One of ECan's basic jobs is water allocation. It was the entire reason for National's replacement of the council with a dictatorship in 2010, and for its continuing limitations on Canterbury's democracy since. So you'd think ECan would know how much water they were actually allocating in each of its management zones, and in particular, whether they had continued to allocate in over-allocated areas. But they don't, at least not unless you cough up a small fortune to find out:
A $3000 charge is being demanded by Canterbury’s regional council for information about water allocation.
Newsroom asked Environment Canterbury to provide the percentage allocation of each water “zone” and how many water consents have been granted or renewed since the over-allocated areas reached 100 percent. We also asked for those consents to be quantified.
In a response under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA), ECan’s science director Stefanie Rixecker says that information will take a large amount of work to collate and it would charge $2964. That’s based on 39 hours of work at $38 per half hour.
The council has agreed to provide, for free, the current percentage allocation of each of Canterbury’s water zones – but says it’s not information that is readily available and will take some time to compile.
Which is absolutely astonishing. Because surely "is there any water available?" would be one of the basic questions in deciding any water allocation consent, and that's information they should immediately have to hand. Likewise, the number of scale of consents allocated should be one of the basic ways of tracking whether they are making the problem worse or better. For them to not be able to obtain this easily suggests that they're simply not doing their job on water allocation properly in the first place.
You can understand why ECan might want to keep that secret, and why they'd want to discourage requests. But that secrecy and discouragement does not serve the public interest. This information should not just be provided for free - it should be proactively published, so we can tell whether they're doing their fucking jobs.
Meanwhile, the quicker ECan can ditch its dictators and have full, free and fair elections, the better.
