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.

Have Iwi Leaders Crossed A Line On Water Rights?

Free Flowing No Longer? How has God’s rain become the “Iwi Leadership Group’s” private property? And how do the latter propose to finesse the Prime Minister's, John Key's, repeated and emphatic assertion that "nobody can own the water"?

 

WHAT IF THE TREATY SETTLEMENT PROCESS had begun in the 1960s, instead of the 1990s? What would New Zealand look like? Historical questions beginning with “What if?” are always fun, even when the factors working against history unfolding in any other way are insurmountable.
 

Supposing, for example, that the highly influential Hunn Report of 1961 had recommended the establishment of a Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal and the negotiation of multi-million pound “Treaty settlements” in recognition of the injustices suffered by Maori since 1840 – rather than the policy of “racial integration” that it did recommend. Would the National Party government of the day have taken it seriously? Absolutely not.
 

The government of National’s Keith Holyoake, like the government of Labour’s Walter Nash which preceded it, was deeply apprehensive of the social consequences of the rapid pace of Maori urbanisation. In 1931, thirty years before the Hunn Report was published, barely 15 percent of Maori lived in urban areas, by 1961, however, that percentage had soared to well over 50 percent. Just a quarter-of-a-century later, in 1986, close to 80 percent of Maori lived in New Zealand’s towns and cities. New Zealand’s politicians and bureaucrats (who were overwhelmingly Pakeha) were concerned that such breakneck social and cultural change might spark serious racial unrest.
 

The Hunn Report rejected both wholesale assimilation and forced segregation as solutions to the “problem” of rapid Maori urbanisation. His great hope was that through intermarriage, the strategic use of public housing and, most importantly, through the homogenising influence of public education, Maori would peacefully integrate with the dominant, Pakeha, society.
 

It’s important to remember that, in 1961, there were clear alternatives to the policy of racial integration already operating in the English-speaking world. In South Africa and the southern states of the USA segregation was mandatory and the very notion of “racial mixing” considered dangerously provocative. With the violent excesses of Jim Crow and Apartheid before them, liberal Pakeha hailed Jack Hunn’s recommendations as being both courageous and progressive.

Jack Hunn: Neither wholesale assimilation nor forced segregation, but peaceful racial integration, was Hunn's vision for the future of Maori-Pakeha relations.

 

Conservative Pakeha were by no means convinced. In 1961 there were still many New Zealand communities in which informal racial segregation remained the norm. Pukekohe infamously separated the races at the town’s barber shop, cinema and pub. Such citizens condemned the Hunn Report as a dangerously radical document. Their deeply entrenched racism would smoulder on in both provincial and metropolitan New Zealand, flaring into angry firestorms whenever racial issues achieved political salience – most particularly in 1981 and 2004.
 

So, even if the sort of radicalism that was later to produce the Waitangi Tribunal and the Treaty Settlement Process had been present in the minds of any interested party – Maori or Pakeha – back in 1961 (which is highly doubtful) it would have been rejected out-of-hand by just about everybody.
 

But what if New Zealand had been ready for such solutions in 1961? How would they have played out?
 

The short answer is: they would have played out social-democratically. The institutional expression of the politics of reconciliation and redress would have rebuffed the politics of hierarchy and commercialism in favour of participation and collectivism. It would have done so not only because that was the shape of the increasingly urbanised Maori society that was emerging, but also because, thirty years after the ravages of the Great Depression, and just 15 years since the end of World War II, that was the shape of New Zealand society as a whole.
 

The formation of such institutions would, therefore, have reinforced and strengthened the social-democratic temper of the times – with incalculable (but likely quite profound) effects on the development of the Labour Party, the trade union movement, local government and the broader New Zealand economy.
 

That the Tribunal (empowered to hear claims from 1840 onwards) and the Treaty Settlements Process were created between 1985-1995 meant that the institutions which emerged to implement these changes reflected a very different set of priorities. The 1980s and 90s were the period in which New Zealand’s social-democratic society was systematically taken apart. In its place arose the neoliberal society of today: a market-driven economic system in which the rich rule and the poor go under.
 

Successive neoliberal governments took care to ensure that the energy of the Maori Renaissance was channelled into elite-brokered, ostensibly Iwi-based, “neo-tribal capitalist” corporations: institutions functionally indistinguishable from the foreign- and Pakeha-owned corporations in whose interests New Zealand politics is now transacted. These neo-tribal capitalists have grown exceptionally skilled at masking the commercial imperatives that are their true raison d’être behind the rhetoric of reparation and redress.
 

How else could God’s rain have become the “Iwi Leadership Group’s” private property?
 

But, what if Jack Hunn’s philosophy of integration is as far as Pakeha New Zealanders are willing to go? What if there’s a line they will not see crossed? What if this is it?
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 April 2015.

Citizens Left Out Of The Water Equation

Enjoy It While You Can: The Tukituki River sparkles in the Hawkes Bay sun, but if the Ruataniwha Dam is built and intensive dairying is made possible further upstream, this iconic river will swiftly be transformed into what Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman, predicts will be "an industrial drain". Water is fast becoming New Zealand's most valuable natural resource and Federated Farmers - aided and abetted by the National Government - is determined to place that resource in private hands.

THERE’S ALWAYS A MOMENT when we realise that power has shifted. Trusted people and institutions suddenly turn against us. Those whose job it is to assess and avert public risk disappear. We hear rumours about wholesale sackings and forced resignations. Obvious and serious conflicts of interest are studiously ignored. And those in charge, while not guilty of telling outright lies, have unquestionably stopped telling us the whole truth.

 

Such extreme power shifts are generally confined to the corporate sector. And while they are never pleasant, and often very costly in personal terms, most of us nevertheless accept the process. The business world is not a democratic world: its unfairness and rapacity is largely beyond our control. Businesses fail, are sold, merged, asset-stripped, re-branded and downsized – and there’s not a lot any of us can do about it.

 

Beyond the business world, however, we do not expect to be left out of the equation. Employees may be required to subordinate their judgement to the entity paying their wages but, constitutionally-speaking, citizens are sovereign: their democratic judgements not subject to private-sector countermand.

 

Citizens do not take kindly to being treated as if they were employees.

 

But this is precisely what is happening. All over the country: from the Canterbury Plains to the Tukituki River in Hawke’s Bay; private interests are muscling in on public resources; compromising the integrity of public institutions; and trampling with ill-disguised contempt upon the rights of New Zealand citizens.

 

And at the heart of this power grab is – water.

 

 

I SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED. On 19 November 2008, just eleven days after the election of the current government, myself and the right-wing political commentator, Matthew Hooton, were invited to address the National Executive of Federated Farmers.

 

Coming away from that meeting, I was impressed by three things.

 

The first was how much the Federated Farmers CEO, Conor English, looked and sounded like his brother, Bill, the newly elected government’s Finance Minister.

 

The second was the presence of Dr William Rolleston. Until that moment, I had only known Dr Rolleston in his role as one of New Zealand’s most outspoken advocates of genetically engineered agricultural production. That he was so closely associated with Federated Farmers was something I probably should have known, but was still rather disturbed to find out.

 

The third, and by far the most important, thing I took away from that meeting was Conor English giving me a quiet “heads-up” that the most important issue facing Federated Farmers, and New Zealand, over the next few decades would be the issue of who controlled access to what was fast becoming the nation’s most valuable natural resource – water.

 

 

MOST NEW ZEALANDERS don’t think too much about water. Most of us live in cities and towns which, for the better part of a hundred years, have enjoyed a plentiful, safe and remarkably cheap water supply. In the odd drought year we townies may be asked to refrain from watering our gardens, but most of us, for most of the time, don’t give water a second thought.

 

Matters are very different in the countryside.

 

Over the course of the past twenty years the New Zealand landscape has been transformed by the extraordinary growth of the dairy industry. Where once the cargo vessels leaving our ports were loaded down with carcasses of frozen lamb and bales of wool – as well as butter and cheese – our agricultural exports are today dominated the thousands of tons of top-quality milk powder produced by New Zealand’s world-beating dairy farmers.

 

That milk powder earns this country billions of dollars every year, but dairying’s “white gold” comes at a heavy cost. The successful dairy farm not only requires millions of litres of water by way of an input, but its hundreds of cows also discharge equally vast quantities of effluent by way of an output. That effluent inevitably makes its way into the nation’s waterways – polluting them to the extent that the lower reaches of more than half of New Zealand’s largest and most magnificent rivers are no longer safe to fish or swim in. And neither are their tributaries.

 

 

THE SHUTTING DOWN of democracy in the Canterbury Regional Council, and the more recent suppression of a Department of Conservation draft report on the sustainability of the Ruataniwha Dam, represent the working out in political terms of Conor English’s heads-up warning of five years ago.

 

New Zealand’s dairy farmers, and the enormous economic interests they represent, have decided to privatise the nation’s water resources – and the government is helping them do it.

 

Dr William Rolleston has even enlisted the reality of Global Warming to advance Federated Farmers’ cause: While New Zealand has plenty of water, he says, it's not always in the right place at the right time.

But, presumably, it will soon be in the right hands.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 October 2013.

Stemming the Flow

Trotters Creek, North Otago.

WHEN IT COMES to Trotters Creek, I have to admit, I’m biased. My family has farmed that part of North Otago since the 1840s. So, if the arc of rolling hill country between Aorere Point and Shag Point isn’t "home" – then I guess I don’t have one.

The Trotters are not alone in feeling a powerful attachment to the little river that tumbles down out of the Horse Range, through the spectacular limestone gorge that also bears the family’s name, and finally empties into the Pacific Ocean in the shadow of the Moeraki Peninsula at Katiki Beach. Fly-fishermen like the poet, Brian Turner, also know and love Trotters Creek. Hardly surprising when, in the remarkably poetic language of the Otago Regional Council’s own pamphlet: "The river runs with large slow, deep pools combined with shallow riffles." In the words of one local, the creek’s "a little gem at our back door".

But the world around Trotters Creek is changing. When I was growing up the hills and paddocks of North Otago were the colour of a lion’s hide. The constant easterly blowing inland off the sea kept them dry and brown through most of the year. It was mixed farming country: wheat and barely on the flats; sheep on the hills.

Not any more.

The last time I travelled along the coast road between Oamaru and Waianakarua I was astounded to see the countryside had changed colour. Its once tawny coat was now a vivid green. The sheep were gone and everywhere I looked I saw cows, cows, cows.

More shocks were in store. Before settling into the converted flour-mill where we planned to spend the night, I led my family down through the lodge’s garden to splash our feet in the sun-dappled waters of the Waianakarua. But where was the rushing river I had dived into as a boy? Could this flat and shallow trickle really be the Waianakarua of old?

What had happened to the water?

Now I understood the dramatic change in North Otago’s colour. Dairying, like a verdant blush, has swept over the landscape’s hills and valleys. The "White Gold Rush" it’s been called, and just like the real thing this new wealth cannot be extracted from the earth without using water – lots and lots of water.

Not even Trotters Creek has escaped the irrigator’s insatiable thirst. It was around this time a year ago that the Otago Regional Council proposed increasing the amount of water "abstracted" for irrigation by reducing the river’s minimum summertime flow-rate to just 10 litres per second – the Trotters, unsuccessfully, bid for 20 litres per second. An appeal was lodged with the Environment Commissioner back in March – but I’m not holding my breath.

Rumours are rife in the community that the Otago Regional Council is running scared of the law-suits that suddenly materialise whenever an extended water-right is denied. Not all the dairy farmers participating in the White Gold Rush are individuals, or even families of dairy farmers. More and more of them are "persons" only in the legal sense that a body corporate can be a person – and they do not lack for money.

That Coastal River Communities and the Waianakarua River Community Users group threw themselves on the mercy of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, rather than try the Environment Court, is because they lacked the funds necessary to present an effective case. That, and the risk of being required to pay the defendant’s legal costs if they lost.

There’s an uneasy feeling abroad in rural New Zealand these days that a coalition of wealthy, publicity-shy, but very well-connected "developers" are hell-bent on constructing a new kind of countryside – and they’re not the sort of people you want to cross.

This climate of fear is something new. Time was, when the local community got together and presented a solid case to their district and/or regional councillors, there was every chance of the community’s wishes being respected. Now it’s different. Now things aren’t so much changing as being changed – and there’s precious little the locals can do about it.

Just one generation ago the cry would have been "Vote the rascals out!" But it’s not that simple anymore. If there’s any real prospect of old-fashioned democratic controls being imposed on these "developers", then, as the people of Canterbury have discovered, democracy itself can be left to lie fallow for a few years.

In 1889 The Temuka Leader denounced an arrogant rural oligarchy: "Born in the lap of luxury, brought up in exclusive social circles, educated to regard themselves as superior beings". Are grasping landowners with bulging bank balances and big-city law-firms about to reclaim their lost ascendancy?

Is the family farm destined to become an endangered species – along with all those little rivers bearing family names?

This essay was originally published in The Press on Tuesday, 6 July 2010.