Rivers are for swimming

Tell the Government our rivers should be swimmable, not just wadeable.

Make a submission to tell the Government we want our rivers to be swimmable, not just safe enough to wade and boat in. A waterway isn’t healthy if you can get sick from swimming in it.

Make your own submission: submissions make more impact when they’re in your own words. You might like to mention these in your submission:

Many of the initiatives proposed in “Next Steps for Freshwater” will help to improve water quality, but with weak bottom lines, there is no incentive to go beyond merely improving water quality so it is safe to wade in.
We need stronger bottom lines for fresh water to ensure that our waterways are safe for swimming.
Freshwater management units might be a better way to protect rivers than region wide trade-offs of water quality but without swimmable rivers as bottom line they will not achieve clean water.
The Crown says no one owns fresh water, but this has led to corporate exploitation and agricultural pollution facilitated by the Crown. Tangata whenua have rights and responsibilities for fresh water under Te Tiriti. So let’s honour Te Tiriti and support the clean-up of fresh water together with an equal relationship around decision-making, rather than just more consultation.
Irrigation is not an environmental strategy, it creates a dependency on extra fresh water taken from rivers or groundwater and it creates new risks to the environment.
At present, 62% of our monitored waterways are unsafe to swim in. This isn’t good enough.
Not all rivers and waterways will be suitable for swimming all the time because of low levels or rainfall events, but it’s not good enough to write off all rivers as unswimmable because of this.
Excluding stock from waterways and proposing fresh water management units rather than overall water quality standards as proposed in Next Steps for Fresh Water is a good start, but unless the bottom line is swimmable rivers, water quality will continue to decline.
I support the use of a Macroinvertebrate Community Index as a measure of water quality, by making it a mandatory method of monitoring ecosystem health, as proposed in Next Steps for Fresh Water.
I would like to see a Natural Character Index included in water quality monitoring data, to show the ecological habitat of waterways.

Read the submission points here.

Submissions on freshwater have now closed. Thanks for your support!

The health of our waterways is priceless. Not only are our rivers and lakes home to native fish and other animals, they are a precious resource that we enjoy for swimming and kai gathering.

The Government claim they are doing what they can to protect water quality, but in a recent discussion document called “Next steps for Fresh water” the Government says making sure our rivers are clean enough to swim in is too expensive and unrealistic.

Part of the Government’s fresh water strategy is the National Objectives Framework, which outlines a range of bottom lines that healthy rivers must not fall below, or in many cases, be improved upon. One of these measures is human health, and the bottom line is that rivers be safe for secondary contact, i.e. wading or boating.

But we can’t let the kiwi tradition of swimming in our rivers and lakes slip away, while the industries that pollute them, like dairy farming, keep growing and are subsidised through irrigation schemes that drain our rivers.

There has to be a better way to protect water quality. The first step is to make the bottom line for rivers swimmable, because the health of our water is priceless.

Join us in telling the Government that swimmable rivers should be our goal.

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