What went wrong?

"I don't know what happened, but in the end they (the Government) got it so fundamentally wrong," says DairyNZ chair, Jim van der Poel.

He made the comments as DairyNZ lodged its submission to the Government on their proposal to deal with agricultural emissions. As well as making their own submission, DairyNZ is a party to the wider submission being made by the various industry groups which make up the He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN) consortium.

Van der Poel rather kindly suggested that the officials and Ministers who reviewed the HWEN submission and came up with the counter proposal, didn't realise the implications of their changes.

He says when the Government announced their counter proposal, they claimed it was what farmers had wanted, with just a few tweaks. He says, on the face of it, this appeared to be the case, but when his and other groups delved into the detail, it was abundantly clear this was not the case and their response was fundamentally different to the industry proposal and clearly not fit for purpose.

"You never quite know what happens in government. It would seem that a lot of people got involved in the process who were not involved in the initial discussions with us," van der Poel told Dairy News.

"Remember our initial proposal that was put to government was a collaboration of thirteen organisations: ten industry-based, a representative of the Federation of Maori Authorities and two government departments, being Ministry for Priamry Industries (MPI) and the Ministry for Environment (MfE).

"They were active participants in the process when it went forward to government. In our view, the final proposal which everyone signed up to was finely balanced and it was fit for purpose," he says.

But van der Poel says the changes made turned what HWEN had provided into a fundamentally different proposal. He says he's got no idea of how, on what basis and who made the changes. He says, in subsequent discussions when the implications of the changes were relayed back to officials, no one refuted their arguments.

"If you look at some of the potential consequences that come out of their proposal, it has quite an impact on NZ's potential export earnings going forward and also on rural communities - that's pretty random. If they would accept our proposals, there was a really good chance of hitting the right environmental targets but not having the disastrous consequences.

"The government proposal puts the reaching of targets as the number one priority to accept some carnage in the rural community as long as the targets are met. Whereas we have taken a totally different approach, which would incentivise behavioural change with farmers and still hit the targets and not have the impact on rural communities," he says.