Debate on Crown Entities, Public Organisations, and State Enterprises — Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. Tēnā koutou katoa. I would just like to comment on Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd. It produced a very useful report at the end of last year, sometime around December, called Calculating Biodiversity Offsets for the Mokihinui Hydro Proposal. This report was prepared for Meridian Energy, which was looking for information about the impacts of its plan to build an 85 metre - high dam on the Mōkihinui River. This river is a very beautiful wilderness river just north of Westport—between Westport and Karamea—on the West Coast of the South Island. Landcare was contracted by Meridian Energy to apply a biodiversity offset framework to the development and to provide information about whether the impacts of the development on this river could be offset. It is a very useful and interesting report about how such offsets could occur and the criteria on which offsets could happen.

Some of the issues around the report include the offset principles that the offsets have to be biodiversity offsets—conservation actions that are designed to compensate for the residual and unavoidable harm to biodiversity caused by development—that the biodiversity offsets are part of the calculations for assessing project viability; that offsets are not possible nor appropriate everywhere; that offsets should be in kind; and that they should apply to the full hierarchy of biodiversity, from high-level functioning systems such as the native podocarp forest down to very individual components. I guess there the report is talking about the particular habitat of the whio, the blue duck, which resides on this river. The offsets must be enduring—that is, they must have a long-term impact and reflect the long-term nature, or the age, of the habitat that is to be destroyed. And the offsets must be additive: they must add to the net biodiversity value of the country as a whole.

I had the fantastic opportunity to raft down that river—the Mōkihinui River—last week. The river is set back into the mountains of the West Coast. It winds down from the mountains, through the path of the 1929 earthquake area. In the first part that I rafted down, from just seaward of the fork, the damage from the 1929 earthquake can be seen, as can the very slowly regenerating bush on the scars of the slips on the side of those mountains. In these areas of forest and regenerating forest live some of New Zealand’s rarest birds and other animals. There is the long-tailed bat, which is very rarely seen in this country, the South Island kākā, the kea, and, as I say, the whio, the blue duck. Those species have made this wilderness area their home because it is so protected from the actions of humans. It is an unmodified landscape.

There are no noxious weeds in the Mōkihinui River, and even the native fish species that live in it live a very safe life because the river is quite difficult to fish in. It is not a regularly fished river, so species—

💬 Hon Member: It’s not polluted.

It is not polluted. My colleague makes a very good point; it is not polluted, at all. As I say, it has no weeds. It is very much still a wilderness experience. Fish species find that it is a safe place for them to breed, and fish species are present that are very rare in New Zealand—for example, there is the long-finned eel, whose numbers are declining, even according to Landcare’s own research in this report, by 7 percent a year in this country. The Minister of Fisheries has even had to reduce the total allowable commercial catch for long-finned eels because of the significant damage done to the population through overfishing. The giant kōkopu, the short-jawed kōkopu, and the lamprey are all living in this river, freely.

Many of the fish species migrate very far up the Mōkihinui River to live, and one of the major problems with the proposed dam, of course, is that it will prevent those species from being able to migrate upriver so that they can mature and prepare themselves for breeding. One of the amazing things about some of our New Zealand species, like the eel and some other fish species, is that they migrate very far upriver, where they live for many years—eels can live for 80 years up there—before they are mature enough to breed. When they decide to breed, they breed only once. They leave the river and swim to the ocean, and it is reported that they make their way to the seas of Tonga, where they then breed and die. The glass eels, if you like—the small, immature eels—find their way back to New Zealand, using ocean currents and ocean temperatures, and find their way back up our rivers, taking the long journey upriver, where they themselves mature until they are ready to breed.

This report from Landcare Research shows that there is no way—no way—that the damage to those species, whether to the long-finned eel, the kōkopu, or to the blue duck, the whio, will be remedied or mitigated in any way. There is no way that that damage will be mitigated; there are no mechanisms to offset that damage. We need to look only at this report, which talks, for example, about one of the offsetting requirements for the emergent impacts on the river requiring us to go to another similar kind of river to the Mōkihinui and dismantle a barrier of a similar size and structure to the proposed dam on it. What is being said there is that the damage caused by building this dam can be remedied only by destroying one exactly the same elsewhere in the country. The report goes on to say there are no other rivers where that could be done. It is impossible to do—impossible to remedy the damage that would be done by the dam.

What is of real concern here is that despite the good work of one of the Crown entities, Landcare Research, another Government entity, the State-owned enterprise Meridian Energy, still intends to pursue such an enormously destructive action on one of New Zealand’s most pristine and wild rivers. The Mōkihinui River has been described by the Department of Conservation itself as the seventh most significant river in the country. We have few remaining rivers in New Zealand that are fully free from development of any kind and, frankly, from poisoning of any kind. I was able to drink from this river while I was on that raft. I could just push my hand into the water, scoop it out, and put it in my mouth. It was sustaining and yummy. It was clean and not poisonous. It is a clean river, but we are about to destroy one of the very few rivers still left in this country where it is possible simply to reach down and drink from it. That is one of the major concerns about the nature of these constructions on rivers such as this one. The biodiversity values are extremely high. The Department of Conservation has recognised that, and Landcare Research has recognised that. Even the information that Meridian Energy has proposed and put into its assessment of environmental effects for the purposes of its resource consent application recognises that significant numbers of seriously threatened endangered species will lose their habitat as a result of a dam being built.

One of the places we visited on this river was a creek called the Rough and Tumble, which was a great little creek that flows down into the river. The Rough and Tumble Creek is noted as a blue duck, a whio, habitat, and a number of whio have been sighted there. I think that one of the other major energy companies—it might be Contact Energy, but I am not sure—has just decided to invest something like a million dollars into the restoration of habitats and the protection of the blue duck, the whio, species. The Government invests vast sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, into the protection of the blue duck and the restoration of its habitat, yet other parts of the Government, such as Meridian Energy, are going out and actively intending to destroy the very natural habitats those animals live in, as a matter of course, and they expect that somehow that will be remedied by—I do not know; investing more money in something else? But it will not happen like that. Landcare Research has shown that that simply will not work. That damage simply cannot be remedied by paying for it elsewhere.

This is where the difficulty for the Government is in its so-called sustainability programme, with its so-called environmentally aware Prime Minister, a Prime Minister who has a newly discovered environmental awareness. That is all great, but in practice we see significant destruction of the very wilderness areas that make this country what it is. When New Zealanders go overseas and think about home, they do not think about motorways. They think about the beautiful wilderness pristine areas and the clean rivers that we still have—the very few clean rivers that we still have—and that is what brings them home. That is what being a New Zealander is all about, yet this Government—and I do not doubt for a minute that National would not do the same, given half a chance—is prepared to actively destroy those very pristine places that make this country what it is.

I applaud Landcare Research for its work in preparing this report. I am dismayed that Meridian Energy has actively kept the report a secret from the public, from the decision makers who are looking at Meridian Energy’s resource consent applications, and from the various environmental and community organisations that have asked for a copy of it and been told it does not exist. That is a disgraceful act on Meridian Energy’s part.

Report noted.

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