Wake up Call on Environment – “Worst Pollution Ever”

Green Party candidate Kevin Hague today released photos of the Waimangaroa and surrounding streams, taken in mid-October by a long-time observer of Solid Energy’s attitude to rivers, who described it as “the worst pollution of the Waimangaroa [he] has ever seen.”
[attached photos of the Waimangaroa and surrounding streams showing 3 heavily polluted rivers and a clean one – how they’re supposed to look].
The release comes hot on the heels of a report indicating New Zealand’s per capita “ecological footprint” is the sixth largest in the world, and flies in the face of our “100% Pure” branding in the critical tourism industry.
“The photos show that if Solid Energy can get away with cutting corners on pollution control, they will, just as they have done with health and safety of workers. Coupled with the well-publicised repeated failures of Oceana Gold near Reefton to meet the water pollution requirements of its resource consents, and the ongoing fouling of waterways by farm animals, it suggests strongly that our local authorities either do not have the correct tools to prevent this environmental vandalism, or prefer to turn a blind eye to it.”
“Local people, including many who work in the mining industry, have worked really hard to clean up Solid Energy’s act on the Ngakawau River, and will feel betrayed that the problem has merely been displaced to the Waimangaroa.”
Kevin pointed out that Solid Energy is owned by the Crown and said that while it is Green Party policy to allow existing coal mines to continue, a prerequisite for that to occur had to be a drastic improvement in environmental and workforce safety practices.
Kevin said that this latest problem was unfortunately still typical of an obsolete attitude to the environment, in which resources were all used as if they were infinite, and waste products simply discharged as if they had no consequence. This attitude is now thankfully only held by a minority, but the reality is that the minority can still cause a huge problem for everybody else – both now and in the future.
“It is absolutely shameful, for example, that the Grey District has no recycling whatsoever. As a community we simply have to take this seriously. This environment sustains us and is going to need to sustain our children and grandchildren. We need to preserve and improve it, not degrade it further. Even from a purely economic point of view, let us please remember that our number one industry is tourism. These tourists are attracted by the clean, green image and it is essential that the reality measures up. Right now it embarrassingly does not.”
Kevin said it was also high time that we stop using our rivers and other waterways as “sewers, drains and cess pools”.
“I recently bumped into John Key in the streets of Greymouth. I stopped to speak, but he did not (Crosby Textor advice I expect). It was a shame because I wanted to give him advice that was important for his health. I wanted to warn him that when his minders organised the obligatory ‘eating iconic whitebait’ photo opportunity he had to check first that the whitebait hadn’t been caight in the Grey River, because – well let’s just say that the dairy effluent from upriver isn’t the only problem, and the sooner that Greymouth’s sewage is properly treated, the better.”