Forest & Bird wins Ruataniwha dam appeal

I wonder if white elephants give a nice, rich, creamy milk which could boost our exports of dairy products??? lol

Albino elephants have very nice milk but they steal there own milk

Fed Farmers was saying this morning that it's just another hurdle to be overcome. http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/312261/ruataniwha-ruling-another-hurdle-or-beginning-of-the-end I guess they would be acting positive in public and in front of potential investors until it's been finally decided not to proceed, but there are still potential options. eg. * Go to the Supreme Court. The Appeals Court had a 2 to 1 decision, so the advocates might still fancy their chances. * Initiate some other method to get the land, like the Public Works Act. Federated Mountain Clubs has pointed out that the PWA would have been the more appropriate way to acquire the land in the first place, but it also involves a process that requires actually justifying stuff, and maybe that's why they preferred to go for the technicality approach in the Conservation Act. * Petition the government to change the law. ie. Have Parliament change the Conservation Act to make it clearly legal for land to be removed from a Conservation Park for this purpose. * Build the dam illegally and hope that nobody notices.

It's ironic that they say this country has been built on farming (I'm sure it has). But in my perspective it's everything wrong with this country. I wish this was a country of half a dozen major cities and the rural centres shut down and we regenerated them with native forest. That would bring the birds and bush back and then this really would be paradise . But thats my dream.

I agree, Gaiters. We could just be smarter and value-add to what we have. I do meet researchers doing this but we have relied too much on primary production. Basically the landowners have held the economy to ransom since they discovered that if you stocked unowned land, you could then pay a peppercorn rent and double your profits as Samuel Butler did (but Lady Barker failed to do due to the blizzard of 1862) and then bugger off back to Blighty to spend your pennies, leaving burnt-off and overstocked land to erode into the waterways. Eventually the government managed to force the break up of the big stations to enable less wealthy folks to play the game. We have been subsidising the farmers ever since. High country farming is unprofitable and is used by the owners as a tax loss to avoid paying tax as every wealthy character here well knows and does e.g Esk Head which was/is? owned by a kiwi but US-based adviser on tax issues worth $17m. I assume everyone on this forum knows that the dairy industry is all about making profit from capital gains of dairy farms, not from producing milk and the interest rate is kept low because the dairy industry is in so much debt, this is to avoid it collapsing. In the meantime, we get our environment trashed from this profitless endeavour. It only makes money because their costs are subsidised e.g. they don't pay for the water they use, only the supply of it. I met a woman yesterday who commutes 2 hours a day into chch to do her job and said she could only afford to do this because she used free diesel from the farm where they are based. Another farm worker was skiting because he was using the antibiotic-laden milk (which should be discarded from the cows with mastitis) to feed bobby calves. This is an outlawed practice. And I knew about the aborted live calves who have their skulls whacked with a hammer for the slinky trade thanks to people who share how they spend their days at work - long before this disgusting practice was outed to the media. Dairy farmers only care about one thing: money. It was nice to meet the Indian who said he liked working with the cows and in his country 'the cow is a god' and the woman who throws the cow-beating pipes up onto the roof of the building whenever she gets a chance.

That was one of the best posts I've read on this site Honora.

@honora: "I assume everyone on this forum knows that the dairy industry is all about making profit from capital gains of dairy farms, not from producing milk" I know there's money in capital gains, but wouldn't that primarily come from the land value? If so then how does this statement fit with the large number of dairy conversions lately, where farmers have clocked up debt and uncertainty merely to convert? Or are farmers themselves being swindled about where the ultimate profit comes from?

The court's full 36 page written decision is now online. It's at http://www.nzlii.org/nz/cases/NZCA/2016/411.html

I have to agree with the comments on capital gains. I dont know a lot about farming but that feeds straight into my ponzi comment earlier

@izogi: I guess they convert to dairy and do it for a few years and then sell off the land. We drove across the Canterbury plains today to go to Mt Somers and there is still intensification progressing with shelter belts being cut down. In the old days they had the shelter belts there to protect the stock from the southerly winds.