The National Party In Gumboots.

Smile For The Camera: Call me a cynic, but the carefully staged photograph of Federated Farmers’ new president, Katie Milne (the first woman ever to hold the post) resplendent in boots and Swandri, kneeling at the side of the Ngaruroro River, while a grinning line of gumbooted corporate cockies look on admiringly, strikes me as too good to be true.

 

IT WAS MAUDE ROYDEN, the English suffragette, who admonished the Anglican Church to “go forward along the path of progress and be no longer satisfied only to represent the Conservative Party at prayer.” Royden’s oft-quoted quip was irresistible to a wit of Sir Michael Cullen’s acerbity. His wicked paraphrase: that Federated Farmers represented “the National Party in gumboots” has always struck me as at least as memorable as the original. The Labour Party would, therefore, be wise to keep Sir Michael’s witticism at the front of their minds as they congratulate Federated Farmers and other “farming leaders” for their pledge to make all New Zealand’s rivers swimmable.
 

And before said “farming leaders” admonish me for failing to do the same, I will concede that, on the face of it, their better-late-than-never embrace of Labour/Green policy just might constitute evidence of a hitherto unnoticed willingness to “go forward along the path of progress”.
 

The operative phrase in this case is, of course, “on the face of it”. Call me a cynic, but the carefully staged photograph of Federated Farmers’ new president, Katie Milne (the first woman ever to hold the post) resplendent in boots and Swandri, kneeling at the side of the Ngaruroro River, while a grinning line of gumbooted corporate cockies look on admiringly, strikes me as just a wee bit too good to be true.
 

First of all, there’s the timing. Surely it is no coincidence that this happy little announcement and artfully composed photo-opportunity have been arranged just four weeks out from a general election? And not just any old general election, either, but one in which the “Water Issue” has featured prominently. When New Zealanders go to the polling stations of 23 September, the appalling state of this country’s lakes, rivers and streams will have persuaded more than a few of them to vote for those parties pledged to do something about it.
 

If Sir Michael Cullen is right about Federated Farmers and the National Party, it is quite impossible to avoid the conclusion that these gumbooted farming leaders’ last-minute conversion to the religion of Gaia – as elucidated in the Gospel of Dr Mike Joy – has been undertaken purely in the interests of protecting the Government’s exposed flank.
 

Presumably, the argument in favour of hauling all these characters out to the banks of the Ngaruroro runs something like this. “If we appear to be conceding the Greens’ and the Labour Party’s points on water quality, and if Nick Smith joins in the inevitable chorus of congratulation, then an issue currently causing the Government a lot of grief will be taken off the table.”
 

And, who knows, it just might work. If the voters fail to notice that there is precious little in the farming leaders’ announcement relating to HOW they, and their respective organisations, intend to go about making our lakes, streams and rivers swimmable; and even less about WHEN this happy state will be achieved.
 

Personally, I’m betting they will notice those rather large holes in Federated Farmers’ cunning plan. Why? Because Greenpeace, Forest & Bird, Fish & Game and every other NGO fighting for swimmable rivers will tell them. I’m especially confident that Russel Norman, the guy who, when he was the Greens’ co-leader, introduced the expression “dirty dairying” into everyday Kiwi conversation, and who is currently the boss of Greenpeace in New Zealand, will find these cockies-come-lately to the clean water party as bogus as I do.
 

Because talk is cheap – especially in the run-up to general elections. And because what I’m being shown in this latest photo-opportunity is just one more image in the lengthy sequence of images presented to New Zealanders as part of a concerted PR campaign to undo the damage caused by the success of the Dirty Dairying project.
 

Cast your mind back over the past 18 months and recall the expensive advertising campaign on behalf of New Zealand’s hard-working, dairy-farming families (along with the big corporations who actually dominate today’s dairy industry, but whose agribusiness systems curiously do not feature in the ad campaign’s soft-focus vision of the Kiwi heartland) and ask yourself this question:
 

“How can Federated Farmers and their allies possibly guarantee to make our rivers swimmable once again, without drastically reducing the size of New Zealand’s dairy herd?”
 

Then ask yourself: “Am I really that gullible?”
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 August 2017.

Everyone Owns The Water.

Ours - Not Yours: If water belongs to everyone, then immediately two principles become very clear. The first is that water can only ever be owned collectively – and never individually. The second is that whatever the collective entity in which public ownership is vested, be it the state or a local authority, public officials cannot ethically permit collectively owned water to be diverted for private profit without first extracting from the profit-seeker an appropriate fee for its use.

 

NO ONE OWNS THE WATER. It sounds so reasonable. How could anyone “own” water? It “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”, according to Shakespeare, and is sent to fall “on the just and on the unjust”, if you believe the New Testament. Playing no part in its creation, what plausible claim could we, as human-beings, possibly advance for its ownership?

 

Well, that all depends on how human-beings organise themselves. A hunter-gatherer society takes its water pretty much as Mother Nature delivers it. From springs and streams and rivers, and directly, from the sky above.

 

Agricultural and/or pastoral societies, however, tend to take a much more proprietary view of water. Without a reliable water supply crops cannot flourish and herds die of thirst. The human-beings who live in these kinds of societies are not disposed to share “their” springs and streams and rivers with anyone – not without a fight.

 

And then there are the human-beings who live in cities. Without water, cities simply can’t exist. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the key capability which makes any sort of enduring civilisation possible is the ability to collect, transfer and distribute large quantities of water for the consumption and use of large numbers of human-beings. How would the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt have survived without their sophisticated systems of water storage and irrigation? Where would Rome have been without her aqueducts and cisterns?

 

Civilised Collectivism: Where would Rome have been without her aqueducts?

 

In a civilised society, the bald assertion that “no one owns the water” is, therefore, nonsense. Because, in a civilised society, water belongs to everyone.

 

But, if water belongs to everyone, then immediately two principles become very clear.

 

The first is that water can only ever be owned collectively – and never individually. (In the simplest terms, you can’t own it – because we own it.) The second principle is that whatever the collective entity in which public ownership is vested, be it the state or a local authority, public officials cannot ethically permit collectively owned water to be diverted for private profit without first extracting from the profit-seeker an appropriate fee for its use.

 

It is only when we work back from these first principles that the bitter controversy over the use (and misuse) of water which has arisen in New Zealand is explained. They make it all-too-clear why politicians and officials in the thrall of farmers – especially dairy farmers – are so determined to make us believe that: “no one owns the water”.

 

Like all good agriculturalists and pastoralists, New Zealand’s dairy farmers claim a proprietary interest in the springs, streams, rivers and aquifers which water their crops, preserve their herds and wash out their cowsheds.

 

Their problem, of course, is that they can’t claim ownership of these water sources openly because New Zealand isn’t ancient Mesopotamia or medieval England. They live in a society in which the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens dwell in towns and cities and where the collective ownership and protection of potable water constitutes the foundation of urban health and comfort.

 

Bluntly, the springs, streams, rivers and aquifers of New Zealand are not the de facto property of the farming sector, they belong to the whole nation. This is the truth that has, at all costs, to be kept hidden. So long as the whole nation can be hoodwinked into believing that they are not the collective owners of New Zealand’s water; so long as they adhere to the nonsensical notion that “no one owns the water”; so long will the farming sector go on extracting profit from this critical resource without paying a cent for the massive collateral environmental damage they’re causing.

 

This was the motivation behind the shutting down of Ecan, the Canterbury Regional Council; the reason why democracy has been suspended in that part of New Zealand for more than six years. So reckless had the greed and selfishness of the Canterbury farming community become that they were willing to strip their city-dwelling compatriots of their political rights rather than be denied the massive, publicly-subsidised, irrigation schemes that would make them and their neighbours rich.

 

When the Prime Minister’s brother, Conor English, shortly after National’s election victory in 2008, vouchsafed to me his prediction that the single biggest issue facing New Zealand for the next twenty years would be “water”, I thought he was joking.

 

He wasn’t.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 March 2017.

Opening Our Eyes

Threatened Birthright: If our children are to enjoy the rights their parents enjoyed in New Zealand's rivers and streams we must open our eyes to the damage already done and the damage threatened by the commercial exploitation of this country's waterways.\

 

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN YESTERDAY, so vivid is the memory. The river was called the Waianakarua. Fresh and clean it tumbled out of the Kakanui Mountains, flowing powerfully through the narrow defile which the district’s Scottish settlers called Glencoe. As it curled and twisted around the great boulders that clogged and blocked the valley, the river collected itself into deep pools. It was into one of these that I leaped as a boy and for the first time in my life opened my eyes underwater. So pure and clean were the waters of the Waianakarua that I could see every pebble. The wonder of it has never left me.

 

Until a few years ago it never occurred to me that the magic of such moments was anything other than the birthright of all New Zealanders. These islands were so large and we Kiwis so few that the possibility that New Zealand’s rivers and streams could ever be anything other than pure and clean seemed fanciful. The marketing expert who came up with “100% Pure New Zealand” clearly felt the same.

 

Humanity’s response to the idea that somewhere, far away at the bottom of the world, there is a place where rivers and streams still tumble pure and clean out of snow-capped mountains has been dramatic. The tourist dollar is now a crucial contributor to New Zealand’s economic well-being. The purity and cleanliness of our waterways now possess much, much more than mere aesthetic value.

 

Indeed, the world’s impression of New Zealand as “clean and green” offers us a perceptual springboard from which we could construct a new and very exciting “green” economy. The world hungers for reassurance that the havoc human-beings have wrought upon the natural environment can be repaired and that it is possible to tread so lightly upon the planet that the wonders they experienced as children will still be there for their grandchildren.

 

The exports from such a green economy would command a huge premium in world markets. The sheer prestige value of products bearing the Made in New Zealand “brand” (think “Swiss watches”, “French wines”) could make this one of the richest countries on Earth.

 

None of this is new. Since the late-1950s, when Bill Sutch offered the Second Labour Government his vision of a richly diverse, highly-skilled, value-added and self-sustaining New Zealand economy, it has been obvious to all patriotic Kiwis what needs to be done.

 

That it hasn’t been done is attributable almost entirely to that wealthy minority of New Zealanders who control our primary production sector, and around whom have gathered a parasitic coterie of importers, retailers and real-estate speculators. These people have always set our nation’s course. The original colonisers. Harvesters of forests. Diggers of mines. Farmers of sheep and cattle. Rip-in, rip-out and rip-off has always been their creed and New Zealand is merely the last in a long line of ravaged and ruined lands they have fallen upon. They remain among us only because there is still some ruin to work here. When the pillaging is complete they will move on.

 

We have reached the point, however, where the nitrate and phosphate pollution these pillaging cockies are pumping into their farmland is overwhelming the environment’s capacity to neutralise it. Milk powder, the latest example of their extractive mania, has given rise to dairy herds whose weight upon the land is now so great that our rivers and streams are rapidly becoming toxic ditches in which no responsible parent would allow a little boy to swim.

 

If you doubt this, just consider the new management policy the polluters’ political representatives have set for our waterways. The quality of the water must be such that merely by wading in it New Zealanders can be confident of avoiding illness. But rivers and streams that they can swim in? No, no! That’s too much to expect. Too much to ask for.

 

It is time all New Zealanders opened their eyes. But, please, not underwater!

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 July 2014.