Te Mana o te Wai, national bottom lines must go

As public consultation on freshwater regulations closes today, ACT MP and dairy farmer Mark Cameron is renewing calls to dump Te Mana o te Wai and allow communities to determine their own standards, rather than sticking with unworkable national bottom lines.

“Under Labour and the Greens, farmers were drowning in red tape, ideology, and spiralling costs.

“The coalition Government was elected with a clear mandate to end the war on farming. We’ve made strong progress, but the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management 2020 still casts a shadow over rural New Zealand.

“New Zealand farmers produce the best food in the world. We feed 40 million people. Yet we’re being held back by a regime of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, written by Wellington bureaucrats who’ve never set foot in a paddock.

“The NPS-FM centralised freshwater rules in Wellington and enshrined the vague spiritual concept of Te Mana o te Wai, or ‘the mana of the water’.

“ACT says it’s time to scrap Te Mana o te Wai and abandon national bottom lines. Let regional councils set their own standards based on science, not ideology.

“Te Mana o te Wai replaces clear, scientific benchmarks with an ambiguous cultural concept. It opens the door to co-governance, undermines equal citizenship, and treats people differently based on who their ancestors were.

“Instead, we should trust local communities to decide what works for them. A blanket set of national standards simply doesn’t work across New Zealand’s diverse catchments.

“Our geography, climate, and soils vary hugely from region to region. So do the challenges facing farmers. One-size-fits-all regulations from Wellington are out of touch and unfit for purpose.

“We should remove national bottom lines and let regional councils, who understand their communities and waterways best, take the lead.

“ACT is committed to real change. We cannot continue with a system that burdens farmers for no environmental gain. We campaigned on overhauling the NPS-FM, removing vague spiritualism, and returning to practical, science-based, locally-led freshwater management.

“It’s time to end the rural sector’s punishment under Labour’s ideological legacy and start trusting our farmers again.”