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The Green Party has a vision that our rivers, lakes, streams and estuaries are healthy, clean, and support thriving ecosystems and communities.

Freshwater is a taonga and keystone in many ecosystems, including the ecosystem humans rely on to survive.

WHAT'S HAPPENING

The Government is planning to re-write the document that guides our councils on how to protect and restore freshwater, the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS-FM). The 2020 version of the NPS-FM was hard fought for by communities and environmental advocates. These proposed changes will lead to our waterways being more polluted, and mean future generations are at risk of not being able to swim or get kai from their local awa. It will put the profits of commercial and economic interests, ahead of the health of our communities and te taiao, our environment.

The Ministry for Environment is accepting feedback until 5pm on Sunday 27 July 2025.

WHAT CAN YOU SAY?

Tell the Ministry for Environment why you love our lakes, rivers and creeks and want them to be cared for. If you have a connection to a specific place, describe that. You can include photos if you're making a submission by uploading a document. 

There are heaps of questions in the online submission form - you only need to answer the ones that you feel like, plus a couple of things like consent to release your submission publicly and your contact details.

Some shocking facts:

• • 90% of our wetlands have been destroyed
  • 76% of our native fish are threatened or at risk of extinction
  • 45% of Aotearoa’s river length is unswimmable

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR (and you can too)

1. Support retaining Te Mana o Te Wai in the NPS-FM. Te Mana o Te Wai places the health of waterways as the primary goal in freshwater management. Without healthy freshwater, we can’t have healthy drinking water and therefore communities.
2. Support keeping ecosystem health, human contact, mahinga kai (gathering food), and threatened species as compulsory values councils must provide for in freshwater management. Do not support large-scale irrigation, and commercial and industrial use becoming compulsory values.
3. Support keeping national bottom lines for freshwater pollution. National bottom lines are the threshold at which pollution can cause unacceptable changes. Removing bottom lines will lead to more pollution, harm to human health and harm to our ecosystems.
4. Oppose removing the nitrogen fertiliser cap. Nitrogen fertiliser is a huge source of pollution of drinking water in our rural communities. It is also a large source of emissions in our agricultural sector. Removing this cap will mean our communities drinking water will continue to degrade and become more contaminated, with potentially serious health consequences.
5. Oppose proposals that will permit the construction of large-scale irrigation dams in a blanket manner, at the national level. These changes could enable further intensification of farming activity, without considering the needs of catchments and communities. Allowing more irrigation dams may lead to our lakes and rivers being further over-allocated. These decisions should remain within catchments and communities. The resilience of our agricultural sector should not be at the expense of wider ecosystem health.

THE CONTEXT

Since coming into power in November 2023, the current Government has overseen a comprehensive dismantling of environmental protections, through the likes of the fast-track approvals act which undercuts all our environmental protection laws, and changes to the wildlife act, which now allow the accidental killing of native wildlife like kiwi.

Freshwater is no different. The Government has degraded the status of Te Mana o Te Wai, the health of our waterways, in consenting decisions; stopped regional councils from implementing their plans to improve freshwater; made changes to enable mining in our precious wetlands; and, in an unprecedented move, decided to make it legal for polluters to continue polluting some of our most vulnerable freshwater bodies. These changes amount to a giving up on protecting and restoring our lakes, rivers and wetlands.

IMAGES: Lake Manapouri by Lan Pham