Back to Our vision for fresh water.
[Video: Peaceful acoustic guitar plays. Water ripples outward from a fallen droplet. Title overlay: Te Mana o te Wai. In smaller text below: This video was produced by a member of the Māori expert advisory group Kāhui Wai Māori established by Minister Parker to provide advice on the Essential Freshwater Reforms.]
[Video: Text introduces Doctor Mahina-a-Rangi Baker of Kāhui Wai Māori, who speaks in front of beach wetland. While Baker speaks, the video switches between Baker and environmental scenes.]
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] Te Mana o te Wai, principally, is about lifting that standard for how we care for freshwater…
[Video: A river rushes by the rocky banks of a forest and a leaf floats on a gentle current.]
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] …and recognising that first priority being about ensuring the life-supporting capacity of water. So that’s things like protecting wetlands, ensuring fish passage up and down catchments,
[Video: Water rushing down a river.]
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] ensuring that practice on farm is improving, being more conscious in our decision-making with regards to freshwater and putting the water first.
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] Te Mana o te Wai requires us to give effect to two sets of values. The first set of values that New Zealanders are relatively familiar with: good governance, stewardship, and care and respect for water.
[Video: A river from above, cutting through grassy wetland, with a few people fishing at the riverbanks.]
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] The second set of values, which are Māori values, being mana whakahaere, which is generally around the way that iwi and hapū wish to govern the use of land, the use of water, kaitiakitanga, or our own unique practices around the care and protection of taonga, including water…
[Video: A river from above, the river mouth emptying into the ocean. By the river is a parked car, some adults and children.]
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] …and manaakitanga, or our own cultural philosophy around sharing, equity, reciprocity…
[Video: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker speaking in front of beach wetland.]
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] …and it’s only by properly engaging iwi and hapū, at the catchment scale, that you can really interpret and express those values.
[Voice: Mahina-a-Rangi Baker] So the National Policy Statement gives that general direction in terms of what those high-level values are. It then directs regional councils to have a relationship with iwi and hapū to understand, from their perspective, what does giving expression to those values mean for them. And that’s the work that’s now cut out for our communities to do, in partnership with iwi and hapū.
[Video: Water ripples outward from a fallen droplet. Title overlay: Te Mana o te Wai. In smaller text below: While production of this video has been supported by the Ministry for the Environment the views expressed are those of Kāhui Wai Māori.]
Back to Our vision for fresh water.