WAIKATO REGIONAL COUNCIL
HEALTHY RIVERS
PLAN CHANGE : 1 January 2017
So what is PC1?
Healthy Rivers/Wai Ora Proposed Waikato Regional Plan Change 1(PC1) is the WRC’s response to addressing the complex problem of water quality facing the Waipa and Waikato Rivers.
(I have yet to meet anyone farmer or other who doesn’t agree that we need to protect water quality but there are many who disagree with the process as set out in PC1)
What does it do?
The proposed plan change gives effect to Government legislation on the management of fresh water (passed in 2014) and Te Ture Whaimana o Te Awa o Waikato (The Vision and Strategy for the Waikato and Waipa rivers) which was adopted by Government as part of Treaty Settlement legislation. The regional council has a legal requirement to give effect to both of these.
How was it developed?
The proposed plan has been developed using a collaborative process involving community and sector representation over the last 2.5 years.
What does it cover?
The proposed plan aims to encompass or include all landowners over 2ha within the Waikato River and Waipa River catchments.
(Why does it only address farming, forestry and horticulture? These are only part of the problem. Why does it not address other issues that also contribute to degradation of the water ways such as sewage disposal and stormwater runoff etc.?)
Sources of impacts on water quality as ranked by regional authorities (taken from an article published by Chris de Freitas an associate professor in the School of Environment at the University of Auckland) are:
The plan change does not mention one of the worst contributors to sediment in the lower reaches of the Waikato River and the Waipa River, Koi Carp. It is estimated that there are approximately 500,000 tonnes of koi carp in the rivers and they produce approximately 7,000,000 tonnes of sediment per year as well as destroying aquatic native flora and fauna, yet there is no mention of a strategy to control them.
How will it work?
PC1 is a change to the Operative Waikato Regional Plan (WRP), to restore and protect water quality in the Waikato and Waipa Rivers by managing discharges of nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment and microbial pathogens to land in the catchment, where it may enter surface water or ground water and subsequently enter the rivers, or directly into a water body.
What will it cost?
The WRC say that it estimates the costs to the rural land users at approximately $500 to $600 million annually over the eighty year timeframe of PC1.
What has been done so far?
The WRC have spent approximately $13,500,000 over the past 2.5 Years to come up with the proposed plan change that has been advertised for public consultation and which their own Collaborative Stakeholder Group (CSG) fears is unlikely to happen as shown by the passage below quoted from the PC1 document:
“Based on the information currently available, the CSG has concluded full achievement of the Vision and Strategy by 2096 is likely to be costly and difficult. The 80-year timeframe recognises the ‘innovation gap’ that means full achievement of water quality requires technologies or practices that are not yet available or economically feasible.”
This passage highlights that there are going to be difficulties and it will be costly, but also that the means to fully achieve what is after all “an aspirational plan” are not yet available or economically feasible.
“Because of the extent of change required to meet the 80-year limits^, achieving even the first step towards the long-term freshwater objectives in this Plan is an ambitious target.”
There have been a number of studies done that have shown the WRC’s economic analysis is so far out of line with the reality of the requirements of PC1 that many farmers will be forced out of the industry.
The plan change allows for those point source discharges that currently have consent to carry on till the end of the consent term effectively grandparenting the right to pollute for the term of the consents.
At the end of these current consents they will then have to come under the requirements of PC1 if it is enacted and the costs for this will be astronomical for the urban ratepayers.
There is currently a new resource consent application advertised for Watercare Services Ltd to discharge 104,800 cubic metres per day of treated waste water from the Pukekohe Waste Water treatment Plant into the lower Waikato catchment via the Parker lane Stream. This equates to approximately 3881 milk tanker loads per day.
With the publishing of the Proposed Plan Change it restricted land owners from intensifying their land use by limiting them to the current levels of discharge of the four contaminants (N, P, E-Coli, & Sediment) and this then had the effect of grandparenting the levels of pollution thereby rewarding the worst polluters and penalising those that had voluntarily done a lot to protect the water quality.
This has also had the effect of capital devaluation of land. Evidence from farm land sales since the plan change was advertised in October 2016 has shown a drop in value of approximately twenty percent.
There have been questions raised as to the ability of those farmers that are severely financially penalised to be compensated by the WRC and this has repeatedly been refused an answer with the comments being that that is a discussion for another forum. That may be so but it is something that will have an influence on the submissions from those farmers and others and should be part of the informed discussion around the plan change.
The actual implementation plan for PC1 has not yet been written and without any knowledge of how PC1 is to be implemented then how can people make an informed submission.
The plan change is highly dependent on the management of nitrogen leaching into the waterways and this is controlled in PC1 by the requirements around nitrogen reference points and farm environment plans, with the nitrogen reference points being determined predominantly by the use of the Overseer program.
Overseer is notoriously inaccurate with a very wide margin for error and was never designed for use as a regulatory tool. It is used in other areas but only as an advisory tool to indicate possible levels of discharge.
The use of Overseer and the requirements for Nitrogen Reference Points as the criteria for discharges under PC1 produces a number of perverse outcomes;
Federated Farmers in conjunction with AgFirst and Fonterra studied 24 farms across the Waikato catchment (13 AgFirst farms and 11 Fonterra farms).
The AgFirst farms were; 3 dairy farms, 2 cropping farms, one lifestyle block and seven drystock farms. Fonterra studied 11 dairy farms.
The purpose was to develop farm environment plans in line with the requirements proposed in PC1 in order to:
The process essentially involved:
The average time taken to prepare the FEP’s was:
AgFirst farms 24.75Hrs
Fonterra farms 13.8Hrs
The average cost to prepare FEP’s was:
AgFirst farms $4,692
The costs of actions required under PC1 were a range from:
AgFirst farms $0 to $785,687
Fonterra farms $5,000 to $111,000
The costs are more severe for drystock farms than others with five out of the seven drystock farms having compliance costs over $100,000 (113k,210k, 385k 425k,785k).
These costs do not include any sum for loss of capital land value due to either land use restrictions or low nitrogen reference points, and this loss of value currently has been shown to be in the region of twenty percent based on sales since PC1 was published and the restrictions started in October 2016.
How “collaborative” then, was the CSG in relation to drystock farmers, where the actual custodians of 43% of Waikato’s waterways (drystock farmers) get 1 vote out of 24? How “robust” is a decision to push stock exclusion beyond the national LAWF (Land and Water Forum) recommendation (of ≤ 15° slope) to ≤ 25° slopes without doing any quantitative analysis of the benefits and the likely cost burden for hill country farmers in doing so?
How “robust” is a process that mandates impossible fencing and water reticulation costs upon hill country farmers and yet doesn’t require the basic rigour of sampling Waikato hill country streams to establish the magnitude of their actual contribution to the problem before doing so.
One of the CSG members stated at a federated farmers meeting that the scheme would eventually cost the greater Waikato region $5.7 Billion and result in thousands of lost jobs, but it was all worth it because the rivers will become more “swimmable and fishable” – whatever that means.
The Ministry of Primary Industries has announced publicly on numerous occasions they have a target of doubling agricultural exports by 2025. If PC1 is enacted in its current form and then gets copied across the rest of New Zealand then the restrictions on land use alone will make this an impossible dream and in actual fact they will make it impossible for New Zealand to even feed its own population without importing food.
A number of representative groups have joined together to ask for a Judicial Review of PC1.
How can anyone make an informed submission on PC1.
The CSG state that is going to be costly and difficult and the 80 year time frame recognises the innovation gap (i.e. full achievement requires technologies or practices that are not yet available or economically feasible) and there are many areas in the document where there is a serious lack of information, (e.g. implementation plan, cost analysis, eligibility for compensation etc.) so how are the affected parties going to be able to make an informed submission.
The WRC’s own data from its monitoring shows that farming is only marginally more than half of the problem relating to water quality yet under PC1 it is expected to carry the responsibility for 100% of the solution which is neither possible or even economically feasible.
The WRC have had 2.5 years and approximately thirteen and a half million dollars to produce PC1 (a document, based on minimal science, that has been shown to contain very poor financial analysis and little information on the implementation of the proposal).
Yet they expect the average ratepayer, with only four months and without the benefit of millions of dollars of public funds to hire hundreds of experts, to be able to make an informed submission based on the document that doesn’t provide enough information to do so.
I don’t think it’s too much for Waikato farmers to expect a water policy that is both environmentally and financially sustainable for all. Farming has an important part to play in rural communities, regional & national economy and environmental decisions – but to play that part they need a WRC that will start seriously engaging with them and provide information based on sound scientific facts and good economic analysis not emotive aspirational targets that are not achievable.
Where to from here?
I believe that water quality should be managed through a sub-catchment management system that is managed by the land owners with supervision from WRC, to criteria based on monitoring results from each sub-catchment area.
Action required:
Withdraw the plan change until there is better scientific and economic analysis to allow an achievable solution to improving the water quality of our rivers.