Changes to drinking water rules are a major win for farmers, rural communities and common sense, Federated Farmers say.
The Government has announced that those supplying fewer than 25 people with drinking water will no longer be required to comply with onerous new rules or register the details of their water supply arrangements.
Federated Farmers local government spokesperson Sandra Faulkner says farming families across the country will be breathing a sigh of relief at the news.
“The drinking water rules introduced by the previous Government were a massive regulatory overreach that would have made life incredibly difficult for 80,000 rural and remote households.
“The process of registering, testing and reporting on their water supply would have added significant cost, risk and hassle for absolutely no gain.”
Faulkner says the rules would have also applied to milking sheds, wool sheds or anywhere else drinking water is supplied on a farm.
“When the regulator arrives, the goodwill leaves,” she says.
“It never made any sense to try and capture thousands of very small shared domestic supplies of fewer than 25 people under these regulations.
“People would have been forced to turn the tap off, quite literally, on their staff, neighbours and communities to avoid unnecessary cost and the risk attached to penalties within these rules.”
Faulkner says rural families have been supplying safe drinking water for generations and that protections are already in place through processor quality assurance programmes.
“There is no practical or realistic way these obligations could have been enforced.
“It would have just created a situation where very small suppliers were reluctant to make use of services such as information and guidance provided by Taumata Arowai.”
Faulkner says these changes show the power of grassroots advocacy.
“Federated Farmers have been calling for these changes for a number of years and we’ve worked collaboratively with local iwi and primary processors to achieve this result.
“That detailed, comprehensive and persistent work has paid off.”
Federated Farmers, New Zealand’s leading independent rural advocacy organisation, has established a news and insights partnership with AgriHQ, the country’s leading rural publisher, to give the farmers of New Zealand a more informed, united and stronger voice. Federated Farmers news and commentary appears each week in its own section of the Farmers Weekly print edition and online.
