July 28, 2020
Iwi argues for say on water bottling plant
Ngāti Awa hopes a challenge to a water bottling consent will lead to it having a greater say in future water allocation decisions.
The Eastern Bay of Plenty iwi is in the High Court at Rotorua this week asking for it to overturn an Environment Court decision allowing Creswell NZ, a subsidiary of Chinese company Nongfu Spring, to take more than a million litres of groundwater a year for its Ōtākiri export bottling plant.
Ngāti Awa chief executive Leonie Simpson says the Environment Court upheld the Bay Of Plenty Regional Council's consent on narrow procedural grounds which excluded the Māori world view.
She says as tangata whenua the iwi considers it has a right under Te Tiriti o Waitangi to uphold the mana and the mauri of the water.
"The majority of this water, this wai Māori, will be exported. It won't stay in New Zealand so from our perspective, we say the mauri o te wai is affected and therefore the mauri of the people because we know we are intrinsically connected to our taonga," Ms Simpson says.
Leonie Simpson says supporters of the plant say its expansion will create jobs, but they are not the sort of jobs Ngāti Awa wants to see.
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