Estimates Debate — Vote Tourism

I thank the Chair, Mr Ross Robertson, for that kind invitation to speak. I take a call on Vote Tourism because one of the developments of this Government was that the Prime Minister chose to take on the portfolio of tourism. There were a lot of other options he could have had. He could have chosen science and technology, or whatever, but he chose tourism. Of course, one of the reasons that he chose tourism is that it is such an important export industry for our country. In fact, over the last decade it was our biggest export earner, ahead of even dairy, even though year on year now dairy has got ahead of tourism.

The reason why tourism is such a big export earner, of course, is built on our “clean, green” brand. The brand has been “100 % Pure New Zealand”; the latest version is “100 % Pure You”, and the brand is built on the fact that New Zealand has a fantastic natural environment. In fact, if we look at the advertisements that are running currently, whether they are online or elsewhere, they show amazing pictures of New Zealand’s natural environment. In particular, they show amazing pictures of New Zealand rivers.

The truth is that this Government has not been looking after our rivers. Our rivers deteriorated very significantly under the course of the last Government due to dairying intensification—completely out of control dairying intensification. When this new Government came in, it made a commitment to do something about that. Unfortunately, it has not done anything about it. In fact, the board of inquiry that was set up by the previous Government to consider the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management came back with a very strong proposal that would have begun the process of cleaning up our rivers. This current Government decided to water down that proposal. The National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management that this Government finally adopted had its teeth pulled out of it, so that it could not begin to clean up our rivers and lakes. This is a major problem.

At the time the Green Party made this argument very strongly and since then just recently the Cawthron Institute—a very reputable independent institute of which the Minister for the Environment is apparently a director—came out with a report that stated that the very same Minister for the Environment’s national policy statement would not clean up our rivers in the foreseeable future. The report stated that the national policy statement, as it had been weakened by the Minister for the Environment and this Government, would not clean up our rivers and would not protect the foundation of our tourism industry, which is our “clean, green” reputation, which is built on the “clean, green” reality.

Unfortunately, the majority of our lowland rivers are now polluted. Depending on which report one reads, some reports state that in the order of 90 percent of our lowland pastoral streams are polluted. Some of the reports from the Ministry for the Environment suggest about half of our rivers that are monitored at various times are unsafe for swimming because of the amount of faeces in them. This has created a fundamental challenge to one of our most important export industries. It is a challenge that the Minister of Tourism, the Prime Minister, should have taken on and championed. Instead, the Prime Minister has stood back while our rivers have got worse and while one of the best tools we have, the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, got watered down.

In fact, the Minister of Tourism, the Prime Minister, is actively promoting $400 million worth of new subsidies to the irrigation industry in order to lead to hundreds of thousands of new hectares of intensive dairying. If we read every science report about this issue, we see that they are all absolutely clear that it is intensive agriculture, and particularly dairying, that has led to the degradation of our river systems. Yet this is a Minister of Tourism who is not acting to protect these rivers, which are the foundation of the tourism industry in our country, one of our most important export sectors. Although we have what I thought would be a hope for tourism when the Prime Minister took on the tourism portfolio, in practice the Minister of Tourism, the Prime Minister, has not done his job to protect the industry, which is fundamentally reliant on the natural environment.

In fact, we have a Minister of Tourism who is actively promoting the destruction of our natural environment by a dramatic expansion of the very industry that every scientific report tells us is leading to a degradation of our rivers. There will be those people who say that we can mitigate the effects. Actually, we cannot mitigate the effect of another million cows on New Zealand. If we read the science, which has to be the foundation of how we make decisions about this, we see that it is very clear: another million cows and more intensive agriculture in our country will lead to further degradation of our river systems. It was very disappointing for me to read the Minister’s statement on science.