Unfit for Purpose -Amy Adams and the Environment Ministry that isn’t.

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 16

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

A previous post queried the role of the Ministry of the Environment under Minister, Amy Adams, in providing guardianship for the environment.  This sorry state of affairs  continues with the advent of new legislation that undermines Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Jan Wright’s role as an independent reviewer of government environment reports. (PCE media release ).      

It has taken around five years for Ms Adams to turn the NZ Environment Ministry from a frontline environmental advocate into its opposite –an arm of Government that is working to bypass, undermine and repeal legislative protection of the environment. Adam’s extreme views began to come clear as early as 2010, when she was instrumental in sacking the Canterbury Regional Council and suspending the democratic process in Canterbury. This Council was resisting the profligate introduction of irrigation into the Canterbury plains in response to the dairy boom and the ‘interim’ suspension has now been extended through to 2016.  

It indicates the mess management of water can get into as it is moved toward private ownership, and we suggest you follow the ongoing scandal in NSW (Australia) to inform yourselves on the endgame of this. (Job offer after wine gift)

In 2013 Ms Adams proposed making wide ranging changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA). She was shamelessly candid in her aims ‘to repeal the requirement to have regard to the maintenance and enhancement of amenity values…(and of) the quality of the environment’. This was media washed as cosmetic though even the Business friendly end of the conservation movement refused to swallow it. The intention was to make the RMA ‘fit for purpose’, a phrase which  has now joined win-win, ecologic and mitigation, as dirty words in NZ conservation.

Only as the Government’s political allies withdrew their support did her machination  hit the skids, which pinpoints something rare in our legislative history and that is that New Zealanders have taken the RMA to heart. Like the ACC and the anti-nuclear legislation it has come to measure something of what it means to be Kiwi.

Though rust never sleeps as they say and in this new Bill she is trying to quarantine legislation from the probing eyes of the Commissioner. How ironic it is that one of the best ever Ministers of the Environment was Simon Upton, one of Ms Adam’s more savvy colleagues from the 1990’s.

It is now time however, to get back to what we are all working for  the survival of these dabchicks, with their youngster, still thriving down at the Waikanae lagoon, though the autumn weather, balmy till now, is beginning to close in on them.

Dabchicks with adolescent chick (centre)

Update on going offline -We managed to track the trigger that caused us to crash last week to a Christchurch server. It definitely came from inside this country, though whether deliberate or not, we cannot say. However contrary to our original anxiety, Google’s procedures in handling such situations seem both sensible and robust.  

Track we were listening to while posting this is Slim Whitman's China Doll -one of the most endearingly creepy songs of all time.
This one goes out to our own Ms Amy Adams.

I'm tired of cry-y-yin'
And all her lie-ie-iein'
That's why I'm buy-y-in'
A china doll

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