Those are words which the Otago Regional Council may have contemplated when details of Tuesday night’s Hansard trickled through.
Minister for Oceans and Fisheries Shane Jones, in the last speech of the night, decided to offer some of his typically forthright views on just how the ORC is doing in its job.
"One should look no further than the Otago Regional Council and their wilful disregard of this government’s intention to rationalise and recalibrate water standards."
Ooof. But Mr Jones was not finished there.
" ... I repeat again: one should look no further than the current conduct of the regional council of Otago, who need to be pulled into line and if we had a provision like they’ve got here for the regional councils, we would not have that time-wasting, ideological, foreign thinking we’re seeing in Otago."
To say the least, there is a lot to unpack here. Not the least of which is why Mr Jones felt the need to comment on the ORC at all.
And, for that matter, why he chose to do so in the middle of a debate on extending consents for aquaculture operations, while the committee of the House was debating a matter that had nothing to do with planning, let alone the ORC.
The ORC is under the purview of the Minister for Local Government; in its role as guardian of Otago’s environment, it is having close attention paid to it by Minister for the Environment, Invercargill National MP Penny Simmonds.
While Mr Jones, as regional development minister, may well have a passing interest in the fortunes of Otago and its many reservations, quite why he chose to express those interests in that time and place is interesting.
As Otago Daily Times readers will know, Ms Simmonds and ORC have been having a long-running, highly public and very politely expressed all-out row about the council’s land and water plan.
The ORC is about to release those plans, as it is required to do. But it is doing so in full knowledge that the government is about to release its own national policy statement on freshwater, a document which is almost certainly going to either overturn, or signal the imminent reversal of, many of the rules by which the ORC is playing at the moment.
In the words of Ms Simmonds, by releasing its plan the ORC could "lead to duplication and additional costs on ratepayers" — something which has herself and her colleagues "concerned".
In the carefully nuanced art of legal letter writing, them’s fighting words.
At the heart of the matter is the principle of Te Mana o Te Wai — the concept that the health of the water takes precedence over the economic benefits that might be able to be derived from it.
That was written into the national freshwater rules drafted by the former government, but it has been well and truly signalled by all parties in the new government that its days are numbered.
Although not yet seen, one would imagine that the new rules would place much greater precedence on economic benefits — Ms Simmonds request that the ORC provide "any implications the plan will have on specific industries (e.g. farming, forestry, mining)" is a pretty clear signal.
Which is where, presumably, Mr Jones, poised to be one of the decision-making ministers on fast track resource consents for things like wind farms, forestry projects and mineral searches, comes in.
Leaving aside the fact that his own view of the right of business to exploit natural resources is also entirely ideological — "time-wasting" is arguable — Mr Jones has chosen a fairly public forum (albeit at 9.57pm, when only tragics like Southern Say are watching) to give the ORC a blast across the bows.
Yes, it was done with Mr Jones’ usual florid rhetoric, but he does not chose his targets idly. He had added an "or else" to Ms Simmonds letter, and the ball is now back with the wandering ORC to either make a run for it or kick for touch.
Big game hunting
New Green Dunedin list MP Franciso Hernandez asked his first parliamentary question on Thursday, and it wasn’t a nice simple patsy to ease his way in.
Instead he tackled the Minister for the Public Service (who also happens to be the Minister of Finance) about job cuts, and did so through the lens of quotes from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon about must-haves and not nice-to-haves.
That drew an arch response from Nicola Willis: "I would not use that characterisation, nor would the Prime Minister. In fact, I find the inference that any member of this House would refer to a human being as ‘nice to have’ as objectionable."
Undaunted, Mr Hernandez ploughed on, asking about job cuts at police, the Environmental Protection Authority and Oranga Tamariki, before suggesting that Ms Willis had been blindsided by the staffing numbers deemed necessary at the Ministry for Regulation.
That drew an even more angry response from Ms Willis: "Apparently, the average salary of a Green MP is a little over $180,000, although I would note that that number excludes the salary of Darleen Tana."
Which immediately drew a point of order that Ms Willis’ answer had nothing at all to do with the question, although the Greens were probably quite happy to have upset the minister’s equilibrium.
More fighting words
Taieri Green list MP Scott Willis gave his party’s speech in the debate on the motion to congratulate the New Zealand Olympic team and, in typically Green fashion, he wanted to highlight the underdogs.
"I also want to think about tae kwon do, because tae kwon do is my sport. I wanted to see our athletes and I was sad to see the muck-up that denied Eisa Mozhdeh and Jemesa Landers a chance to compete," he lamented.
