We need to ban environmental criminals

Stuff today reports on the annual stats on dirty dairying prosecutions, and finds that most environmental crime is committed by repeat offenders:

Repeat offenders dominate the annual tally of environmental offending by dairy farms spewing cow effluent onto land and waterways.

Of the six prosecutions by regional councils that concluded in the 2022/23 year, half involved individuals and companies that had been convicted of similar offending in the past.

The details on these past offences show that the current penalty regime is clearly not deterring these persistent criminals from repeatedly defiling the environment. Which means that we need another solution. Fortunately, there's one ready to hand. People who violate the Animal Welfare Act - for example, by being persistently cruel to animals - can be banned from owning or exercising control over animals for any period the court thinks fit, and it is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment, to violate such an order. The regime was created precisely to stop persistent offenders from repeatedly violating the rights of animals.

We should do the same with dirty dairying. If a farmer repeatedly violates their resource consents and continually pollutes the environment, the court should be able to ban them from farming. That threat should focus their minds on ensuring they run a clean operation, rather than just pouring their cowshit everywhere.