EDITORIAL - Close taps on the busybodies

9th October 2008

LOUIS PIERARD

THE Government's clean air laws have reportedly drawn a challenge from Napier's Mayor Barbara Arnott for citizens to boycott the expensive standards, which come into effect in 2013.

The new laws ban wood burners, requiring householders to replace heating systems at an estimated cost in Hawke's Bay of $40 million.

While the regulations have been warmly embraced by the grim army of environmentalist shroudwavers (who find no greater pleasure than in anticipating self-eradication), it is an unnecessary, unrealistic and extravagant intrusion that is likely to have - as some correspondents have pointed out - the unintended consequence of thousands more heat pumps placing an extra burden on the national grid. With the escalating price of electric power - a fact that the Government seems only now to have discovered, thanks to an election - and the risk of power cuts in bad weather, many would rightly argue that an efficient, modern wood burner makes far more sense.

For Mrs Arnott, suggesting region-wide civil disobedience to express contempt for silly rules (however appropriate that response would be) is a luxury.

It falls to the Hawke's Bay Regional Council to enforce those regulations and failure to do so would risk its own demise.

Now we learn that building regulations, which will come into effect in February, will restrict the flow rate of water in showers in new homes and renovated bathrooms. The maximum flow rate will be six litres a minute. At present, many showers run at 16 or more litres a minute and plumbers say most shower systems on the market will not work properly on the new rate.

So where's the water shortage? And why are we all suddenly rendered incapable of deciding how much power to use?

What have New Zealanders done to deserve the growth of a culture of such busybody legislation? Is there nothing that can escape the dreadful ambitions of ideologues committed to straightening "the crooked timber of humanity"? It is but another example of creeping control that invades our lives for no other reason than a presumption that the state and its institutions know, far better than we do, how we ought to behave.