Rose sees red

Federated Farmers spokesperson David Rose makes some interesting claims in the Hot Topic column of last week's Fiordland Advocate. He levels his aim at 'some' councillors of Environment Southland and makes unsubstantiated claims about their ability to do the job they are elected for, and trained to do. Councillors, I can reliable inform you, undergo professional development to enable them to make good decisions, judgements that are informed by evidence and tempered with fair decision making process. The training is rigorous and time consuming, and results in a recognised high standard of unbiased decision-making, to the extent that training can do.
David Rose appears not to accept this and claims that some councillors 'want to act on emotion, not science' when deliberating on the problems Southland faces as a result of farming. He talks of Waituna and the serious issues the lagoon faces and how Environment Southland councillors plan to deal with those and the wider Southland issue of intensification of farming. Rose clearly favours some members of our council and says that 'part of the council wants to work with the community on a factual science-informed response', but goes on the smear the 'others' who are 'want to act on emotion, not science' and even worse it seems, to Rose anyway, these errant councillors who don't want to work with the community, who don't want to 'act on science', the emotional decision-makers, want to do it NOW! And what they want to do is MAKE RULES! This, it seems, is very bad, according to Rose's way of thinking.
How Mr Rose knows these details of councilor thinking is a puzzle. Has he been a fly on the wall at our meetings? Mr Rose has not been sitting in the public seating area during council meetings, so far as I have noticed, so he must be relying on second-hand opinion. He's very confident of his sources then, so willing is he to go public with his opinions.
Mr Rose makes another interesting claim. He says, "Federated Farmers have lobbied hard to have a process where farmers' input will be sought while considering the changes ." This puzzles me also. I've not been subject to hard lobbying from the Federated Farmers, either in the boardroom or in private so I'm wondering who has? Mr Rose may well have been lobbying other councillors, but I've seen neither hide nor hair of him. I'll ask tomorrow, who it is that's had the pleasure of his lobbying and I'm guessing, that of his brothers in arms. 
I often hear about the need for all parties involved in the management of Southland's resources to work collaboratively, sing from the same song-sheet and get together around the same table. Federated Farmers' Mr Rose, who should know better, seems determined to take pot-shots from afar, create division and mistrust and subvert the good-faith process. A cynic might wonder if Mr Rose is simply trying to derail the process that's under way to protect Southland's environment and thereby it's economy, from harm, by delaying or even preventing the regional council from doing its job. I suspect that's something that the majority of Southlanders won't look favourably upon.