“Horizons Regional council” Polluters friends?



Protesters outside Horizons



New York has its Wall St Protests; here in our city we have our very own “Horizons” protest. The reasons for both protests are much alike, different in scale yes, yet the reasons are similar.

The protesters in NY want their government to jump on the big boys and make them pay for the fleecing of the financial markets and to introduce fairness. In Palmerston North the protesters want “Horizons Regional council” to enforce the rules regarding the polluting of our rivers. Both protests want more openness and honesty applied to those who ignore the rules. In both cases it’s hard because those entrusted to enforce may well be those who are ignoring the rules. The Horizon’s Councillors are made up of ex-city mayors and councillors with a few farmers tossed in to give a bit of balance. The position has got so bad that the Chief enforcer resigned when he kept hitting a brick wall over the way polluters were allowed to talk their way, bully their way out of the penalties allowed for by their proven failure to comply with the agreed rules. Ian Ritchie, George & Christina Paton, Bert Judd and local Greens decided that enough is enough. When they saw that the Mayor of Palmerston North failed to front up and state the reasons for his failure to comply, they acted…the local media also managed to slip in a few words, in between their rugby world cup frenzy. Sooner or later the PN representatives on the Horizons council are going to have to sit up and admit that the choices they made regarding the PN waste system was wrong and the land based system that they rejected was correct. Those named above are real community heroes and should be recognised as such. It’s was ironic to me that all the well dressed or suited councillors who attended the 11^th of October 2011 Horizons council meeting had an interest in both the causes and effects of the massive pollution that enters our river yet can not face up to enforcing the much needed prosecutions against polluters.

The local heroes achieved a major goal and that was the destruction of the stupid Horizons Prosecutions [so-called] Advisory Committee, which was nothing more than a delaying tactic/process for delaying decisions already made by those whose job it was to protect the public good. Still the prevalence of flim-flam over substance is not new .