Speaking of suppressing uncomfortable data, Hekia Parata isn't the only guilty party: Horizons is also suppressing data to whitewash dirty dairying:
A dairy lobby group appears to have pressured the Manawatu-Wanganui Regional Council into removing potentially embarrassing information about dairy farm pollution from public documents.In other words, the public would object if we knew what they were doing. Well, now we do, and they look even worse for their spineless grovelling to farmers and shady attempt at a coverup. Again, the council have lied to us - and we should de-elect the lot of them and salt the earth where they stood pour encourager les autres.
The council has been giving farmers discretionary consents that allow more nitrate leaching than set out in its so-called One Plan to clean up rivers.
In a July 2014 email obtained by Radio New Zealand, Dairy NZ project manager Geoff Taylor said the council agreed to remove certain data tables from the discretionary consents after feedback from farmers.
The tables showed gaps between the actual nitrogen leaching targets set for some farmers and those in the One Plan.
"This was seen to be a risk if the gap between what the farm was actually targeting and the target set in the table was too wide," Mr Taylor said in the email.
"Under an Official Information Act request this was seen to be easily discoverable with the potential to cause significant harm to the industry."
