The battle heats up

The Herald continues its series on the defining election policies. Today’s focus is on water quality. Jamie Morton reports

What to do about the alarming state of New Zealand’s lakes and rivers has predictably dominated the environment space in the run-up to this election.

Anger over our freshwater estate has reached boiling point as report after report has shown a pattern of ongoing degradation in many parts of the country — perhaps nowhere more so than Canterbury where the dairy industry taking much of the heat.

Kiwis have become all too familiar with concepts like agricultural intensification, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, the risk of bacteria E. coli, and other factors like stormwater run-off, sediment and algal blooms.

Environment groups have called for a cow cull.

Opposition parties have made rivers a rallying cry.

And increasingly, the ugly flipside to our clean green tourism brand is being noticed overseas.

New Zealand: Polluted Paradise is the title of a major documentary investigation now being broadcast by Al Jazeera, while major US newspaper The Wall Street Journal sification and are worsening at more than half and a quarter of monitored river sites respectively.

Between 2013 and 2014, more than half of water allocated for consumptive use was for irrigation and 65 per cent of that had been allocated to Canterbury.

As the election has neared, worry and anger over the quality of our freshwater estate has turned up new questions: who owns our water, and why don’t we make those who use and pollute it pay?