’s Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, have made a secret pact that all three will never be abroad at the same time.
Why not?
Because at least one very senior military officer must always be in the country to monitor orders coming from the White House, and countermand them if necessary.
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these reports, but I believe them. In fact, I was already assuming that some arrangement like that was in place. Mattis, McMaster arose. Providing adult supervision is a tricky business, especially when the child is technically your superior.
And having said all this, it occurs to me that some senior military officers in North Korea must face the same dilemma. They too have a child-man in charge, and they will be all too aware that if ‘‘little rocket man’’, as Trump calls him, stumbles into a war with the US, then they, their families, and practically everybody they have ever met will be killed.
Their dilemma is even worse, because they serve a petulant godking who has the power of life and death over them and their families. To stop Kim Jong Un, if he were about to make a fatal mistake, they would have to kill him and accept that they would almost certainly be killed themselves immediately afterwards. Would they actually do that? They don’t even know the answer to that themselves, but I’m sure they think about it.
There is probably not going to be a Second Korean War. Probably neither set of senior officers is ever going to face this ultimate crisis. A subtle form of adult supervision is exercised on a daily basis in both capitals, because even the loosest of loose cannons has to work through other people in order to get his orders turned into actions.
But things have come to a pretty pass when we can have this discussion without sounding crazy.
I’ve publicly questioned the pertinence of trading off public rights and environmental effects assessments on the basis of process costs before.