I am ashamed that Fonterra is a New Zealand company. They are about to wreck the south island in order to sell infant milk powder to china. One more step in their favour by their government chums and we will have lost a beautiful part of our world. Dairy farming in canterbury just doesn't make sense, its an arid place. Thats why you need so much water to farm dairy here! Increasingly, the only option to stop this appears to be...industrial sabotage.

Canterbury most obviously does NOT "hold 70% of fres water in New Zealand" - 70% of freshwater allocated for use within NZ is in the Canterbury region, but that's not 70% of the total freshwater resource in NZ - for goodness sake, the West Coast has the most water! get it right all you reporters who continually parrot an original misquote!

ecan are absolutely useless. i can't wait to see them get sacked. i'd love to see the CEO get the boot too. what a disgrace. they make me sick.

The concerns I have are:

1. Isn't this a case of NANNY STATE gone wild - the very thing National campaigned against before the last general election?... 'Those poor Cantabrians can't be trusted to hold their own council to account, so we in Wellington will replace them with our guys FOR YOU COZ WE KNOW BEST.'

2.Will urban user pays water metering & privatisation inevitably be the next step? A Cantebury Water Rights trust presentation shows that without fair water allocations irrigation will double over the next little while and municipal water allocation will shrink by up to half. Will city residents end up subsidising the dairy industry?

3. About the true situation concerning reports that the ECan review authors had dairy industry links with high up National Party members and others on the team where the same consultants that acted for southern councils in preparing advocacy to disband ECan - it would be really useful to get some good investigative reporting on this.

4. And most importantly, I'm really concerned that the voice of our democratically elected Ecan councillors, including the 2 Save our Water councillors, we voted into ECan at the last election will be gagged as our democratic rights are trappled underfoot by Wellington. IF THE COUNCIL IS TO BE SACKED that is the PEOPLES CHOICE at this October elections this year NOT WELLINGTONS business now.

I remember reading from somewhere that it takes 10 litres of water to produce 1 litre of milk.

Here is the worrying bit: 'Canterbury holds 70 per cent of fresh water in New Zealand and Prime Minister John Key told Parliament two weeks ago the Government wanted to remove “regulatory roadblocks” to water storage and irrigation in the region.'

That means indoor dairying applications in the Mckenzie Basin are likely to succeed.

Nick Smith has dealt to ACC and now he is turning his gun on the environment.

When I read the headline I was relieved - the government has seen sense and won't let the proposal to waste Canterbury's resources go through. Imagine my disbelief and disappointment when I read the article.

Anyone who lives in the Canterbury hinterland knows how much harder it is to get water out of a private well even now. That this very obvious danger sign is being ignored is a very scary thing.

This is worrying news, both that the recommendation is to remove the elected representatives, and the idea that the ministers need to 'strike a balance between being fair and making the right decision'. That doesn't make any sense, the right decision is the fairest decision.

I just hope that they decide to limit agricultural water taking, the Canterbury plains used to be scenic, but are now becoming sceptic, and that can't be good for business.

RA

Do they want to replace them because they aren't doing their job properly ? Or is it because they are doing their job and managing a scarce resource and taking sustainability into account ?

robert #4: get rid of ecan altogether? What a stupid thing to say, it clearly shows that you have little or no idea about what Regional Councils do. Let's see, if there was no regional council, there'd be no maintenance and management of regional parks (including pest control), no maintenance of waterways, no flood protection, no one to tell you when the regions beaches and rivers are or aren't safe to swim at, no one to clean up pollution incidents, no one to take enforcement action against the dairy farmers who let effluent flow freely into rivers, or low lifes that dump their household rubbish in to waterways. You, like most people just take that for granted. Yip, you pay them money, and yip, you're not the only one that grizzles about it, but get a grip. In stories like these, only the bad is ever printed. The press dine out on it. What about all the good that they do for the region??

Only Creech and his fellow Fonterra shareholders will benefit from this move. Farming for milk in Canterbury is not the most environmental use of resources. Leeching nitrates into the alluvial soils will degrade aquifer water supplies to all other users. Removing elected councillors and replacing them with a government appointed commissioner strips us of our democratic rights, and is a recipe for disaster for all Canterbury water users.