ECan has released a report on the environmental governance of the Mackenzie basin, which they're hailing as some sort of "breakthrough":
After more than 10 years of wrangling between environmental and farming interests, a "breakthrough" report on the Mackenzie Basin proposes everyone comes together if the area is to be properly protected.
While emphasising a need for better collaboration, the 54-page "Mackenzie Basin: Opportunities for Alignment", released publicly this week, stops short of suggesting a formal amalgamation of local council and government departments.
Commissioned by Environment Canterbury (ECan), Land Information New Zealand (Linz), the Department of Conservation (DOC) and the Waitaki and Mackenzie district councils, the report recommends joint consent hearings, clearer plan guidelines, new tenure review guidelines and staff sharing among affected organisations. It also suggests all of the major agencies look into ways of managing the pressures of tourism in the Mackenzie.
Mackenzie District Mayor Graham Smith said the report was a "breakthrough".
Hardly. Because if you read the report, and in particular the issues summary table, its clear that there is a huge divergance in views between farmers (who want to profit by despoiling the area and drowning it in pivot irrigators) and everyone else. While there's obvious potential for government agencies to work more closely together to ensure that e.g. ECan's water consents don't undermine district council efforts to control land use, there's no kum-bah-yah group hug "everyone wins" moment to be found here. As the report itself notes, "a common understanding of the appropriate extent of pastoral intensification compared to landscape / ecological protection has not yet been achieved". And given that that is the central problem, this isn't any form of "breakthrough".
The central idea of the report is a drylands park to protect the natural landscape, now downgraded to a non-contiguous drylands natural heritage area because so much of it has been privatised and destroyed while they've been talking. If we're to have any hope of achieving this, then the first step has to be stopping the corrupt process of tenure review, at least in the northern part of the basin, so the government can work out what land we would need to make it happen. The good news is that the relevant portfolios are both in the hands of Eugenie Sage, so we we now have a Minister and a government which might actually be interested in doing this.
