NZ Federation of Freshwater Anglers

the past Christchurch has been renowned for its abundant supply of extremely pure, safe and inexpensive water. This water was regarded as one of the city's greatest assets, but now it is being gradually turned into one of the city's greatest liabilities.

This situation has arisen over the last 20 years through a huge increase in intensive farming in the Mid-Canterbury area west of Christchurch.

Farmers have depleted aquifers by taking vast quantities of water for irrigation. A lot of this water gets mixed with fertiliser chemicals and animal effluent and over decades seeps into waterways and aquifers.

This contaminated water has already caused outbreaks of illnesses in Springston, Dunsandel and other small communities close to Christchurch.

In February the Auditor- General issued a report on how eight New Zealand local authorities were planning to meet future drinking water requirements.

The eight local authorities ranged from the very small and poor to the Christchurch City Council, which was larger than all the others combined.

The report said "only three out of eight local authorities from our sample were managing their drinking water supplies effectively to meet future demand for drinking water".

The Christchurch City Council was not one of the three.

The council has known for a long time that Christchurch faces increasing problems with its water supplies and that once damage is done it cannot be reversed.

A council booklet published several years ago said that as the level and pressure in aquifers reduces contaminated water can get in and that Christchurch might have to find an additional source of water within less than 20 years.

The council knows that a declining supply of increasingly contaminated water will impact on the health and wellbeing of the 360,000 people living in Christchurch, but it has done nothing to try to improve the situation.

In fact, it has used its influence and millions of dollars of ratepayer money to assist farmers to make the situation many times worse.

This came about because farmers were able to convince the decision makers at the council that if farmers make a lot of money some people in Christchurch will also benefit and their spending will help the local economy.

When farmers asked the council to support the Central Plains Water Scheme west of Christchurch it should have refused. The scheme will take up to 41 times more water each year than the council takes during an average year. This will reduce the amount of water available to Christchurch and the water it does get will become increasingly contaminated.

The Canterbury District Health Board engaged Wellington-based health consultants to prepare a health impact assessment on the CPW Scheme. This internationally recognised model recommended the scheme not go ahead because of the adverse impacts on people living in the area.

As 92 per cent of those people live in Christchurch, the council should have taken the report seriously, but it chose to ignore it.

Instead of using its influence and ratepayer money to support the CPW scheme, the council should have kicked up a fuss and demanded that rules, regulations and legislation be changed to protect the interests of all Christchurch residents.

The council should have demanded that those who are making big money by exploiting community water resources should pay for each litre of water they use. This would reduce massive wastage and provide funds for dealing with the environmental damage and the problems they create for urban residents.

Over recent years the council has spent a lot of ratepayer money on billboards, newspaper advertising, brochures and leaflets which request residents to reduce their use of water.

If everyone living in Christchurch cut in half their use of water for gardens, bathing, toileting, washing and cleaning, the amount of water saved would be equivalent to the amount of water which the largest dairy farm in Canterbury has consent to use free of charge.

Obviously, the amount of water Christchurch residents use and waste is a drop in the bucket compared with the vast quantities of community water which farmers use and waste.

Farmers should only have been allowed access to community water after the needs of the community were secured and protected.

In June 2009 the council approved a water supply strategy which makes provision for water meters to be read and residents charged for the water they use over and above a basic allocation.

(In Auckland the average family pays about $1000 in water charges each year.)

Provision is also made for some assistance to help residents pay for tanks and pumps so that rainwater and grey water can be used to water lawns and gardens during the summer.

(In Australia the average cost for each home of these systems is about $5000.)

The strategy also provides for the city's water quality, which was once rivalled by only one other city in the world, to decline to the point where it only meets New Zealand drinking water standards.

This means that water will be chlorinated and treated at great cost to ratepayers.

These and other proposed measures will be gradually introduced after an advertising and education campaign has prepared the way.

Regardless of how much ratepayer money the council spends on educating the public, chlorine will not taste good and it will not deal with illnesses caused by viruses, fertiliser chemicals and nitrates.

The water supply strategy fails to even acknowledge that most of the water problems facing Christchurch are the result of rural irrigation and intensive farming.

This major omission means that the estimates provided of the financial costs to the council and residents are completely inadequate.

The total costs will probably be at the very least hundreds of millions of dollars, but this could increase to billions of dollars if water has to be stored in the foothills of the Southern Alps and piped to Christchurch or if clean water has to be purchased from farmers, as has happened in Australia.

When farmers asked the Mayoral Forum to back a Canterbury water management strategy which would allow them to double the area under irrigation in Canterbury, the Christchurch mayor should have stood up for the rights of residents.

He should have pointed out that the water resources of Canterbury belong to the whole community and their needs should come far ahead of the desire of farmers to make huge capital gains and big profits by further exploiting community water resources.

As Christchurch has two- thirds of the population of Canterbury the council should have insisted that it have control of the steering group developing the strategy.

Instead of doing this, it allowed rural interests to have complete control and it did not have even one representative on the steering group.

While there was public consultation on the strategy, most aspects of the consultation were condemned in a report by a Massey University professor.

He also found that the consultation was biased to give farmers the outcome they wanted. His report was ignored by the council and it went ahead and approved the strategy. The end result of all this is that the council is going to have little or no influence over what happens to the water required to recharge Christchurch aquifers, and the public will inevitably suffer.

The council and councillors were sent copies of a report published by Lincoln University entitled Public Opinion on Freshwater Issues and Management in Canterbury.

The report showed that what was happening to water in Canterbury was the opposite of what over 95% of the public wanted. The council could have used the report to help try and secure and protect the city water supplies but it chose to ignore what people wanted.

The only use of the report it made was to wrongly claim that the results supported its intention to charge Christchurch residents for water.

ECan has been doing its best to protect Canterbury water, but the Christchurch mayor played a key role in getting the Government to dismiss councillors and appoint commissioners who will give farmers all the water they want.

This will hasten the demise of the Christchurch water supply. It is difficult to know why the mayor and other council decision makers have been so keen to ensure that farmers are given vast quantities of pure water completely free of charge.

Public complacency has allowed the present situation to develop. The damage which is being done to our drinking water aquifers cannot be reversed.

If current trends continue and are accelerated under Government directives, Christchurch residents will soon end up with a very restricted supply of expensive, chlorinated and contaminated water.

* Grant Nelson is a trustee of a private charitable trust, the Gama Foundation, which has funded research on water issues in Canterbury.