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Articles Silly Ideas for Pipes and Possums
Tuesday, 26 May, 2009
Don Carson
Maybe it's the fumes from the whiteboard markers, or maybe it's something halucagenic in the Auckland water, but when high level think-fests happen there stupid ideas pop out.
It happened with the previous government's knowledge wave. The technical visionaries sat around with their bluetooths and wrote off agriculture in favour of New Zealand trying to compete with the vast resources and huge industries of the leading industrial high tech nations of the world, and make cell phones with Cheryl Moana Marie ring tones.
The new government then had a crack at it a couple of months ago. Leaders produced two visions which have lasted in the public imagination - nine day working fortnights and a walking track running the length of New Zealand. The sector which already produces two thirds of our export earnings didn't merit a mention on the list.
An Auckland gathering has just happened again. This time its people called entrepreneurs. They got together in small groups, and drew lists of things and pronounced them good. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand, primary industries get considered. On the other hand, the two main ideas that have had the most reporting are just nutty.
First there is the concept of hauling water from the West Coast to irrigate the parched Canterbury summer plains. It comes from the Australians. They've talked for decades about piping the Ord River in the north to Perth in the West. It hasn't yet happened but, as the Lucky Country dries to death, the pipeline may yet spring into being.
But for Canterbury, the idea is just so stupid. It's just taken $200,000,000 to drill less than ten kilometres to make the second tailrace at Manapouri. Thirty kilometres plus, through the Alps, therefore might be done for less than a billion dollars, but not much less.
There is no point in doing it. It makes no sense to bring water through the Southern Alps, when the westerly air flows already dump snow and rain in the headwaters of rivers, such as the Rangitata and Rakaia. The problem is storage, not access.
The Central Plains Water scheme is to build this storage. But the RMA stands in its way and the project is headed for downsize to ineffectualness. So, it would be the height of lunatic contradiction, if the visions of entrepreneurs in Auckland were to extract money out of the government for the most inefficient way of getting water, yet people in the province have been denied a far better way of doing the same thing.
Then there's the other Auckland bad idea – boosting the possum industry. I have nothing against possum fur and paid a handsome price for my possum merino blend sweater in Dunedin a couple of years ago. The WRONZ technology, that solved the problem of spinning the short possum fur with wool, was one of its most worthwhile inventions. It's a shame that the blending standards have slipped to allow any old mix to go on the market and ruin the wool/possum reputation.
And the meat side, tried in the 1980s, was never a realistic prospect.
The new entrepreneur concept, just blown out of the Auckland gathering, is to ditch the Animal Health Board possum control schemes, in favour of subsidising a bigger possum industry. Assuming that nobody is daft enough to think of farming possums, the problem of hunting any animal for profit is that the hunter has no interest in reducing the possum numbers bellow a sustainable harvest. It happened with bounty hunters targeting rabbits for Rabbit Boards in the olden days, and it will happen again.
The animal reproduction scientists are on the point of releasing biocontraceptives in to the mating lives of mum and dad possum. If it works, it'll cut back hugely on remaining tb spread, and the native trees will flourish as they haven't for decades. We'll then have wiped out a possum processing industry, that we have just sunk a fortune into, believing its a great entrepreneurial idea.
If anyone wants to buy into a much better fibre prospect - I could tell you about it, at doncarson@paradise.net.nz.
