It’s not only the U S of A that’s in election mode.

In New Zealand, the right-leaning National Party is offering the hint of free massages to farmers if they vote for them.

Sorry, I meant, the hint they’ll let slip on the environmental laws in place, laws that aim to make New Zealand’s waterways clean again.

My bad.

To give an example of how bad it’s got, take the Auckland region. From Wikipedia:

“As of January 2019, Auckland is the region with New Zealand's most polluted waterways, with 62% of rivers and lakes graded poor by the Ministry for the Environment for swimming, and 0% of rivers and lakes graded as good.”

Icky.

New Zealand has a population of around 5 million humans, but the sheep and cow population is equivalent to 150 million peeing, pooping humans.

Or, as Dr Shaun Forgie puts it:

“There are over 6.7 million dairy cows in New Zealand, each producing on average 27 kilograms of dung a day. That is over 66 million tonnes of dung a year. By the time you add in another 3.7 million cattle and 29.8 million sheep that is over 100,000,000 tonnes of dung a year which can sit around for months at a time. To put that into perspective, that is enough dung to fill 41,000 Olympic sized pools, which if joined end to end would stretch from Cape Reinga to the Bluff. That is one river that would not meet anyone’s swimming standards.”

That’s a lotta poop for a small country.

New Zealand markets itself as “clean” and “green”, which is increasingly seen as bollocks worldwide.

But Hobbits, right? Let’s pretend Hobbits come from New Zealand! That’ll save us.

Genius.

[Cover photo: Amelia Wade]