Devil is in the detail
New Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern’s plan to charge water royalties for commercial bottlers and irrigation schemes is a pre-election crowd pleaser. It capitalises on the outrage some people feel when they read of pure New Zealand water being shipped off in bottles overseas for the profit of foreigners. The idea that revenues raised can be redirected into cleaning up our stressed and polluted waterways also speaks to valid environmental concerns.
But the policy has come out of nowhere, and the lack of detail is worrisome. Voters could be excused for thinking it is a glib, once-over-lightly headline-grabber.
If they find themselves on the Treasury benches after next month’s election, Labour might learn the lesson with water that US President Donald Trump learned with healthcare – who knew that it could be so complicated?
Adding a levy, effectively a tax, of a few cents to a bottle of plastic bottle of water, is easy to understand and something that many people will support. But water bottling uses a fraction of one-hundredth of one per cent of New Zealand’s available water, and it would be easy to overestimate how much money the levy would raise.
The prospect of taxing irrigation schemes also raises more questions than can immediately be answered. The system of resource consents for irrigation is already complicated sometimes, and this proposed ‘‘flexible’’ levy will add another tangle of vested interests.
And, as New South Wales has learned to its considerable cost, putting dollar signs into water management can lead to rorts, rip-offs and meter tampering on such a scale that no-one can have any confidence about the amount of water being taken.
What about hydro-electric schemes? If a litre of New Zealand water is subject to a levy when it is put into a bottle, then why are the 141 square kilometres of Lake Manapouri, and all the other hydro resources, not mentioned in Labour’s meagre plan?
Levying water use also suggests that the Crown owns the resource, rather than the current accommodating position, which former prime minister John Key tried to assert, that noone does.
Asserting a Crown right to impose a levy is almost certain to spark a renewed bid by Maori to secure permanent rights to their share of water resources. And it is right this discussion happens.
An important part of Labour’s policy would redirect young people on the dole into conservation work in a bid to give them ‘‘work experience and income while helping to improve the environment’’. Again, this sounds like crowd-pleasing rhetoric rather than sound, evidence-based policy.
When New Zealand previously tried work-for-dole schemes, participants’ prospects worsened because they were on the scheme and not looking for proper jobs. An Australian study last year found just 12 per cent had full-time jobs three months after finishing such a scheme.
In short, this was an easy announcement to make, and it may prove popular, but it also like peeping into Pandora’s box.
But it’s a conversation for New Zealand and one that arguably is overdue. The key is for New Zealanders to understand the complexities of such a proposal and for Labour to detail how it would work before the nation goes to the polls. We should be told more about how this will work before New Zealand goes to the polls.