Readers will be aware that I’m not too hot on the National Party, despite having voted for them fairly consistently in both Party Vote and Electorate Vote since returning from the USA twenty years ago.
Frankly I’m not too keen on ACT either, despite having thrown my Party vote to them as recently as 2008 and 2020, and possibly again in 2023. Seymour’s recent talk on matters of Chinese Lung Rot responses has been disappointing, even as I understand the needle he has to thread with a fearful and frightened public.
But this latest piece of news, courtesy of Elle over at Homepaddock in her latest Rural Roundup, raises in one more area, just why National has been so poor in supporting their voters over the years. The link is to a specific National Party announcement, “Labour must stop flooding rural NZ with pointless and onerous regulation”, with this part in particular of note to me:
“As it stands, the Water Services Bill would expose tens of thousands of rural water schemes to disproportionate bureaucracy, just so they can continue supplying water between, for example, a farmhouse, a dairy shed and workers’ quarters,” Mr Luxon says.
“Despite warnings from National and major sector bodies at select committee, the bill will require Taumata Arowai to track down and register around 70,000 farm supply arrangements, each of which will need to write safety and risk management plans.
Well yes, we can all see where this is going. Bureaucratic boxes to tick that, like the OSH forms on worksites and dairy sheds (parlours darlings) across the country, will be filled in so that backsides are covered.
As an aside I was amused during my tractor/truck driving ag contractor work last season to so often brush past farm signs reading:
“WARNING: ALL VISITORS AND CONTRACTORS MUST SIGN IN”
But once more I have to point out that National has already failed in this regard. Before the Clarke administration left office they passed legislation that would tighten up considerably on water schemes in general (Drinking-water Standards for New Zealand 2005 (Revised 2008)). Throughout the nine years of the Key administration the implementation of this moved closer and closer to rural water schemes.
It finally reached our district in 2018, when all the farmers of our district were called to a meeting held by the local Council to discuss the fate of our scheme.
The system was designed by the Council in the early 1980’s and then built largely by the farmers. From 1984 it was providing a gravity-fed, year-round, drought-resistant water scheme. To farmers like my Dad it was a god-send after decades of faffing around with springs, wells, dams, crude flitration systems and pumps.
And now we were told that the regulations had finally caught up with us and the system would require millions to upgrade to the new standards and even then, the houses would have to be disconnected from the supply, pushing us fifty years back into a past of spring, wells and pumps. This despite individual farms having steadily added increasingly better filtration systems to back up the system’s original ones.
Fortunately the Council were very much on our side in understanding what crap this all was – in forty years of operation not one sickness, let alone death, has been traced to the system. They concocted a letter to government explaining in classic Sir Humphrey fashion that, given all the new water discussions going on with Labour, the Council regretfully could not possibly move on changing the system until they were sure what was needed.
It bought us three years.
I’m afraid that I rather offended a National party woman farmer at the meeting who wanted to conduct a petition that could be carried to government by our local National MP. My suggestion instead was that if we all dug in our pockets for a few thousand dollars each we could easily get $150K or more together and – considering his “good looking horses” tax legislation – get it to NZ First on the understanding that Winston Peters could get a similar change made to the Black Letter law by specifically excluding our district from the Act.
It got a hearty laugh and “hear, hear’s“, but went down with her like a cup of cold sick.
The truth is that this legislation sat on the books throughout National’s nine-year reign. Perhaps we were not sufficiently aware of it ourselves but surely our National rural MP’s were? A huge cost impact for no effective gain in safety or water quality. Havelock North we are not, with farmers keeping a close eye on the system.
So now I’m expected to get all excited and revved up about National’s “fightback” against this new legislation? At this stage I’m looking at National and thinking, why bother now? The damage is done and will be further done before National returns to government.
At this stage the best we can hope for is that our spendthrift government may throw a few million our way so the system can be upgraded to meet their imposed standards, but even then, from a nation-wide perspective, it’s a waste of money that could be better applied to other things, like ICU beds perhaps.
No Minister 
“So backsides are covered”, the very nub of where we find ourselves c2021 since personal responsibility was cancelled so long ago no one knows what responsibility means any more. The current outfit masquerading as a ‘government’ will never take the fact that they are where the buck stops, on board.
That sad state of affairs now extends well down into the once proud and pedantic to the point of frustration that leads to violence, public payees, Bloomfield under fire from Hosking over the SEVEN yes SEVEN week coverup of the ballsup that saw people stabbed with needles either sans inoculant or no better, severely diluted with saline shots.
Message to St Ashley of the Pestilence it is you who might be Knighted, if not who will retire with a superannuation to make a poor bugger sent to the poorhouse stony broke because of your insane management, piss blood. Man up you pathetic example of a person in charge and cease with the under bus tossing, it does not sit well with your paymasters.