17 March 

Wise Water Use’s petition is being presented to a meeting of the Central Hawke’s Bay Consumers’ Power Trust today, to express public opposition to Centralines’s grant of $200,000 to promote the resurrection of the Ruataniwha Dam. The petition also calls for the CHBCPT to delete ‘water storage’ from the list of causes that Centralines can support financially. 

“Wise Water Use believes this grant was inappropriate, underhand, and involved potential conflicts of interest,” says Dr Trevor Le Lievre, a spokesperson for Wise Water Use. 

“The Centralines Board, led by long-term dam advocate, Ian Walker, are using other people’s money to flog a dead horse. The Hawke’s Bay Regional Council has already spent over twenty million dollars of ratepayers’ money developing the original Ruataniwha Dam proposal. That proposal, having failed to attract private investors, was ultimately stopped by the Supreme Court, which found it was illegal to flood DoC land of high conservation value. 

“Now the same players are milking Centralines’s consumers, in an attempt to find a way around the Supreme Court decision, build the dam, and flood a rare natural ecosystem legally,” says Dr Le Lievre. 

CHB Power Consumers’ Trust represents everyone with a power connection in CHB, who are the owners of the local electricity grid. The Trust in turn appoints the board of directors of Centralines to manage the grid - to distribute electricity, maintain the network and bill the customers. 

“Any profit that Centralines makes belongs to the owners, and can be returned to them as credits or rebates on their power bills. Some money can also be used for community grants. But last year, Centralines granted $200,000 to a private company, Tukituki Water Security Limited, who commissioned a report which recommended resurrecting the Ruataniwha dam,” says Dr Le Lievre. 

“Centralines calls the payment a ‘business development grant’. We say building dams is not the business of Centralines. This is power users’ money being spent on a pet project of a number of the directors of Centralines, who have a history of supporting the Ruataniwha Dam. 

“The grant to Tukituki Water Security Ltd, a private company with Mike Petersen as the sole shareholder-owner, has not been itemised in Centralines’s financial reports. I asked the Chair of Centralines, Ian Walker, to publicly announce the grant, but he refused – unlike Centralines’s other community grants, which were given a special press release. What’s going on here?” Dr Le Lievre asked. 

“Tukituki Water Security Ltd (TWSL) is apparently the financial arm of the Tukituki Water Security Project (TWSP), which is promoting the dam. Two of the Centralines directors who approved the grant, Ian Walker and Sarah von Dadelszen, are members of the TWSP – along with Mike Petersen, the sole shareholder of TWSL which received the grant, and who is also the chair and spokesperson for TWSP. Other Centralines directors have been involved in various ways with the Ruataniwha Dam project over the years. 

“If the directors of Centralines think the dam is such a good idea, why don’t they spend their own money on getting expensive consultants’ reports to promote it, and return the company’s profits to the rightful owners, the power consumers of CHB?” asked Dr Le Lievre.

“Wise Water Use believes that major engineering projects, like the Ruataniwha Dam and Managed Aquifer Recharge, are not solutions to Hawke’s Bay’s water issues. Instead, they promote inappropriate land uses, wasteful uses of water and unequal distribution, which is why we now have some people irrigating flat-out, and others missing out altogether. 

“Actually, there is enough water for everyone, except that a number of industrial farmers have already grabbed most of what’s available, using the Regional Council’s ‘first come’ first served’, ‘winner takes all’ approach to water allocation. This approach almost guarantees greedy applications and wasteful uses of water. A single CHB dairy farmer has rights to take more water than the whole township of Waipukurau, and they’re still asking for more!” he says.

“Centralines is secretly backing a loser here, and we object. Our petition shows that many people agree with us. Wise Water Use says we need a different approach – one that allocates water to the most sustainable and most efficient uses. We support the hierarchy of obligations in Te Mana o te Wai that prioritises:

1. The health and well-being of water bodies and freshwater ecosystems; 
2. The health needs of people (such as drinking water); and
3. The ability of people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being, now and in the future. 

“Before all the native bush was cleared, before the wetlands were drained, before the rivers were confined within stopbanks, and before the aquifers were drained to irrigate industrial farms, Hawke’s Bay was renowned for having plenty of water, rich soils and abundant biodiversity. Current land uses are unsustainable, and climate change will make our problems much worse. 

“We need to promote sustainable uses of land and water – wise water use – before we commit future generations to major engineering projects like the Ruataniwha Dam and Managed Aquifer Recharge,” says Dr Le Lievre.

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