Source: Federated Farmers
By Richard Dawkins, Federated Farmers water storage spokesperson
New Zealand doesn’t have a shortage of water storage ideas – what we lack is a system for turning the best of those ideas into reality.
Across the country, there are water storage and infrastructure projects at every stage of development, from Northland to Central Otago.
Some are already operating, some are well advanced, and others are little more than concepts.
That’s encouraging, but the problem is every community still seems to have to reinvent the wheel.
They assemble their own team, find funding, commission studies, work through consenting and somehow maintain enough local enthusiasm to keep a project alive for years.
When a project is finally finished, much of that knowledge and experience simply walks out the door.
We should be much better at this by now because water storage isn’t a new challenge – we’ve been talking about it for decades.
Many of the projects being discussed today have long histories, and the barriers are familiar: finance, consenting and finding people with enough time and determination to keep pushing them forward.
I think we can learn a lot from the approach taken across the ditch in Tasmania.
Rather than expecting every community to start from scratch, Tasmania has a dedicated entity with the people and expertise to assess projects, work alongside local communities and move viable schemes through development.
If a project isn’t going to stack up, they establish that early and move on.
If it does stack up, they use the same engineering, commercial and project development capability to turn it into something that’s ready for investment.
Then the lessons learned are carried into the next project.
It makes perfect sense, and IrrigationNZ has been looking closely at that model and advocating for a similar, more coordinated approach here.
I’m not saying New Zealand needs to copy Tasmania line for line, but there’s plenty we could learn from the model.
There’s also plenty of evidence here at home showing why storage is worth getting right.
Take Opuha Dam in South Canterbury, where farming benefits from the water, but irrigation is only part of the story.
Releases from the dam have historically prioritised environmental river flows, followed by domestic and stock water, then irrigation and electricity generation. The lake has also become an important recreational asset.
It’s a useful reminder that water storage is about so much more than just putting more water on farmland.
Done well, water storage can support environmental flows, drinking water, recreation, groundwater recharge, productive land use and climate resilience.
It helps both rural and urban communities manage longer dry periods and more variable rainfall.
Reliable water also changes the decisions people are prepared to make.
If farmers and growers know water will be available when they need it, they can invest with more confidence, use water more efficiently and consider different crops or higher-value land uses.
That investment doesn’t stop at the farm gate; it flows into processing, jobs, service businesses and stronger regional economies.
The Central Plains irrigation scheme is a good example. Federated Farmers’ 2026 election platform points to the scheme as contributing around $400 million to Canterbury’s GDP in 2025 and supporting more than 2,200 full-time jobs.
None of this means every proposed dam should be built, or that taxpayers should be writing blank cheques.
Water users should pay for the private benefits they receive, and projects still need to stack up commercially and environmentally.
But there’s a clear role here for government in helping worthwhile projects through the difficult early stages and removing unnecessary barriers before good projects are killed by process.
That’s why Federated Farmers is asking the next government to provide seed funding for new water storage projects.
We also want faster approvals, resource management reform that properly enables community storage and managed aquifer recharge, and a national standard that makes sensible on-farm water storage much easier to build.
Fast-track consenting is already helping address the consenting challenge for some major projects, but consenting is only one part of the job.
Someone still needs to identify the opportunities, test the engineering and economics, build local support, find the funding and turn a concept into something investors can actually back.
This is where a more coordinated approach like Tasmania’s could make a real difference.
We already have the projects, the expertise, and the successful examples showing what water storage can deliver.
Now we need to build a system that turns our best water storage opportunities into reality.
Captions
Richard Dawkins beside dam on his farm.jpg – Richard Dawkins beside one of two dams on his farm in Marlborough’s Waihopai Valley. This dam holds 85,000 cubic metres and was built in 2020; the other one, built in 2016, holds 47,000 cubic metres. Together, the dams store 132,000 cubic metres of water for irrigating 135ha of grapes.