GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – Help the little guys fight the big guys
Creswell NZ sounds like a New Zealand owned company doesn’t it?
It’s not. In fact it is owned by Nongfu Spring Co., Ltd a massive Chinese bottling company and last year our Government allowed them to buy the land to build a massive 16,800m2 water bottling mega-plant at Otakiri in the Bay of Plenty .
If not stopped it will extract 550 million litres water a year put it in milliions of plastic bottles and shp it overseas
MInister Eugenie Sage said she was powerless to stop it, but she will not release the advice she received from Crown Law on which she based her opinion nor did she act on her responsibility as a law maker and her professed Green principles to change the Overseas Investment laws.
But all is not lost.
The little guys of Whakane can still fight the big waterbottling giant in the Environment Court but they need your help.
They need to raise $NZ 43,125 to fight the Appeal. So far they have $2,290 pledged.
New Zealanders who want to protect our natural resources have the odds stacked against them.
For the giant multinationals money is no object but for the small communities, affected by these mega water miners, finding enough money to get the battle into court is a huge challenge .
And while it’s Otakiri today, this will happen in many more places in New Zealand tomorrow if Enironmental case law is not established to stop these overseas bottling companies in their tracks.
So please go to the Love Our Wai Pledge Me site today and help them out.
I have. I hope you will too because their battle is our battle.
Please share the link.
Kia Kaha
(PS There’s various rewards for donating certain amounts)
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
Thanks for this post. However very disheartening that the Greens and Labour and anyone else has not moved to change the law to prevent overseas sale of water for next to nothing, from happening!
Activists seem fine to break the laws in other countries aka Israel/Palestine but when it comes to NZ, our Green parliamentarians meekly rubber stamp very harmful decisions hiding behind flawed crown law?????
I think if they look into it, and get other legal decisions they could easily stop water bottling because it is hard to imagine how this helps NZ in any real way, or is it because they have signed the very flawed trade deals? Who knows, especially when droughts hit in that area in the future with climate change and it is a slap in the face with the actual pollution caused by plastic bottles being rerouted around the world for the rich to continue to pollute local water supplies and the oceans by having ‘free’ water from banana republics like NZ propping it up. No doubt like our logs we will give them away for next to nothing, and then buy them back for quadruple the price.
But no, the government and lawyers hand over their responsibility to the ‘people’ to fund raise to pay to remedy this outrage. Ordinary people working 2 jobs, or people in one of the poorest areas of NZ and then expect them to use their money for donations for more lawyers to fight to over turn the decision the Greens rubber stamped against their own principles!
To be honest, I get very depressed at this point! And I voted Green to get the Natz out to stop that sort of thing and change the law.
Labour and NZ First are hypocrites pretending they want to stop NZ being tenants in their own country, ah nope, in the 100 days not a peep at this issue or going forward! No wonder NZ First is losing voters and a fresh face by the Natz next election might make this government a one term government!
People are the voters, not other countries and corporations and the government needs a reminder who they are supposed to work for and represent.
Depressing stat on the Pledge me site, 6 cubic metres of compressed plastic produced per day equates to a four-storey building cubed if the plant runs all year. Negligent madness.
NZ Government & Local/Regional Councils have been very remiss in addressing the acquisition of our aquifiers by overseas companies and corporates IMHO ?