100% Pure?

Today there might have been an important shift in New Zealand environmental policies. As everybody knows, New Zealand claims to be “100% Pure”, the land of nature, but has, contrary to this, a super high level of pollution, especially in relation to its low population.

According to Gareth Morgan, an Opportunist Party Politician, the tackling of pollution was largely left in the hands of local councils, not centrally administered as you would expect. It it quite remarkable that no central regulations were made before when New Zealand economy and tourism are so dependant upon the “100% Pure” Slogan and even we in Germany start addressing the New Zealand environmental issues.

Furthermore, previous New Zealand environmental regulations followed the model of “grandparenting pollution rights”, which means that pollution regulations were made for every individual farm based on its former pollution. According to Morgan, “that rewarded the dirtiest farmers (with a legacy of pollution) and penalised the best while removing the incentive to cut pollution.”

The Opportunist Party’s approach wants to set a bottom line for pollution that binds all farmes not considering their previous pollution levels. What really strikes me is the goal of this bottom line: “Under the TOP policy, the default bottom line would be to move towards swimmable rivers.” Excuse me? For a country advertising and relying on its nature to such an extent, swimmable rivers should be the norm. “Move towards swimmable rivers” doesn’t sound at all like the natural paradise but rather reminds me of some Chernobyl Repopulation report.

Another aspect of the Opportunist Party’s approach is tradeable pollution rights. If I understand this correctly this means that any farms not sticking to pollution levels can do so and pay into a “clean up fund”. While I think it is good and neccessary to impose penalties to enforce pollution levels, I don’t think this opportunity should be built into laws by default, encouraging richer farms to change nothing at all and simply paying an amount of money. The extra money this costs can be recovered by raising prices of their products, which they will be easily able to do, since their competition is raising their prices aswell because they are sticking to pollution rights.

All in all, the tackling of pollution remains an important subject for New Zealand, and while the change from a grandparenting policy was neccessary and really a good thing, there is still a lot of effort to be made for New Zealand to fullfill its 100 % Pure status.