Regional council aims to embed Te Mana o te Wai before law change
Craig Ashworth
The Taranaki Regional Council will try to embed Te Mana o te Wai into its new Freshwater Plan before the Government rewrites resource laws.
The Government has pledged to overturn freshwater regulations and resource management law to favour easier development.
The coalition deal includes Act’s policy to replace freshwater policy and standards “to rebalance Te Mana o te Wai to better reflect the interests of all water users”.
At this week’s regional council meeting, councillors were told those law changes will take at least two years – so the council had to continue work on its new Freshwater Plan under the current law.
Council policy manager Lisa Hawkins said the Government intended to write a specific law to remove Te Mana o te Wai from resource consenting processes, but has said nothing about changing its place in planning laws.
Te Mana o te Wai – an idea introduced by John Key’s Government in 2014 – is at the core of current rules.
Labour beefed up Te Mana o te Wai in 2017 to make the health and well-being of waterways the top priority in freshwater regulation, with human water needs second and other users third (commercial, cultural and social).
Councils must protect the mauri or life force of waterways and actively involve tangata whenua in making freshwater decisions, policies and plans.
The council’s first Māori constituency councillor Bonita Bigham said people were worried Te Mana o te Wai was being diluted. “If [consent] applicants aren’t expected to be able to respond to Te Mana o te Wai provisions, what effect will it really have?”
Hawkins described how in a few years Te Mana o te Wai considerations would be baked into the Freshwater Plan, alongside other council environmental plans that govern consenting.
“We should have all new plans in place, and [if] they’ve given effect to Te Mana o te Wai as it stands at the moment ... then that plan has automatically kind of addressed those considerations.”
Bigham said it was “implicit rather than expressed”.
Hawkins replied: “It’s implicit, exactly”. Presented alongside a startlingly blunt assessment of the declining health of Taranaki waterways, Hawkins triggered objections from the farmers’ lobby at the council table.
Federated Farmers Taranaki president and regional council representative Leedom Gibbs accused officers of coercive consultation. “It is my understanding that quite often that consultation is very directive in the way that it goes out. Like, with the consultation that was done in September, it was very hard to not agree with statements … There’s not a lot of room in there to say ‘but’.”
Dairy farmer Donald Mcintyre has been a regional councillor for 16 years – during which time he too served as Federated Farmers Taranaki president. He said things couldn’t be too bad, because people still swim at his on-farm wedding and events venue.
“It’s not as dramatic as what you’re putting down on paper here.”
First-term councillor and until lately Taranaki Federated Farmers executive member Donna Cram agreed with Mcintyre’s lament. Mcintyre said they were improving water quality anyway. “The plan will make it a lot easier to do that, but we are already on a journey towards there, aren’t we?”
Cram responded: “And industry of course, leading that, through us.”
Mcintyre warned council staff would struggle to get support from farmers sick of “silly rules”. “Over the last two or three years, that goodwill has been burnt pretty severely.”
Policies that have been attempted up until now have been not workable or fit for purpose, Mcintyre said.
“And so people have switched off.” Bigham had the opposite view of council relationships on the ground.
“This council’s gone a long way to building trust and good faith within our community and I think it’s critical that we look at whatever it takes to make sure that our communities can participate in those conversations.”
The Government extended the deadline for Freshwater Plans by three years to 2027 so councils wouldn’t be forced to reset local rules before the yet-to-bewritten laws are passed.
But regional council chairperson Charlotte Littlewood said the overdue renewal of the 22-year-old plan had already been delayed many times.
“The fact that we haven’t implemented any of the national policy statements yet ... is quite a significant statement… but there is a point where we have to draw a line in the sand and actually do this.”
At the end of the debate, ninth-term councillor Neil Walker, Littlewood’s deputy, made a quiet request of the chairperson.
“Get the communications working properly too, to indicate that were taking [a] sensible, measured approach to all this.”