A new water tax is needed for foreign water bottling companies currently paying no water tax while they are causing harm to our public health and environment.‘

Press release - Citizens Environmental Advocacy Centre Incorporated. 22nd February 2019.

The environmental impacts of business activities of water bottling in NZ are currently not being considered by “The Tax Working Party” group, as to the environmental impacts these foreign overseas companies are causing to our residential communities health and wellbeing now; - consider the cost and harm they are causing us now by only using truck freight transport;

We are supporting placing a new water tax on those foreign overseas companies taking our best water around our country today as they are choosing to exclusively use only road truck freight which has a large carbon footprint and impact on residential health from noise, vibration and air pollution.

Facts;

• The transporting of that water by trucks to production plants and for export is harming our roads as more trucks are gridlocking the roads causing accidents and road damage.

• But the elephant in the room is the harm the extra truck transport going through our cities and causing Noise, vibration and air pollution is now adversely affecting the health and wellbeing of many residential areas around the country and councils now have no funds to mitigate the adverse effects of these trucks carrying water for export through their residential zones.

The “Tax Working Party” should be a proposing an ‘environmental harm’ cost as part of a tax on the “user pays” principal, to pay for mitigation on those transport effects to our citizens.

Since these water export companies are now choosing to use only the roads to move millions of litres of water and causing damage both to our residential environment, and impacting large costs to us paying for road repairs on the roads they are using we must place a tax on the cost of transport of that ‘so called free water’ then it is only fair these foreign companies are required to pay tax to mitigate for their damages they are causing in their business.

We think this is a fairer system to give local councils and NZTA the funding to repair the roads and repair the water infrastructure also.

All NZ citizens should be not paying tax for a for a ‘natural recourse’ if they are not using it for financial gain, so only commercial water users should pay a tax and NZ business should only pay a limited tax far less then foreign companies as they are not citizens.

End.

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