Q+A’s Paul Holmes Interviews Federated Farmers’ Don Nicolson & Green Party MP Russel Norman.

The interview has been transcribed below. Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

DON NICOLSON & RUSSEL NORMAN interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL Water, everyone seems to agree is going to make us rich somehow. Norway aside we've got more water than any other country and we have a clean green image to maintain abroad, but some people are worried that our poor water management, or what's perceived to be poor water management, I putting that at risk. In the past week factory farmers have abandoned plans to house nearly 18,000 cows in cubicles in the South Island's McKenzie country, they’ve been sideswiped, Critics argue that the combined effluent would be similar in quantity to a city the size of Christchurch contaminating McKenzie country water supply, and then a new report found that thanks to dirty dairying our streams are more polluted than ever, and in the north, Kaitaia and now Kaikohe are under strict water rationing, so what's going on with the water.

So why are we suddenly talking water we've got the dairy farm the effects of dairy farming of course, we've got lack of supply up north, we've got economic potential, why are we talking water all of a sudden?

DON NICOLSON – President Federated Farmers
I think we've been slow out of the block, we've been talking water for years in the farming sector, we're waiting for the wider community to actually make itself more resilient as we're trying to make ourselves more resilient, so you know in Northland two metres of rain falls every year and they haven't stored it, and they're no in a crisis situation, rivers low, I mean let's make our communities more resilient as well as agriculture.

PAUL So let's get more savvy about water.

RUSSEL NORMAN – Greens Co-Leader
And if you look at surveys of New Zealanders when you ask them what's the most important environmental issue, they now say fresh water, and the reason they say that is we've got major issues around water, the Environment Waikato, its latest report said that 70% of all the sampling sites in the Waikato the water was unsafe for swimming, 75% of all sampling sites it was actually unsafe to give to stock for drinking, so there is a significant water quality problem

PAUL Right so how would you describe our management of water Russel?

RUSSEL I call it malign neglect, it's been neglected for so long, we haven't given it the attention it deserves, it's tremendously important. New Zealanders really value the right to swim in a creek, they value the right to catch a fish, also the impact of dirty rivers on the marine environment, like you know why is the schnapper fish really in trouble in the Far North, because of all the sediment coming down the streams, so people are feeling the impacts of poor water management.

PAUL How are you going to stop sediment coming down the streams?

RUSSEL It's about proper management, so that’s about fencing waterways, so to keep stock out of them, it's about riparian planting, it's about keeping stocking rates at a level that the soil can actually handle in terms of the effluent coming off the animals, and it's about using fertiliser, both nitrogen and phosphorus in a sustainable way and at not too great a levels because otherwise it runs through the system.

DON So Russel's got his facts all about farming, why doesn't he focus on some urban stuff for a change, I mean urban waterways are very degraded in this country, but he picks on agriculture all the time.

PAUL Well I wonder why that might be, it might be something to do with the report that came out last week, that dairy farmers are making the streams filthy, 15% of farmers fail to comply with regional and council environmental rules, why do 15% …?

RUSSEL It's actually 40%, 15% is the serious non compliance, 40% non compliance.

DON Sure that’s true and some of the non compliance was little certificates on the dairy shed wall, I mean Fonterra's cowering into a corner because it's been beaten by these sort of people to want to jump all the hurdles.

PAUL No it's doing another big initiative into China and doesn’t want to know the mess.

DON Yeah they don’t need another mess, another problem to their brand, I accept that, but the problem is rural water schemes and sewerage schemes have never been updated for years. A lot of the water quality issues Russel's talking about are basically around sewerage schemes that have not been upgraded over time.

RUSSEL It sounds right I mean you know, if you look at – I was just up at Kaitaia on Thursday and they’ve got a major problem up there which is partly due to the drought, no question, but it's also because they haven't invested in infrastructure over a long period. I was talking to – there was a small community water scheme. Ed and Rada Masters and there's 50 of them on this community water scheme, their water is brown because the dairy farmer in the catchment above them refuses to fence the stream which they all rely on for the water, they’ve offered to put in the labour for free, the Regional Council offered to pay for the fencing around it, but the dairy farmer from his yacht because he's currently travelling the world on his yacht, refuses to go in and fence that stream so that community has clean water, and those are the kind of situations where we get both a water supply problem and dairy problem combined.

PAUL So it does seem like there is a cavalier attitude though amongst the dairy…

DON I don’t think so, I actually don’t think so Paul, it's been overstated by people like Russel, look we took Russel to the Opuha dam in south Canterbury, a great success story, run by farmers, owned by farmers, has recreation, electricity generation, water sports, fishing, hunting, and guaranteed minimum flows in the Opihi River, plus it adds about 470 jobs in that reason and Russel can't even come out and say a good thing about it.

RUSSEL I've said a number of good things about it, however what we have to go back to is the science, and the science is absolutely clear ant that we have degrading water quality right across New Zealand, and they're also very clear that it is the intensification of agriculture that’s driving it, and every scientific report says that.

DON No that’s not clear to the layman reading this stuff, but you get the sensational headline Russel, that’s what people believe.

PAUL In the matter of the non compliance which may have been a failure to put a sticker on a cowshed or something, but nevertheless, 85% are complying we have to take from that number, so 15% perhaps badly not complying and 40% totally not complying to some degree or another, you're saying. At the moment the business is voluntary, you want to see regulation now, yeah?

RUSSEL Yeah that’s right, exactly right, so we've got this voluntary accord, I'd say what we actually need is good environmental minimums, good regulation, and that way the good farmers don’t get penalised by the bad farmers, cos currently if you're a good dairy farmer doing all the right things and lots of them are, then your reputation's being besmirched by the bad ones, whereas if you have environmental minimums which we can actually impose because they're regulations, then it means it protects the rivers and lakes for everyone and protects the good farmer's reputation.

PAUL Would you have a problem with that?

DON I have no problem with setting standards, actually maximum standards would be good, because these guys just want them higher and higher all the time, so let's get a maximum standard.

RUSSEL We like clean water.

DON Yeah we like clean water and so do our animals, and but here's the rub Paul, last year 23.2 billion dollars worth of farm gate revenue over all sectors, including pork and poultry, out of that 23.2 only 6.2 cents in every dollar stayed with the farmer, yet we get 100% of the environmental grief from proposal like Russel, you actually get a big sick of it, 6.2 cents in every dollar stays with the farmer.

RUSSEL So in terms of economic strategy which is obviously a critical issue, the question you have to ask about the economic strategy for dairy is can we continue to increase production every year and compete on the basis of price, or do we try to compete on the basis of a brand of integrity, like Peter Townsend, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce in Canterbury's been saying, in which case we have good animal welfare, we have good food safety, good environmental performance, and then that’s the basis on which we compete New Zealand products in the world, and that’s how we make money without trashing our environment, and that’s my strategy for economic development.

PAUL It is a matter of balance isn't it, I think Canterbury's got 70% of the country's water and 240,000 extra cows have gone into Canterbury in the last six years, are we going to get to the point where we can't do any more farming.

DON We've gotta do water storage, the thing is New Zealand's not running out of water, the water's running out of New Zealand and we've just gotta do this water storage to make us more resilient, the threat of climate variation that Russel's so hot about, if you want to make yourself more resilient let's store some water, let's make sure the water quality is good, cos water's gotta have properties, I don’t want sterile water.

PAUL No you'd have to build major dams though wouldn’t you?

DON No, but there's lots of community schemes available, yeah there's a lot of investment required, but it's not as much as you'd think, and so just making Canterbury resilient doesn’t make New Zealand resilient.

RUSSEL But it's the question – I think it's an interesting question, like water storage, so you know I would certainly support smaller on scale farm storage, but do we want big dams across major rivers like the Hurunui scheme which would dam one of the last of the wild rivers on the East Coast in Canterbury.

PAUL You don’t actually have to dam the river do you?

RUSSEL Well you don’t exactly you can have on farm small scale storage, the Hurunui scheme dams the south bank with a 70 metre high dam, which I think is totally unacceptable, we can have small scale on farm storage.

DON Look when the river flows are high you can divert water flows into holding dams no problem at all.

RUSSEL And then the other side is the downstream and which I think you’ve also gotta look at. If the water storage is then used to intensify and dairy like tens of thousands of hectares you have downstream effects in terms of water quality in rivers and also in ground water.

PAUL Just a couple of quickies, should we start charging farmers for water? The car maker pays to buy the steel for his cars, the baker pays for his flour to bake the bread.

DON Look if we do that then the person washing their car in Remuera had better pay, the fish better start having a value around them, and the kayaker better have a value and then we'll all be happy and then we'll get some really true values around the resource efficiency, because that’s what we're gonna be talking about.

PAUL Russel can you see a time when water becomes a huge export earner for us, because country's build desalinisation plants don’t they?

RUSSEL Effectively it is already a big export earner for us because of the dairy sector we have basically water through the dairy sector.

PAUL And I spose because of the tourism sector as well.

RUSSEL Exactly, so tourism, the other huge export earner that we have that is threatened if we get our environmental management wrong.

DON Look no water, no life Russel, come on.

RUSSEL Yeah so? I'm a Green Don I'm a Green.

PAUL Thank you Don Nicolson and thank you Russel Norman

ENDS

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