Chris Teo-Sherrell

The most pressing issue for Horizons is to respond to public demand for putting protection of our waterways and broader environment as its top priority and to act accordingly.

We rely on the environment for achieving a high quality of life that includes making a living, having good physical and mental health, and enjoying leisure activities. It ranges from climate change (which Horizons seems almost to ignore) and air pollution, through soil erosion and the condition of bush and wetlands, to river, lake and groundwater quality. Our actions can have positive or negative effects on the environment. Horizons needs to ensure that it allows and enables only the positive so that we leave the environment in better condition than we inherited it in.

Horizons has the One Plan and various tools to help it do this while enabling appropriate economic use to be made of the environment. But currently, Horizons appears to lack the will to fully and urgently carry out this role. It needs to rediscover this core purpose.

Councillors have the legal duty to act in the best interests of the entire region, not just their own area. Naturally, councillors will be more familiar with their own patch and be able to better represent the interests of people in it. But they still need to come to grips with the issues affecting the whole region and other individual parts of it. And they should recognise that actions in one part of the region have consequences for other areas.

For example, land use in the hill country and on the Manawatu¯ Plains both affect the quality of water in the Manawatu¯ and Rangitikei rivers. So councillors must come to understand these connections and take a holistic view.