New Zealand's water

Who owns New Zealand’s water?

Wake Up NZ,

17 April, 2015

A recent expose by Campbell Live has shown New Zealanders the truth surrounding how water resources are allocated and profited from, which leaves us with the question, who owns New Zealand’s high quality fresh water?

The answer seems pretty simple, New Zealanders as a collective own the water. However, is this reflected in current council regulations in how water resources are allocated?

A Chinese owned bottling plant, One Pure has recently set up in the Hawke’s Bay and once operating at full capacity, will run 24/7 to export an expected 400 million litres of pristine aquifer water per year back to China. Fresh drinking water makes up only 2.5% of all water on the planet, with the remaining 97.5% being salt water. 


New Zealand has such a high quality of aquifer water that foreign investors are shipping millions of bottles out of the country per year, all of which has been taken at zero cost besides a tiny council resource consent. Surely our water should be allocated to New Zealanders, so our businesses and economy can benefit from our resources. Currently, this water will all be taken at the cost of New Zealanders at a time when water is increasingly becoming polluted around the country.

Thanks to intensive dairy farming, our rivers and lakes now have high concentrations of nutrients, sediments and faecal bacteria, and a result a large increase in algae blooms. Heavy amounts of fertilisers from farm run-off enters our waterways and causes destruction throughout the entire ecosystem. The result is half of New Zealand’s rivers and lakes are now of such poor water quality that they are a health hazard to swim in. This is all in a country which attempts to market itself internationally as ’100% Pure NZ’. The irrigation needs of these dairy farms is also sucking dry the rivers which support entire communities further down the line.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Jan Wright, recently released a water quality report focused on the two nutrient pollutants – nitrogen and phosphorus.

“On land they are valuable nutrients, helping plants to grow. But when there is too much of them in water, they become pollutants, and can lead to excessive growth of weeds, slime and algae.

“New Zealand is undergoing huge changes to land use and decision makers need to be aware of the consequences for the future.

“Over recent years, hundreds of thousands of hectares used for sheep and beef farming have been converted to dairy farming on the one hand, and forestry on the other.

“Conversion to dairying increases nutrient loads on water; conversion to forestry does the opposite.”

So who is to blame?

The council and government only see dollar signs and do not listen to the concerns raised by industry experts. The dairy farming lobby groups have a strong grip around the neck of the country, led by a government which relies heavily on the farmers for re-election. The government is also attempting to alter the Resource Management Act, which of course would also have a devastating effect on the protection of water resources and the environment going forward.

Fresh water will soon be the new gold, and we need to have much tighter council and government regulation around what companies can profit from our aquifers, what levels of nitrates and pollution will be allowed in waterways and what projects will have resource priorities. The changing climate is also going to put heavy pressure on water in New Zealand as summer droughts become more common and water restrictions placed on every day New Zealanders while foreign companies and farmers still have full water resource consents.

The cost of not acting now is a future where our once pristine water needs to be treated before consuming in a country which has an abundance. Unfortunately there’s also an underlying mindset of greed and profit at any cost, filtered down from the government which is causing considerable damage to our environment. If concerns are not voiced now, the ability to provide sustainable fresh water to future generations will be lost

To watch Campbell Live programme GO HERE