Canterbury's dictatorship fails

When John Key replaced the elected Environment Canterbury with unelected dictators, it was supposedly because it wasn't making enough progress on cleaning up Canterbury's rivers. Five years of dictatorship later, they've actually gone backwards:

The Canterbury Regional Council (Environment Canterbury) has failed to meet its own deadline for cleaning up the region's rivers - and has, in fact, gone backwards.

In the five years since the Government replaced elected councillors with commissioners for their lack of progress in meeting targets, more rivers have become unsafe for swimming.

In 2010, the new council set itself a target of ensuring 80 percent of rivers in the region were safe for swimming. At the time, 74 percent of rivers fell into this category.

Today, the council announced that only 67 percent of rivers were safe to swim in.

So much for "making the trains run on time". But given that the dictatorship's primary policy has been to give more water to farmers, allowing more irrigation and more pollution, its hardly surprising. A regional authority wanting to clean up rivers would be restricting irrigation, not promoting it.

Meanwhile, we have an illegitimate regional dictatorship destroying Canterbury's environment for the enrichment of the few. Its time it went. Its time for elections.