2017: Should farmers pay for water?

September 10, 2018

By AHNZ

Farmer Giles, and others, ploughed the tussock. They drained the swamp. They tamed the floods, they cut the irrigation ways and built the roads. It was never easy.

City folk owe their existence as such to these colonial pioneers. The value of what these old timers did passed on to the present. Here Jack Tame, the city boy, supposes these waterways are a free gift from god to the people of New Zealand.

“It takes 400 litres of water to produce a single litre of milk. And what does the agriculture sector pay? The same as the foreign exporters – absolutely nothing.”

“So why isn’t there the same uproar over farmers using water that exists over foreign exports?” – Jack Tame: Should farmers pay for water?, NZ Herald (2017)

He wants his cut of the water wealth, and you can have it too. Just turn on the producers as a mob majority and take your slice of canabalistic cake!

Of course we can’t teach history and we can’t be allowed to remember who we are. It would get in the way of nonsense like this leading us on sharp turns into socialist redistributionalist disaster.

“If no one owns water then we all own water.”

“The amount of our water extracted…our total extracted resource,… our agriculture sector…our purest resource…our farms..our water…our waterways.”

This Communism relies heavily on our lack of identity, our ignorance of history. We must forget that our water supply was ever pioneered and tamed, assume it was always there tabula rasa and then in this amnesiac state ‘observe’ that ‘nobody’ owns water. Classic case of philosophising mid stream.

“Our,” “our,” “our,” Jack repeats. As if this water belonged to everyone, including him. As if nobody ever had to work for it, or against it, to bring the water to their colonial farms. There was a time when land was useless and people had to walk off it. Or, a time when they had to carry it physically themselves or use a horse and cart to get it on a regular basis or else give up farming entirely. What Jack, the ahistoric townie, is missing is that FARMERS ALREADY PAID for the water. Ref. 1930: Kirwee Colonel, AHNZ 

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Ref. This was first posted as a reaction to Tame in NZ Herald, March 2017

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