How you can take meaningful action to ensure clean rivers in New Zealand

In less than five minutes ❤

Let’s ensure Kiwis can do this for generations to come

We want New Zealand’s lakes and rivers to be fresh, clean and healthy. Fishing and swimming in rivers and lakes has long been a favourite pastime of the Kiwi summer holiday.

But unfortunately, the Government’s freshwater standards are letting the Kiwi dream down. The Government’s position is that water only needs to be safe for “wading” which means — legally speaking — rivers are allowed to pose a “moderate risk” of infection when people are wading or boating in them. As a result, our rivers are suffering and fish are dying.

The good news is we have an opportunity to act right now. This Thursday, we are joining the crew at Choose Clean Water to make the case for laws that clean and protect our rivers to MPs directly. Our plan is to take along a massive collection of comments and photos from New Zealanders who love our rivers and lakes and support our demands. MPs listen to hundreds of submissions from the public and we want to ensure that we stand out. Can you help us?

Click here to add your power in support of clean rivers

Incredible action on Parliament Lawn featuring thousands of droplet messages from Kiwis concerned about our rivers, lakes and streams

Earlier this year, our friends at Choose Clean Water and an amazing team of supporters from all over the country took the voices of tens of thousands of New Zealanders to Parliament to hand in a petition calling for the Government to set “swimmable” as the minimum standard for freshwater in lakes, rivers and streams. That petition was then referred to Select Committee, which is why we now have this opportunity to take our message directly to Parliament.

Picture the scene: The team at Choose Clean Water and a crew of ActionStation members arrive at Parliament equipped with a camera, a giant billboard-sized collage of photos featuring members of our community, and a pile of stats about water quality in New Zealand. Imagine hundreds (or thousands!) of photos of nanas, mums, dads, doctors, business owners, students, activists, tangata whenua, farmers, teachers, nurses, police, pensioners and more. Marnie from Choose Clean Water hands over the giant photo message and says, “Behind these petitions are real people that are concerned about New Zealand’s water. We are not numbers on a spreadsheet. We are many, we are powerful, we are voters and you need to listen. Here is a list of our concerns and demands.” That’s powerful.

Let’s make the most of this opportunity to speak directly to power, by showing the power of our community.

Click here to add a photo of yourself and/or your whānau enjoying your local river, lake or stream, then tell us a little bit about who you are so we can include it in our submission.

The event is also open to the public, so if you’re keen to come along, please do! It’s at 11am on Thursday 13th October. Sign up to the Facebook event here to stay up to date.