Law at the End of the World
In this podcast, coming to you from the end of the world, Elizabeth Macpherson and Cristy Clark share developments and insights about how law is being used to support outcomes for the environment and those who depend on it - i.e. everyone.
Law at the End of the World
Why I Research Water Law - Episode 22 (with Elizabeth Macpherson)
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In this episode, we explore the tension inherent in researching environmental law in the context of an increasingly politicised research context. We share Liz's inaugural professorial lecture from October 2024, and Cristy uses the opportunity to interview Liz about why she researchers water law. We discuss typical problems encountered in settler-colonial water law frameworks, and how innovative governance models, like that for the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand, suggest potentail other ways for governing human-water relationships. As always, Cristy and Liz explore recent developments in environmental law, water governance, climate change policies, and Indigenous rights, sharing insights and updates on key legal cases and policy reforms in Australia and beyond. Key hilights include a public law climate case in Aotearoa, a judicial review about engagement with First Nations about water allocation decisions in Australia, and a win for the case opposing oil and gas exploration off the coast of South Africa.
Video of Liz's Professorial Lecture
Why science must reinforce its social contract | Nature
on Science Communication. - by Peter Dearden - Snarked
Setting a pluralist agenda for water governance: Why power and scale matter
Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu - headstart
Iwi proposal would reshape councils around mountains and rivers
Michael John Smith v Attorney-General
High Court rules in favour of native title holders fighting Northern Territory water licence
Court Awards $62 Million to Isabel Communities Over Unlawful Logging
Landmark judgment in South Africa permanently halts Shell’s Wild Coast oil and gas exploration
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I'm talking about legal frameworks which are under reform and might change in the future. What I was speaking to is really quite relevant to the moment that we're in right now going into the election. So I feel like if we've got to put it out there, this is the moment to do that and also to be courageous about doing it because this is what we do as environmental law scholars. We speak truth to power and we explain the way in which legal phenomena work in context. So I think it's our obligation to do that courageously.
SPEAKER_02Hi, and welcome to Lore at the End of the World, where we talk about the future of environmental law. I'm Christy Clark, an associate professor of law at Monash University, located on Moradri Wuwarung and Boonerung Boonarang Country in Australia.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Elizabeth McPherson, a professor of law and Rutherford Discovery Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. University of Canterbury is located in the South Island of Altearua, in the Takiwa of Hungahou. In this podcast, coming to you from the end of the world, we share developments and insights about how law is being used to support outcomes for the environment and the people who depend on it. I.e., everyone. How are you, Christy? What have you been up to?
SPEAKER_02Feel like a broken record, Liz, because what I've been up to is teaching. Yeah. But I feel like the semester has kind of kicked in to gear. Like we're settled, you know, you sort of in the lead up to week one, there's a lot of kind of prep and organizing and it all feels a bit looming. And then as you get underway, it starts to kind of find a rhythm. So yeah, I'm teaching international environmental law and the law of climate change.
SPEAKER_03Cool.
SPEAKER_02And although I'm sometimes struggling to keep them separate in my brain as so many issues are intersecting. And I've got a little cohort of students who are doing both, which is very lovely, but is adding to that blurring of lines. It's been really good. I'm enjoying it. But you know, it's first semester of teaching at a new university with some other roles and things like that. So everything's been full chat. And I was invited to, you know, participate in a very lovely event that sounded incredibly appealing and that I would have loved to accept. And I took a good hard look at my commitments and and really had to just say, I can't do it.
SPEAKER_03Which You can't do everything.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And and I I gave myself overnight to think about it. And when I woke up and thought I can't I cannot do this, I felt very sad.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then I sent off the email and I immediately went, Yep. Alright, well, that's that. That was actually kind of inevitable and clear cut and I don't have any uh regrets, and I kind of moved on. But yeah, I I think it's an indication of where things are at at the moment that every moment is very fully booked. So yeah, how about you? How have you been going?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm not teaching, obviously, so I don't have that experience going on in my life right now, but I can relate to it from previous lives. And new teaching is always a hell of a lot of work. I've been just doing research. I got to do some real science-y site visit stuff last week, which was quite fun, actually, I have to say. Getting out in the field out into a wetland with one of my collaborators from my Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, Richard Bullman, take some sediment cores to try and measure the rates of sequestration in wetlands. So, like the the stuff that is the science that underpins the legal and policy frameworks that I'm writing about. So it's really important for me to get out in the field and see actually how that is done. So it's not just sort of a mystery that ends up being some number that's in some policy document or in some framework. Also just happens to be a really beautiful part of the country. So that was fun. I had to go and buy some new gum boots because I realised I was gonna get laughed at for being a massive townie turning up at the in a in a swamp basically with my leopard print gum boots. So went and bought some real scientist-looking ones. And yeah, no, it was it was a good time. I think last time I said I'd been sick. I was sick last time, came out of that. The kids have just been one after the other sick. The only person in our family who hasn't got sick was Sam, who had the flu jab. So I don't know what that tells you. But I've been kind of nursing a sick Margot since Friday night. She's been pretty much attached to my hip, and I woke up. Yeah, I woke up with a with a cough this morning. But I do feel like with our relationship's quite well quite going quite well because she feels very attached to me. Other than that, Sam and I are sort of starting to plan out renovations for making this transition through to the other side. So I think I'm gonna be spending my evenings and my weekends painting. We've just decided we're gonna do the painting ourselves because of the size of the quote we got given. Out. So yes, I'll probably have lots of time to listen to podcasts while I'm doing that. And speaking of listening to podcasts, after having Inga on the episode last time, I've gone off and listened to a bunch of the episodes of On the Rig. I've really enjoyed it actually, and I've kind of nerded out a bit on productivity hacks. So I think it would be cool, depending on what you think, Christy, for us to do a bit of what technology, you know, what's our tech stack? Sam keeps laughing at me when I say that, that we use as legal academics. And especially keeping it simple for ECRs starting out to what sort of tools are we using to be more productive as legal scholars? So maybe next time we might do that potentially. But what are we going to focus on today?
SPEAKER_02Well, lately I've been thinking, and I think people will probably understand some of the context for this. I've been thinking about the politicization of research. Not just academics. Everyone is operating in a really highly politicized context at the moment. But the issues that this raises for academics broadly and legal scholars, and particularly legal scholars working on issues around environmental law and climate and water justice. I I think these raise quite big issues and kind of thorny and tricky issues to navigate on both a personal and professional level. So that's sort of a an area that I've been thinking that we could focus on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've been thinking about this too. And there's been a lot of chat on social media about it lately, in particular in Alter. I think Australia maybe went through this moment a couple of years ago. But we have a bunch of academics who are speaking out who have been concerned about the restriction of funding and research funding not going to humanities and social sciences. Also in the US, there's been a lot of concern about that too, that there are political reasons why research on climate change, for example, is seen as being too political, the government not wanting to fund it. And it makes you reflect quite a lot on what is the role of the legal academic, because yeah, it's not just like we're scientists who are becoming politicized. Like our job is to express our views and opinions that are based on evidence that relate to the state of the law and the impacts of the law on communities and on the environment. Um, and it's also our obligation to be critic and conscious of society. That's like written into the Education Act that academics have an obligation to be, quote, critic and conscious of society and have the academic freedom to kind of express that. And I saw last week that Peter Gluckman, who is a New Zealand scientist who has been involved in advising the government around science system reform, but he's also the chair of the International Science Council. He published an article in Nature, which we can link to in the show notes. And he's talking about how scientists have an obligation to reinforce the social contract and to point out where things like laws or policies are not going to achieve their stated purpose or going to cause unintended consequences. I don't like the way that he uses the word science because it feels quite exclusive to me sometimes to maybe exclude the humanities and social sciences. But I know that's not what he means because in that article he does specifically say that we're seeing around the world some governments intruding on how science budgets are spent and in particular trying to pull funding away from social sciences and climate change, as specific examples that he mentions there. But this article was published in Nature, so a lot of people were going to read it, and he's and he's a high-profile guy. But also Peter Deedon, who co-leads the Bioprotection Centre of Research Excellence in Altiarua, he picked it up on his substack, and we can link to that too. Because in Peter Deedon's comments, he's also mentioning directly the way in which this is manifesting in Aotiarua, in that researchers who are pointing out policy consequences, negative policy consequences, it feels like there is an effort to maybe not support or not fund that kind of work, which makes it really difficult for people who are in humanities and social sciences, and in particular people in areas like law or political science or economics or other areas like that, because our job is to critically reflect on the law and the policy. And Peter's saying here that he suspects that it's because the political class don't want academics coming around and giving evidence that policies and ideas are ineffective and damaging. So there's definitely a live conversation about this in Aotearoa, and I think there is too in Australia. I also saw that Nicola Gaston, who leads another research centre, she linked to speech by the former chair, I think, of the Australian Academy of Sciences, who was speaking out against this sort of intervention in the independent research process and saying that we really need to see our research institutions call this out where it's happening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so we we had we had a little bit of this, uh it particularly peaked a number of years ago now, not that many years ago, but under the last government. And for example, we had an instance of some ARC projects that had received funding. And just to give people a sense, some of these programs have less than 10% success rate. So once they get funded, they've really been through an enormous amount of scrutiny and competition. But they do kind of have this technicality that they go to the minister for sign-off. And there was one that was focused on issues relating to climate justice, it was sort of around the the youth climate movement, that was pulled. And basically he, the minister of the time, said that he didn't believe that it fit the national interest test. Um and it was considered at the time to be highly political. It actually then the following year under a new administration went back into the process and was awarded funding. So um kind of had a fairly positive ending in that particular instance. But we've also had this historically under the last government where early career fellowships had a similar um situation. And for those people, that can be the difference between a career and academia or not. Yeah. And it's very hard to fix that after the fact. The bigger I mean, maybe not the bigger question, but a big part of that is obviously the incredible difficult nature of getting funding and how rare and difficult it is, but then overlaid over the the politicization of that funding really exacerbates the situation and creates this chilling effect where people might feel more reluctant to engage in research that is potentially politically controversial, or to, in fact, even outside of their but perhaps their grant applications, but do other work that that might make themselves a target in some way. So yeah, it's really concerning.
SPEAKER_01And it's a real challenge for people working at environmental law.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And so that kind of brings us to the the focus of our often interview segment, but in this case it's a it's a special segment because we're going to finally hear from you and we might talk about this a little bit more afterwards, Liz, but this uh is a professorial lecture from October 2024. And we did talk early on in the launch of this podcast about putting it into an episode. Um, and at the time you decided against doing that, which I think really speaks to some of these pressures that people do experience, but potentially others as well, but also that context and and we might discuss that a bit more. But this this lecture provides an overview of your comparative research career, which is focused on water and provides a big picture critique of New Zealand and the world's water law frameworks. And I just want to note for listeners that we are uploading the video of this talk because it has some really useful slides, for example, to help guide you through some of the discussion to YouTube. Um, and we'll provide a link in the show notes. But before I hit play, I do want to provide um a bit of an introduction to our speaker, Dr. Elizabeth McPherson, who is a professor of law and a Rutherford Discovery Fellow at the University of Canterbury, as most of you will know. Liz researches comparative environmental, natural resources, and constitutional law, particularly as they relate to water. She's led numerous grants and published widely on freshwater and marine law and policy, especially as they relate to indigenous peoples' rights. Liz is the author of the award-winning book Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. And she currently leads a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship program in partnership with Nitahu, funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand on Blue Carbon Futures in Auterwah, New Zealand, law, climate and resilience. Liz has over 20 years legal and policy experience advising Indigenous peoples and governments on environmental and natural resources law matters and continues to advise in her fields of expertise as a barrister.
SPEAKER_01I said that my family were gonna pop in in the break, and that's actually quite a lot of people, so thank you for allowing that. Um there are some children in the house, which is lovely. Um Kyota Chris, that was a really awesome presentation and a very hard act to follow, but I'm gonna do my best. Um in this lecture, I'm going to reflect on what I've learnt during 20 years of legal practice and research related to water law. And that practice has been in Aotearoa and also abroad, but I'm gonna focus on my experiences here. My focus today is on the water law frameworks of the Settler State. I'm not an expert on T Kangamari or indigenous law or knowledge. And I'm speaking for myself and any mistakes that I make in mine alone. I was at a conference recently, actually, it was the 10-year anniversary of the Wanganumen River settlement, and somebody came up to me at the end of the conference and said, Have you always worked with water? To which I replied, Yes, I have. And they immediately followed up with a why. And I had to stop and think for a moment. No one had ever asked me this before. Well, I said I spent my early life in the Wider Upper. My parkyard family had taken up land there in 1850, and Wider Upper, a bit like Canterbury, is a place of rivers, lakes, wetlands, and groundwater. My family found an area that had been a wetland, and it included a backwater of the Ruamahanga River, which was redirected from its natural course in the 1960s and no longer flowed into Lake Wadadapa. Water was always around us, and we knew that water was something powerful. If you weren't aware of it and you didn't respect it, it would raise up and make itself null and big through floods, droughts and disease. If that wasn't watery enough, we spent our summers at Lake Toport, and my happiest memories are of long summer days spent diving into the lake, catching cockabilles in the stream, and learning to sail a dinghy. My relationship with water has been the one constant theme, not just of my personal life, but of my professional life too. I was admitted to the bar in 2004 and took up a position in the Māori Legal Services team at Kensington Swan, having previously worked as a clerk at Simpson Griesson. For those of you who remember 2004, it was a tumultuous time in Aotearoa. The Crown had passed the Forsher and Seabed Act in response to the Ngaati Hapa decision of the Court of Appeal, which had recognised that Māori customary title and the Fortune Seabed had not been extinguished and could be recognized by law. I was working under the mentorship of Deborah Edmonds and Professor Richard Boast, and their family are in the audience today. I'd like to acknowledge you guys. And Deborah and Richard had worked on the Forshar and Seabed case. We were suddenly embroiled in urgent inquiries to the White Hinger Tribunal, a potential case going to the Privy Council, and complaints to the United Nations. In the following years, I worked in various capacities on the Tiara Lakes, Wanganui, Waikato, Taraweda Rivers, Lake Topo, Todangamwana, Taur, and more. Water, both fresh and salty, was the big unresolved issue, both from the perspective of Mori rights and interests, but also in terms of broader society and the environment. I would not have imagined that we would be where we are now, with hard-fought Mori rights to the Fortune seabed once again under attack, and Mori rights to freshwater still unresolved. And like we as abroad in Latin America and Australia and coming back home, I've been continually searching for ways that our legal frameworks addressing freshwater and marine ecosystems can be better. Here is a word cloud of my Google Scholar profile. You can see that water is front and centre. I have seen numerous examples of legal failure, of our laws failing to support the health and well-being of water and related communities. But at the same time, I have seen some beacons of hope for a better relationship between the people and water, but first the failures. Most New Zealanders are well aware of the dire state of our waterways and the increasing pressures on water quality and quantity as a result of overuse, mismanagement, pollution, and climate change. This is a snapshot of Lawa's data, which was updated just last week relating to Canterbury. And no, red is not good. In our terror, we are actually ending up with places like Lake Waikare and Waikato with aquatic ecosystems which are completely stuffed. There are some key problems with our legal and policy frameworks for water. Our laws and policy frameworks have largely ignored the reality of water as a complex living ecosystem. Instead, we draw lines on maps and carve out parts of water systems, the beds, the banks, the wildlife, the water, to be regulated by different laws, policies, and institutions. And the boundaries of these jurisdictions don't reflect. the boundaries of natural systems or the scale at which they should be managed. Our legal frameworks have focused on allocating out rights to use water rather than maintaining reciprocal relationships between people and water. We have ignored indigenous peoples and their knowledge in doing so. Sometimes we have tapped on an idea like sustainability, but essentially we have focused on facilitating development. And then we have just kept on going and going. Here is an example of regulatory complexity for just one harbour in Aotiarua in Korirua. How anyone can make sense of that arrangement is beyond me. These problems apply generally to all of our siloed legal frameworks across fresh and saltwater systems, but I'm going to focus on water law frameworks today. So a bit of water law 101. Modern water law around the world is generally statute based. We have water legislation which vests underlying water ownership or authority in the state, the government or the public, empowers authorities to allocate out rights to use water and provides for water policies or plans to be developed at the national or the local scale. The courts may also recognise water rights, including riparian rights for landholders to take and use water flowing in a defined channel through their lands for reasonable use, prior appropriation rights to take and use water on a time prioritized basis, or customary rights for historical water users to take and use water, perhaps indigenous peoples for certain purposes. Water policy or planning focuses on coordinating or sharing the different water uses and attachment between environmental, economic, social or cultural. And we have water rights which are understood as a right to take or pump water from a particular source, a river or an aquifer at a particular time subject to conditions. And those water rights may be bundled where they are an incident of landholding or unbundled where they may be traded in water markets. But around the world indigenous peoples have been excluded from these water law frameworks. They have been excluded from the jurisdiction to manage, governor water according to their own knowledge and worldview, and they've been excluded from a distribution of the available consumptive pool of water to use for any purpose. Drilling down into our Teoro, from 1840 the crown simply assumed that it had authority over water and began to regulate water pursuant to the common law. The statement no one can own water is often relied upon by the Crown in response to Māori freshwater claims. And it's important to remember here as former Chief Justice Elias emphasizing Yaati Upper and Paki number two that English common law rules only apply to Aotearoa to the extent applicable in the circumstances. And the circumstances in Aotearoa both culturally and ecologically are quite different to England. Even then the common law relating to water is itself incredibly complex and variable. And here I want to acknowledge the work of my PhD student Claire Thompson who's currently wading through this historical complexity for her thesis. But even Douglas Fisher, a leading authority on water law, says that the doctrinal foundations of the common law of England with respect to water are difficult to identify. Under Roman law, water was divided into different categories of public and private water and the legal status generally followed that of land, so water on private land could be privately owned as an individual property right. During the Middle Ages the application of the common law to water depended on the circumstances of the case and the nature of the pleadings before court. During the 19th century this was a time of incredible change, disagreement and uncertainty in terms of the English common law there was a broad and fact dependent jurisprudence relating to water across taught and equity. The common law with respect to water was not actually considered midshore until 1851, which was some years after the signing of Tetidity or Waitangi. The case of Embryon Owen in 1851 is the common authority for the proposition put forward that water is public high juris and that none can have property in the water without taking it into possession. It's also the common authority for the doctrine of riparian rights. The common law also developed doctrines about the ownership of the beds and banks of rivers and lakes which varied as between the water bodies considered navigable, non navigable and tidal and these included the feigned and rebuttable admidium philum aquay presumption that a riparian owner owns the bed of a river to the midpoint and if it conveys the land on the banks of the river the bed of the river to the midpoint transfers with the conveyance. In 1903, with increasing settlement and development pressures the New Zealand government passed the Coal Mines Amendment Act and the Water Power Act as an attempt to confirm what it had until then assumed this legislation vested the beds of navigable rivers and rights to generate electricity from water in the Crown. And those were carried over to the Water and Soil Conservation Act and the Resource Management Act of 1991 which vested the sole right to take dam and use water in the Crown. These were all unilateral acts there was never any consent there was never any negotiation and there was never any compensation to Maori. The Crown today has largely delegated this assumed authority to regional councils under the RMA. So coming to the RMA the RMA has a planned statutory approach to water regulation with low incidence of water trading. The overall purpose of the RMA is sustainable management. The RMA doesn't actually say a lot about water but case law has confirmed a first come first serve approach to allocating water. There is no specific recognition of Māori rights to water nor a provision for a Mori water allocation permit or reserve under the RMA. And this approach has allowed powerful interests to accumulate water rights often to the detriment of the environment, Mori and society. And just remember that image from the Lawa data that I showed at the beginning. The RMA does include some overarching obligations towards Mori and the treaty is sections six, seven and eight for now it also provides for some collaborative governance arrangements that can apply to water joint management agreements and marafana and transfers of powers for example. But as noted by the Waitangi Tribunal in the Y262 report these arrangements have almost completely failed to deliver on partnership outcomes transfers of powers have not been used for freshwater other than in Lake Topol in relation to water monitoring activities and Manafakukmo Adohe have also not been used in a widespread manner in a freshwater context. Water governance by regional councils is directed by the National Policy Statement for freshwater management which is also under reform and that directs councils to manage water in a way that gives effect to Tamana or to Y which recognises the connection between human health and the state of our water and prioritizes the health of the water above all other interests. To achieve this councils are required to work with Tangatefenwa in water planning. That sounds pretty good but the Crown has also proposed an amendment to the MPSFM that will remove Tamana Otewai from consenting decisions. So where are these beacons of hope that I mentioned well there have been a number of Treaty of Waitangi settlements that have established collaborative governance arrangements for specific rivers and lakes. The most well known of these is that for the Wanganui River, the second longest river in Aotearoa I have been researching the arrangements for the Wanganui River over the past five years and I want to acknowledge Gerard Albert, Miriam Crib and Haydn Tudua and the Riverine Rights Project. The Wanganui legal system is known as Kawa. The jurisdiction for this Kawa was undermined when the Crown unilaterally and without compensation vested the river bed and regulatory power over the river in itself. The environmental social and economic consequences of that act have been devastating for Wanganui Iwi. It's obstructed their food gathering navigation and traditional use in favor of the intensification of agriculture, urbanization, resource extraction and hydro development. The Wanganui Iwi have consistently resisted the Crown's assumption of control over the river and related litigation is often referred to as the longest court case in New Zealand's history. This has included multiple judicial hearings related to the ownership of the bed of the river and the right to use the water in it, an inquiry by the Waitangi Tribunal and eventual settlement with the Crown in 2014. The Treaty settlement for the Wanganui River under the Tiawatupua Act of 2017 establishes a river governance arrangement that takes a completely different approach to our standard order law frameworks. And that approach is underpinned by their worldview and their legal system. The Wanganuiwi see their river as Tiawatupua which is not just a resource to be owned but a living entity and their ancestor this is not a relationship underpinned by a modernist or dualist understanding of conservation where pristine scenic places are locked up and cordoned away from human use it's an approach that recognizes human entanglements with landscapes. As well as caring for the river, the Wanganuiwi use the river for trade, travel, social and cultural connection as a food basket and a fishery and as a source of resources. This treaty legislation recognizes that the river is an integrated and living whole from the mountains to the sea the river is declared to be a legal person with all of the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person, which we lawyers know to mean the rights to sue, be sued, enter into contracts and hold property. The title to the riverbed is vested in the river itself and the river is represented by Top Tupua, the human face, with one crown nominated and one IWI nominated member. And international scholars are often interested in Topot and consider it to be the ultimate source of power within the arrangement but Topo routinely refer issues to the Hapu who have place based Kawa in authority to decide on what should happen. The legislation sets up this collaborative governance framework for the river which is called tepa oda and brings hapu together with government recreational and other commercial interests the driving force of the arrangement is the river values, the tuputikawa. These kawa are the intrinsic values that represent the essence of the river. They reflect the direct link between the health of the people and the health of the river. They emphasize the integrated and connected nature of the river and acknowledge the responsibility of the Iwi to work collaboratively with everybody in the catchment to further the river's health and wellbeing. The recognition of Kawa, so the indigenous legal system in the Teotupor Act presents significant implications for the exercise of Wamanui jurisdiction. Decision makers, government decision makers must recognize and provide for the river's status as a living entity and the Kawa of the Wamanuiwi when they make decisions about the use and management of the river. And in the words of tribal leader Gerard Albert this is enabling a paradigm shift and we are already seeing significant differences in the way that development is being approached on the river and how a range of interest groups are coming together to put the river first. The Wanganui model is a negotiated settlement and it's not perfect. But it shows what we could do to shift away from the fragmented and duplicative and facilitative water law frameworks that we currently have towards something based on an understanding of water as a living and related system. So what's the state of the jurisprudence related to water in Aotearoa? Well the Waitangi Tribunal has emphasized the need for the Crown to settle Māori proprietary claims to water as more than ownership, rather tanga. The urgency of a remedy on Māori freshwater rights and interests was emphasized by the Supreme Court more than a decade ago in the Māori River power case of 2013. There have been a number of cases coming before the New Zealand courts which seek various remedies with respect to water. There have been a series of cases about the ownership of the land under the water their beds leading to the river and lake settlements like the Wanganui one. The Supreme Court decision in Paki number two about Awaikato has left it open as to whether Mahdi customary title remains in the beds of rivers depending on the circumstances and the tikanga of the case. But what about the water itself as early as 1929 Judge Archison emphatically recognised the unextinguished customary ownership of Leason traditional occupation and use. However the courts have yet to settle the question of Mori customary title to water and until now all serious attempts have been obstructed on jurisdictional grounds. Richard Boast, Andrew Idoueti, Jacinta Dudu and others have variously observed applying the President Inghasi Alpa, that Ewyan Hapu could make out a common law claim to water, noting the high bar for extinguishment. But I know from my time in Australia that there are significant limitations to native title and we are seeing this play out right now in terms of the Tuckerwana, the foreshire and seabed of course there are other grounds on which a Maori claim to fresh water could be made and I know the High Court case being brought by Nightahou in this regard. The Crown may also owe Maori obligations with respect to water as a fiduciary a relational duty of good faith or the honour of the Crown noting comparative North American jurisprudence. And a water case on these facts is yet to become before the courts in Aotearoa, although it was alluded to in the lands Ikefenua, paki and Wakatu cases. If the Crown owes such duties to Māori, it may be under an obligation to hold waters on trust for Māori pending the resolution of their water claims and given the deteriorating state of our water resources and the pressures they continue to face from development interests I would argue that they should do so. Coming back to Tea Tupwa while the legislation focuses on collaborative water governance rather than water rights and the intention may well be to stay out of the courts rather than to go back there, the Act leaves it open for Wanganui to make a claim with respect to the water in the river in the future in the future when decisions about water allocation in the Wanganui come inevitably before the courts the case will turn not just on the principles of the RMA like sustainable management, the case will turn on the colour of the Wanganui Iwi and that possibility leaves me with a lot of hope for the future of our precious freshwater tanga. The issue of water rights and governance is live in many parts of the world just this month the federal US government has introduced the Northwestern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act, which provides for the largest ever US water settlement and as part of this settlement the tribes are able to lease or transfer water to support water security in the Colorado basin and enabled revenue raising. In Manitoba First Nations have filed a case seeking a declaration that Lake Winnipeg has the rights to life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and they did that in response to the impacts of hydro on the lake. Being a comparative law scholar a large part of my job involves following these developments around the world and trying to bring home lessons for how we can drive legal innovations related to water here. So what's next for me this year I've commenced a five year Rutherford Discovery fellowship in partnership with NYTAHO on the legal frameworks relating to blue carbon but that's the story for another day. A professorial portfolio cannot be built alone as we have heard today. I want to thank foremost the Iwi and Hapu and Indigenous nations who have shared their knowledge with me so patiently and so generously I also want to acknowledge my colleagues at the Universities of Canterbury and Melbourne where I did my PhD and worked and also the funders who have enabled this work especially MB, the Royal Society and the research councils of Norway, Chile and Canada and to my family who have supported the time that it takes me away from them. Thank you. This photo of my kids at Lake Runner reminds me of what it is all about passing a connection to water on to the next generation of water warriors because we are going to need them. Nordu water is the life giver of all things tenakoto tenakoto kito I couldn't even listen to this recording of my professorial lecture for about two years. I have to say and I don't know if it's a tradition everywhere in the world but in Altio we have this tradition in most universities if not all universities where when you finally make full professor they force you to give a lecture within the first year of becoming a professor. That's called your professorial lecture. And the one that I did I had about half an hour it's not very long to do. It's supposed to kind of give an overview of your whole career and the contribution that you've made across your career but you've also got to do this in front of a really large audience. So you you've got to do it in front of the leadership of the university and of your faculty in front of your peers and you might have peers in my case from across a range of disciplines so I'm trying to speak to a range of different disciplines not just lawyers. But then there'll be a bunch of hardcore lawyers from my faculty there, legal scholars who I've got to show that I've read a few cases, understand the law too. And then also your family who you really just worried are going to fall asleep halfway through. So I did find this to be a really diverse audience to try and speak to compared to when we're usually giving talks at conferences or or public events or anything else really. And I kind of agonized over it afterwards. In fact anyone else I've spoken to who's done the professorial lecture felt this a similar way about it, found it sort of a deeply unsettling experience. But I have been reflecting on it more lately because a lot of the things that I spoke about which you know could be considered to be slightly politically sensitive or legally sensitive, they're really timely at the moment. I'm talking about legal frameworks which are under reform and and might change in the future. What I was speaking to is really quite relevant to the moment that we're in right now going into the election some further developments in court cases and things that are developed in that lecture that are things that we're talking about on the podcast. So I feel like if we've got to put it out there, this is the moment to do that and also to be courageous about doing it because this is what we do as environmental law scholars. We we speak truth to power, as Peter Dearden said, and we explain the way in which legal phenomena work in context. So I think it's our obligation to do that courageously. So it's I guess what we've done today.
SPEAKER_02So I want to start just with a question that we always ask our guests, Liz. And also I think sort of tweak it slightly because Inga spoke in our interview that we had in on the last podcast around this kind of theme of back to zero. Like this idea that a lot of people come to academia after having already established themselves in another profession. And once they finally land their feet somewhere in academia, what they discover is that to some degree they've gone back to zero. They no longer have necessarily the same networks and sort of established expertise that they had in their previous career or profession. But they have yet to sort of develop them in academia but they're not at the beginning of their career. And so I I guess including that experience of being somewhat back to zero, which I think has a slightly different tweak for legal academics who've come from the legal profession. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your pathway into academia. You know what what led you there in the first place?
SPEAKER_01Yeah I really related to what Inga was saying about going back to zero and also about sort of falling into it accidentally and in a similar way actually to the way in which she got into academia but I was in legal practice. So I started off really young in legal practice. I think I was only 21 when I started working as a lawyer. And I was working at a big firm in Wellington originally on a bit of commercial, a bit of litigation and then I went to another firm when I felt like the real corporate law path wasn't going to be right for me. I went to join another large commercial firm but which had a team that specialised in Māori legal services. And it was at a time when there are a lot of Whitehang tribunal inquiries going on in Aotearoa. So you know some of the big ones that people would know like to Uduweta and um National Park and Wanganui, the Central North Island, Todanga Moana, a lot of the river and the lake settlements and were being negotiated or were there were urgent claims going to the tribunal. So I got to have a bit of a baptism of fire at the the height of treaty litigation in Aotearoa and got to work with a bunch of really cool people, many of whom have gone on to do amazing things like become judges or you know become academics or do other things. And I really enjoyed it but I also wanted to travel so I went overseas and I I went away after a few years for a really long time. I was away for 11 years. I worked in practice first for a big firm in Melbourne, Arnold Blockle and later on in government for a really long time. I worked as the principal lawyer for Aboriginal affairs for the state of Victoria and got to work in the Department of Prairie and Cabinet got to see how policy is made and how legal issues are managed within government within state government and I kind of got to a point with that when I was getting a bit bored I was thinking about having kids and I thought I'd like to go work for the UN So I'd also I should say I'd done a stunt a stint in Chile because my ex-husband's Chilean and I did a couple of stints living in Chile working as a foreign lawyer and later on during my PhD but I thought I should work for the UN and that would enable me to travel around the world and and you know be an international lawyer and realised pretty quickly that you had to have a master's if you wanted to go work for the UN. So I applied for a scholarship and went enrolled in MPhil actually at Melbourne Uni and got in and started that MPhil and pretty quickly realized that I had found somewhere that I enjoyed being a lot more than in practice. I actually ironically really enjoyed being able to to express my view about what I thought about things. When you when you're working in practice you are beholden to what your clients want to achieve and taking the cases that they bring to you. When you're in government you're beholden to hold the policy line of the government not be overly critical of of what the government is doing, even though you're supposed to be frank and fearless. So I realised pretty quickly that I wanted to convert to a PhD which I did and have never left academia since then. So I was over in Melbourne for a while but I had to come back to Aotearoa in order to get a permanent academic job because it was so difficult to get a job at Melbourne Uni or actually anywhere in Australia. And by that point I'd had three kids. I had three kids during my PhD and in terms of the back to zero thing it really was back to zero for me. I was a senior executive within government by the time I left and I went into the academic world knowing nothing. I remember not knowing what a research question was. I didn't know what a hypothesis was. I remember feeling like everyone at Melbourne Uni was so incredibly smart and I was just the dumbest person in every room. But I I think probably because of that I worked really super hard and also because I had babies small babies and I didn't have any time to waste and like you I was like you know breastfeeding a baby typing my thesis. And so yeah but I just really loved it. I love the flexibility and the honesty and the quirkiness of everyone and the in the connections the friends that's when I met Erin we started at the same time Erin O'Donnell met Lily O'Neill Julia Dem a lot of my friends now so yeah I I fell into academia I also found law quite harassy which Angus spoke about architecture in the 90s and I just felt like academia was a more respectful and a more interesting place to be hard relate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah so let me turn to a little bit of the kind of more legal maybe nitty-gritty parts of the lecture just some things that I was hoping we could explore a little bit further. So you describe New Zealand's water law as fragmented and this is certainly unfortunately not unique to New Zealand. But there are different laws for the beds, for the banks for the wildlife and for the water itself as just some examples. And I know this is a big question, but what might a genuinely integrated legal framework for for example a river or a basin look like in practice? Um and and you do mention sort of Wanganui as a different approach but it's its own unique place-based approach. So I guess I'm wondering whether there are some key f features or principles that might kind of stand out as a way through this very fragmented approach that has historically been established.
SPEAKER_01Yes. So coming back to the original theme today around how difficult sometimes it is to get support or funding for legal research or political research or humanities and social sciences, a lot of the time if you're working on environmental issues and you're a legal scholar or you're someone from HASS, you end up kind of attaching to a science team who are looking at a broader issue and will get funded, which was kind of how a lot of my early research projects developed and I'm I I was involved in the Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge and a project there around ecosystem-based management. And ecosystem-based management is a term that reflects ecology, reflects Western science. But actually I had that project going on at the same time as I had my Wanganui Legal Rights for Rivers project. And I realized this incredible cross-fertilization of ideas between what my Māori collaborators were talking about in terms of a relational ontology of feeling related to a river catchment as an integrated living system and what the ecologists I was working with in in marine ecosystem-based management were saying about having to manage a complex ecosystem and humans being a part of that ecosystem, a dependent part of that ecosystem rather than something separate from it. And I could see these two ideas coming together. And one thing in particular that really helped me to identify some key features of a better way to do this was learning from ecologists talking about scale. And I I I ended up getting involved in another project which was called scale and ecosystem-based management. And they brought me in as kind of like the token legal scholar policy expert and they were talking about scale. And again I didn't really know much about scale because we don't talk a lot about scale in law. Probably geographers talk a lot about scale legal geographers, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But in other fields of law it's not something you know it's not something that international law scholars really talk about. But so we spent a lot of time thinking intellectually about scale and and really getting down to the foundation of what was important when we're talking about scale it's time and space. And we're models that we could identify that were more relational, adaptive, fit for the local context, the ecology and the purpose we could identify with them that they took a different approach to time and to space. They wouldn't be dividing up space based on arbitrary administrative units, which is what our Western law frameworks do. They would be looking at a living system and what would be a logical boundary to put around a living system. So for a river it's going to be the entire catchment everything that's connected to it, all of the tributaries, all of the people who live within that area and their livelihoods and their economies and their relationships. They all have to form part of that administrative unit. When you look at time we're not talking about three year election cycles we're talking about going right back to many generations back of our ancestors and how they related to that place and then projecting forward to you know like we when Wanganui talk about the intergenerational planning, they're talking 500 to a thousand years into the future and in you know talk about for our children and our children after and our children after. So that much more you know what what Western legal scholars would call rights for future generations, you know, as Emily Jones spoke about on the pod that those things were just kind of taken for granted in a lot of the successful models that I was studying. But really you could boil it down to looking at the scale of a regulatory system across time and space.
SPEAKER_02And I've just kept that in the back of my head ever since and I think I I'll put in the show notes a link to an article that you and your collaborators publish an award winning article on on that exact topic because I think it really does a brilliant job of of bringing those themes together in a way that's very clearly articulated and spelt out for people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah it took us a long time to get there too for something that basic.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I think basic is often very deceptive. It looks basic but there's a very there's a lot of complexity behind basic and then a lot of very strong communication. Alright so then to actually turn to the settlement, the subsequent legislation, the model it has been the focus of intense international scholarship. And I wondered if there were like say three things that it would be lovely if international scholars understood better about the arrangement when when they're starting to engage with that curiosity.
SPEAKER_01It is an emblematic model. It is famous around the world a lot of people are interested in it a lot of people are inspired by it that's a great thing I am one of those people too like I I'm an outsider to that community I have relationships there but I'm not from there obviously and often I have to step back and listen to the voices who are speaking from there. But speaking from that perspective what I've found useful is to actually just listen to those voices. I think there is there is so much being said by the experts of Wanganui about their own model and and it's publicly available and people can find it. There's a lot written in a Midiama crab Hayden Tudo I've written about it. There's a lot written by the actual institutions the local institutions ngatangatitiaky or wanganui and to potupua and people can find all of that on the on the web. They don't need to go and listen to a TED talk by an American professor or a professor from Oxford who wants to talk about it because actually they can find everything that they need to know about it locally. And I think it's really important to um pay respect to the original knowledge holders. I think often I'm reading scholarship I I get asked a peer review papers that have been written about Wunganui and and they're actually just not doing that. And it's a really important lesson for everywhere else in the world too. Like if we're if we're writing or researching Bururung in Melbourne we can make sure that we're going back to the First Nations who they are the experts on that particular river. If we're doing a trato in Colombia there are Colombian Afro descendant and indigenous scholars who are experts on those places and so that should be the starting point. It doesn't mean that we're not interested in reading what other people are writing about them but completely ignoring the knowledge of the local experts you actually just really miss the point a lot of the time and there's a lot of international scholarship that really tries to put a square peg in a round hole. It's it's trying to fit Wanganui into a broader narrative about the global rights of nature movement or just rights generally or maybe guardianship or stewardship or these other very Western ontological concepts that are from a completely different world, a completely different place and a completely different time. So I think that's really kind of the most important thing. I guess the the only other thing to say in terms of Woman is because there's so much rich primary and secondary data about that model, people don't need to extract knowledge and sort of you know expect things from the community because it's already out there. And then and there are also other places where there's similar things exist and there could be a need for external researchers. And then I'm going to say one other thing because it comes back to the scale thing about time. So one thing I find really hard is when again people have got their blinkers on, they're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole they're trying to look at a model like Wanganui or to Udawita or something and they'll say okay well it's been in certain number of years why's the river not 99% pure and just actually spending some time with ecologists and understanding how long it takes to repair ecological damage at the scale that you've got when you've still got engineering interventions on the river for example that this model has no in there we have no control over you've got a hydro dam. But it does tend to come up again and again especially new people coming to the field like well what difference has it actually made? Yeah yeah and it's just not it's not the right question to ask but it's because people people everyone has their own worldview and and some people are more aware that they have a worldview than other people. Some people are not aware at all that they're looking at it through a particular lens.
SPEAKER_02Yeah well summarized and yes I I've almost gotten to the point of either just not peer reviewing or just having sort of yeah a dot point of please go and read please note. Because yeah that these are the issues and then as you say it's such a good reminder as someone who you know who is interested in other places of just you don't know what you don't know and it's and you sort of suddenly realize the extent to which that can really trip you up. So yes mere culpa. Alright so you point out that a customary title to water itself not just riverbeds has never actually been settled by the courts in the lecture. Yeah. There's a range of things I could ask about this but I don't want to wade too much into tricky waters. I want a better way of describing it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But one thing I did wonder is why do you think this question has remained unresolved for so long I've been looking at this too actually not just in terms of freshwater but also the fortress and seabed the marine coastal area where you see a similar thing going on. And actually I again it's like every new research project I get I often try and pivot and do something new because I kind of get bored quite easily and my new project is supposed to be about something else but I'm seeing the same patterns happen again. I'm seeing the same patterns in the marine coastal areas I'm seeing with fresh water. These are finite resources there's competition over access to use them and control them and there are power dynamics. And what we are often seeing in the case of water both fresh and salty is a clash between public and private rights. At least in in Western law and you know in the common law and in the Anglo-Saxon legal systems that we've inherited there are some assumptions around public rights of access and of you know navigation of fair passage of access to beaches of access to rivers all those sorts of things and and they serve a good purpose right like it's it's a nice idea to think that anyone can go down to their local river or their local beach and swim. But actually colonial governments have really wielded those public rights and even the commons which again is supposed to be a good idea they've wielded those entitlements in order to prevent having to let Indigenous people continue to exercise authority over their places that were never lawfully taken away from them. So I I think that's why this question remains unresolved and there is a lot of ontology in it too you know there are a lot of assumptions around what law can or cannot recognise and those are assumptions that are inherited from the English common law and before that from from Roman law and other places. You know the idea no one can own water. But if no one can own water is used as a shield to ever allowing indigenous peoples to have access to manage and use water in relation to their traditional territories that was never lawfully taken from them, then it it's another injustice. So I think that's really where it is but I allude to this a bit in the professorial lecture but some of the research that my PhD students have been doing has been really fascinating because they're actually going back and trying to trace back the nature of rights to water back through the English common law and then back to Roman law. And in fact it's just a complete mess. It's a total mess. There's r there are so many of these things under nuisance and tort and equity and you know there are public law, private law there are all these different doctrines and really they were about the law was trying to develop solutions for how to share water within catchments and within multiple people groups of users. There's nothing particularly kind of unusual about that but there certainly was is no doctrine that says indigenous peoples should be able to get access or get land back, but they shouldn't get water back or they shouldn't get land underwater. Like th there's no logical argument for that.
SPEAKER_02And the law was defined by pluralism. It was incredibly place-based. The idea that there was some sort of unified or unitary homogenized system in relation to rights and property is just a complete fiction and and there's zero like the the evidence is all contrary for both land and water. So yeah absolutely but we do have this we do have this single story narrative with incredibly flimsy support base that has been used. And you know notably not used in Australia where we've created water markets. So that's yeah yeah interesting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah these very strong assumptions can be just placed to one side when it when it meets the interests of a particular elite.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Alright so another big question I'm throwing them at you. So if you compare your work across our Toro Australia and Latin America particularly Chile But also Colombia, for example. What do you think distinguishes governance models that do seem to be shifting power in comparison to those that seem to indicate that they're perhaps acting in a more symbolic way? And here I just caveat with I think oftentimes it's too early for us to really know what those long-term shifts in culture and ontology and even legal assumptions will be. But to the extent that we can see these early signs, what might be some of those indicators that you've kind of started to get a spidey sense for?
SPEAKER_01Law in and of itself doesn't determine outcomes. It's power, politics, and money that determine outcomes. And increasingly, I think it's money. Like in in a capitalist system, it's wonderful where there are water governance models that are developed in participatory ways that reflect legal pluralism, that are led by local communities, that are led by indigenous communities, that adopt indigenous relational worldview. These are the strong models that we see where, you know, the time and the space are working together with the community and people seem to be buying into these models. That's great. But the other thing that they have is that they have resourcing thrown behind them. And I think it's naive to to believe that you can have a grand kind of declaration of rights that's that's going to make a huge difference in the world if you don't fund the work that's needed to implement it. And to continue to implement it in a participatory and devolved way. Because that does take a lot of time. And also not just funding the governance, funding the science that's needed to contribute to good decision making. And the the matarunga, the indigenous knowledge that's needed to create good decision making. Like none of that's free in a capitalist system, unfortunately. Though people who are going to do that work need to be paid to do it, or else they'll be doing other things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. To to me that's the bit that I have been surprised doesn't feature as strongly in scholarship, for example, around Tiavatipua, because the there has been it could always be better, but the the sort of the thickness of the institutional framework there is backed up by money. And that same resourcing is absent in other models that have set up governance systems which I mean they're not the same, but they have th they they seem to have potential in the way that they've been thought through and designed, but they haven't so far gained traction because as you say, in a capitalist system, no one's resourcing them to actually get that traction, which just creates this incredible barrier. Um but commonly the idea is is there a difference between whether it was a writer, a personhood, or a this or a you know, these kind of like almost yeah, rhetorical legislative terminology stuff. Whereas glaring difference is money. Yeah, that's like it's just an interesting feature that it doesn't seem to have been as much the focus as I would have anticipated.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and maybe there's a reason for that too. And I mean, all of these governance models are c are kind of a bit fragile. They're all under-resourced still. And the resourcing's patchy, like the resourcing has to come from here and there and there, like they're still not effectively resourced, but th there is some resourcing. Whereas with some of the other models around the world, there there isn't any institutionality and there isn't any resourcing. Maybe there is some from philanthropic or the or the NGO sector. But I think too that what would be more useful that we don't have a lot of analysis of what are the cost savings of devolving governance power to the people who are related to it, that then results in uh fewer conflicts going to the more senior courts, fewer disputes, more upfront planning, and less reactive kind of, you know, if you think about like planning law in Victoria, like I used to work for the Department of Planning and Community Development, like the amount of money that's wasted in VCAT and these other these planning disputes, like the the idea of something like integrated catchment management like they have in Wongano is about is about set settling that stuff at the beginning so that you have fewer conflicts later on. And I'm sure that that must like result in massive financial cost savings to the economy. But I I think we could do with more research like that. And Julia Talbot Jones has done quite a bit of work around this, for example, but yeah, yeah, we there could be more, I think.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, definitely. Yeah, agreed. Alright.
SPEAKER_02So in the talk you mentioned the at the time proposed amendment to remove uh Tamana or Taway from consenting decisions. So I just wondered if I know you've you've spoken about this since on the podcast, but given that that will be fresh in people's minds, I wondered if you could provide a bit of an update and just I guess talk about the practicalities of what this might look like in practice for a council weighing up a water allocation decision or another, you know, a resource consent that affects water, perhaps more relevantly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, tomato water why is really interesting because it's something that hasn't captured the global attention in the same way as the Wimanoe River model has. But it was our it was our national level freshwater policy document. You know, it'll be like the Murray Darling Basin Plan, for example, in Australia. Like the the but the national policy statement of freshwater management, and it included this principle to Mana or Towai, which I think the first time it was put in was about I'm just trying to think, it was it 2010. It's had several iterations. The idea behind it was it was reflecting a Maori worldview where people were related to water and it cr and it created a hierarchy of obligations. So instead of just people have the right to take water for irrigation or for these purposes, it was more like people have an obligation to put the health and well-being of the water first, then after that a right to take water for social and cultural purposes, then later that, you know, economic purposes. So it had kind of a hierarchy which we don't currently have in our, we didn't otherwise have in our water allocation framework, which is just first carbon, first served. So it was a cool thing and it was developed, you know, in a in a fairly participatory way. It wasn't perfect, you know, some people were critical of it in some ways, but we were starting to see it make a difference in the way that councils were developing their plans and how they were making decisions about water sharing effectively within catchments. And the current coalition government had their eyes set on it from the beginning. And it has in fact been taken out of consenting decisions. It's no longer um not even not required. I think decision makers, which are generally local regional councils at the moment, are not allowed to take Timana or Tiwai into account when they're making decisions. They've also had a pause on developing their freshwater plans, so it's out of their freshwater planning process as well, pending the changes to the RMA, the new national freshwater policy statement that's in development. And, you know, really the election is kind of um putting some uncertainty over this whole thing at the moment. But I it's kind of like to my auto-wise gone. I don't know whether we could see it come back if we have a change of government, but it really feels like it's gone. And it I used to refer to this when I'd give talks. Like I would give people would ask, you know, what what impact is something like Wanganui having in the broader mainstream framework because Wanganui came out of a particular place-based treaty settlement. And I'd be like, Well, it's not the same thing, but look at what we have over here. This is our whole freshwater planning system, and we have something that looks based around an idea that people are related to water and have an obligation to care for it. We have that here. So it's sad. I feel sad about it.
SPEAKER_02Alright, so finally, I guess to kind of look backwards to look forward. Your current project on blue carbon with Naitahu, which we've spoken about separately on the part. I wondered what lessons from freshwater lore you're carrying into that work. I know you also have the Sustainable Seas project, so that might obviously feature as well in terms of lessons. But I guess, you know, you you have already mentioned that you're seeing these similar patterns. I just wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit more around some of those echoes that that you're discovering, despite the intention in many ways to to shift gears.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, coming back to scale and time and space, I am refusing to draw a line between freshwater and marine. My my core focus is in the coastal area because that's where people congregate. In a country like Ao Troy, but also in Australia, you know, people congregate around the coast. It's a place where there are a lot of resources. There are freshwater systems and there are saltwater systems. They're all interconnected from the mountains to the sea, and the people feel connected across these spaces. Not like we put a fence across a river mouth and say, okay, that bit's fresh and that bit's salty. So that's one lesson. I think actually it means that all my freshwater work is useful for my marine work. And I I am surprised and often shocked how many fora I am in, either fresh or salty, where people will say they only do one or the other. Guilty.
SPEAKER_02Yes. I'm still totally out of my depth. But I mean, you swim in a river out to the ocean, like that's the best bet that meeting spot where the tide kind of tells you this part's fresh, this part's salty. Like I totally take your point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and when we're doing the some of this, you know, wetland stuff, coastal wetland stuff, it's actually it it's it's it's scientifically near on impossible. It makes no sense. Yeah, these are brackish, you know, they're part fresh, they're part salty, they're all interconnected. They hold species, people care about them, the food baskets. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Pair point well made.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it but I do think our legal frameworks are really unhelpful the way that they divide it up. And being a bit of a legal geography nerd like you, it just it's so much fodder for critique and academic writing. And really, it it's a really easy argument to make. Our legal frameworks need to stop dividing these ecosystems in arbitrary and nonsensical ways. And we need to have more discussions in international law of the sea fora about the the relationship with freshwater ecosystems, and we need to have more conversations in freshwater fora about the impacts of decision making in rivers on estuaries and on the ocean. And so that's the that's a lesson that I'm taking through for sure. And also it just makes it really easy because I don't have to stop doing any fun freshwater stuff because I can say that I'm taking the mountains to the sea, to Ki Thai approach, and does it make sense to to to say that I'm only gonna look at this, you know, I'm only gonna look at 12 nautical miles out to 200 nautical miles. I'm not gonna do that. But a lot of the legal frameworks that we have do it, and especially in the climate context, they often do restrict themselves to a particular geographic. And that's jurisdictional. Yeah. It's jurisdictional, it's legal, it's also highly colonial. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, our next section focuses on what's new in environmental law. So in this section we discuss any developments in environmental law, including legislation, judgments, publications, and news. So Liz, do you have any updates to share? Let's not pretend they're brief. Let's just say updates.
SPEAKER_01I feel like they're quite brief today, actually. I'm just like, phew, I'm glad I got through that interrogation. Now I can do the easy part. No, my updates actually are quite brief. First on resource management reform, but just in Alteror, just because I've been talking about this every episode and people may be following on. Not really an update, but an update is that the replacement of the Resource Management Act looks like it's going to go through before the election in November, as the government has promised. It's now awaiting passage at the committee of the whole house stage. It hasn't had its third reading yet or royal assent, but I haven't heard anything to the effect that that's not going to go through. We're also waiting in terms of the conservation reform. I haven't put this on my update, but that's had a that's also in train, no major development with that yet, except that the government did propose a new kind of national policy around conservation. But I haven't had a chance to look at that yet, so I'll put that on my next update. The government's also pushing through local government reform. And this is important in the environmental space because it is local government who make the main decisions around planning and consenting that determine the development and use of the environment and natural resources. So that's going on at the moment, and that is presenting a lot of uncertainty for councils. Councils were invited to propose new unitary authority arrangements. So they wanted to have fewer of the of local government entities, and they had put it out to councils to try and figure out how they were going to combine with other councils and around geographic areas. I haven't been following this really closely, mostly because I'm not a local government lawyer. I'm primarily an environmental lawyer. I'm tangentially interested, but I don't have time to keep up with it. I have been interested because at the same time I spoke about this last week, that some of the changes to the Resource Management Act have resulted in fewer opportunities for Iwi and Hapu Mari to participate in local planning and decision making at the local government level, getting rid of the Manafakahun or Adohi agreements, which I mentioned in the last episode. And I was really interested to see on social media that some Iwi have decided to develop their own proposals for local government reform. You know, even though they they haven't necessarily been asked to do that, they are exercising their Rangatiratanga or their inherent rights and authority to determine how decisions about the use of the of the environment are going to be made within their local areas. So I think that's really cool. And there were two in particular that jumped out to me I thought were interesting. The first of those is the Naitahu proposal, which we can link to in the show notes. And they are proposing that it be organized around the large river catchments, which makes sense, right? From a time and space ecosystem-based approach. Whereas, you know, the other, the way we could do local government geographical jurisdiction, the way we've always done it, who knows? Sometimes it's a river, sometimes it's just a line ruled across the country. So I thought that was cool in terms of what we've been talking about, time and space. And then in the Central North Island, the Iwi around, you know, Wonganui and the in the Tongared or the National Park, the Kahui Monga area in the Central North Island, they have proposed a an arrangement that reflects their relationship with the mountains, the Kahui Monga.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That that unite a lot of the tribes in their area and also where the rivers start and flow out to the sea. So again, kind of a letting the land and and the people determine the way that it's organized rather than this arbitrary approach that we've seen before. So hopefully someone listens to those proposals. They're not official proposals as part of this approach where the government's asked for. The councils themselves are determined them. But they are the tribe standing up and saying how they think it should be done. So I think that's cool. Yeah. Cool. With climate change, I mentioned the tort liability amendment legislation in our last episodes. That went to the Justice Select Committee and that select committee, which is supposedly a select committee of politicians in government who are experts on justice issues, I guess. And they have recommended that it be passed without amendment. So yeah, it's now sitting at third reading, and it's one more step away from enactment. So that is very likely to go through. But meanwhile, at the same time, we have another case that's just started in the Supreme Court today, which is another climate case involving Smith, another Smith and Attorney General proceeding. But this is not a tort claim, this is a public law claim. And this claim, Smith, who's a co-martw of Narpuy in Natikahu, is arguing that the crowd's response to climate change has been inadequate. Um, and in particular because of the disproportionate impacts on Māori and Tehungaroya Māori, which is a Mahdi Law Society, and Takahui Tikatangata, which is the Human Rights Commission, have both been given leave to intervene in the proceedings and are participating in that. So, yeah, as I mentioned, it's different to the tort case. It's a public law case. Smith's claiming that the Crown's inadequate response breaches its public law duty to protect him. And he's making that claim under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the right to life and culture, as well as obligations arising out of Titidity or Waitangi. The courts have not let this case proceed. So this is an appeal to a strikeout. So it's struck out at the High Court, the Court of Appeal upheld the strikeout, and now it's going to the Supreme Court. In terms of what the Court of Appeal said, the Court of Appeal thought that Smith's claim couldn't succeed in this case because the Climate Change Response Act provided a comprehensive regulatory framework for making policy decisions around climate change, and so it wasn't appropriate for the courts to step in. We talked about this a bit in the last episode. In fact, the Climate Change Response Act is very limited in our Tedo's. It's limited to mitigation and setting up the emissions trading scheme. It doesn't effectively deal with things like climate adaptation. And it's also really ineffective in terms of mitigation. So I I feel as a constitutional law scholar that in that situation, if you do have a policy framework or a statutory arrangement and it is not achieving the objective that the rights under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act say that people are entitled to, or the rights that the Titutch or Waitangi says that Maori are entitled to, then they should have recourse to the courts. And it's a really important treaty principle that the right of redress and the right for if I are aggrieved, that they can go to the court. It's also a really important constitutional law principle that people have recourse to the courts when their rights are not being upheld. So I think that there's a good case to be heard in the Supreme Court. What's going to be controversial, I think, about this case is this issue of the separation of powers and what is the role within our constitutional framework of the courts versus the role of parliament. And there has been a lot of disinformation put out there by right-wing, I mean, trolls effectively on the internet, who are posting a lot about the courts overstepping their role and that it's only the role of the legislature to do these sorts of things. But we're a common law country. Like the courts hold a really important role in this discourse that goes on between parliament and the courts holding them to account. So I I hope that the Supreme Court is courageous and does what it has to do in this one. Because I actually think that the public law case is it's a better place for this to be heard than taught. Yeah, so it's one to watch, and I'll provide more updates once we hear what the result is, which is probably, you know, not going to be for a while, I would have thought.
SPEAKER_02Do you know? I assume that they are drawing on the ICJ's climate advisory opinion because some of these specific issues around I guess like around accountability and around scrutiny were addressed by the International Court of Justice.
SPEAKER_01I am quite sure that they will be. Yes. Yeah. The Supreme Court made an effort to make this, you know, very visible hearing, and it was actually possible. I could have listened in this week, but I've just been too busy with other things. I am sure they're making those arguments, but I am also often quite surprised at how little attention domestic lawyers in Altero give to international law arguments. Yeah, okay. I don't know if it's the same in Australia. I think kind of it is. You know, people have this idea that international
SPEAKER_02We we suddenly seem to have shifted, so that's why I thought it was interesting. There seems to have been a real shift just very recently, and I I'm not sure exactly what prompted that, but I was wondering if that was kind of the same across the ditch, so to speak.
SPEAKER_01I think there will be a shift. I just I've yet to see it in a in a really comprehensive way, and I'm looking forward to seeing that in the judgment. Or maybe I could sort of snoop and see what's going on tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02Super interesting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So how about you, Christy? Have you got any updates?
SPEAKER_02I do, and I'm not going to pretend that they're brief, but I will try to. I did pretend why we're brief, and then they weren't brief. Look, I thought you were fairly brief, actually. I'm going to give you a brief tick, a tick of brief. Ah fix. Alright, I've gone on about this one a few times, but there is an an actual update here. So the MAC Energy case or the Denman case, which is our kind of our first High Court case that's dealing with climate change and looking at the kind of the local effects of climate change created through scope three emissions from a development. So just to remind people, this is an appeal by MAC Energy against the New South Wales Court of Appeal judgment that overturned a 22-year extension all the way out to 2048 of its Mount Pleasant coal mine. And this was because it was successfully challenged by a local environment group, the Denman Aberdeen, Musselbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group, Incorporated.
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_02And the court found that the state's independent planning commission had failed to take into account the project's impact on the environment and climate, particularly the impacts of the mine's scope three emissions. So its broader contribution to climate change through what it exports and gets burnt overseas, as coming back to local impacts.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um and MAC Energy appealed this decision of the Court of Appeal to the High Court. And that was heard about three weeks ago, I want to say. But the original approval, the original mine, which has been ongoing, is due to expire, or was due to expire in December this year. Um and it's highly unlikely, one could even say impossible, that the whole High Court would hand down its judgment on the appeal before that date.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02So in response, it appears that MAC Energy has gone back to the New South Wales Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure in order to convince it to provide a stopgap arrangement that will allow the mine to continue to operate despite the expiry of its original approval and the court denying its renewal. And so what they've done is that they've provided a six-year extension instead of a 22-year extension. Same situation, same impact. Yeah. As a modification to the original approval, it's known as Mod 8. And it extends the mine's life out to 31st of December 2032, but also increases the mine's permitted coal extraction rate from 10.5 million to 12.5 million tonnes a year. It's really focused basically on the royalty payments, the taxes, and the continued employment of around 575 full-time equivalent workers, and said that the impacts on the community and the environment could be adequately managed. ABC News reported on this extension and they had one of those kind of classic both sides articles, which led with the rationale and the reasoning for the extension in very kind of positive language, and then kind of finished up with the Denman Environment Group's sort of concerns and objections kind of tucked away at the end. But in it they quote from a local politician who said that the extension is crucial to secure these jobs, but as the expiry deadline loomed, it's damaging to people's psyches when they're constantly bombarded with this news that they could lose their job. People have mortgages, they've got families. It's frustrating to have this project bailed up through environmental lawfare from a very small group. We hope that once it's dealt with in the High Court, people know they've got a job for the next couple of decades. I just think it's incredibly illustrative of this language that's used by politicians, particularly right-wing politicians in Australia, and that is then picked up and used fairly neutrally, frankly, by the media around this idea of lawfare, this idea of jobs. You know, we're not talking about just transition still, we're talking about like protecting what is actually a very small number. Certainly for the local area, it's substantial, but it's a small number of jobs as compared with the kinds of damage that we're talking about when we're blowing through our carbon budget and the sorts of costs and impacts that this is going to have on everyone in the world. And the just the disproportionate nature of this pretend both sides is it it's it's toxic.
SPEAKER_01And these things don't have to be mutually exclusive. Like if that was the whole point of the focus on just transition, is how how do we find sustainable livelihoods for these 575 people that don't involve an unsustainable, environmentally damaging project that now doesn't have to go through normal environmental impact assessment processes that are required by law? How is that law fair?
SPEAKER_02We have they have known since the moment they received the approval that the licence was expiring at the end of this year. That is enormous amounts of notice to create some transition locally, by the company, by the local council, by those politicians to ensure that jobs were created and transitioned in other areas. But instead it was just this no business as usual. We're not going to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well they know that they don't have to, and if they've got the support of politicians, that they can just continue business as usual.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And and I just think it's it's emblematic of a lot of what is still going on in Australia, which I guess takes me to my next point, which is the 2026 into 2027 review of Australia's safeguard mechanism. So the safeguard mechanism is Australia's main instrument for regulating emissions from large industrial facilities like mining, but also manufacturing oil and gas. And it applies to any facility emitting over 100,000 tons of direct or so-called scope one emissions each year, which covers around 215 to 220 facilities, who together are responsible for about 28% of Australia's total emissions. So the original mechanism was introduced in 2016 to provide a baseline or a series a ceiling on emissions, and really it just permitted emissions up to that ceiling. It didn't do much to create incentives or pathways towards reductions or decarbonisation. In 2023, there was some reforms, but they primarily focused on essentially emissions tradings, so that this um and and this introduction of an annual reduction in this baseline. So 4.9% reduced each year up to 2030. And any facility that exceeded its baseline, they needed to offset their emissions. And then there was a review put in place in order to determine how well this new mechanism is meeting its key objectives, and that's where we're at now, the review. And our NDC originally committed us to achieving a 43% reduction below our 2005 levels by 2030. And then when we submitted our updated NDC in September last year, the new target was 62 to 70. What's the point of saying to 70 when you're talking about a ceiling? But anyway, below 2005 levels by 2035. Now, I think I've said earlier, this particular target really probably isn't in keeping with our obligations as had just been articulated by the International Court of Justice. It's insufficiently ambitious. But nonetheless, we're not even on track to achieve it. And so the this review is around one of our key means of trying to achieve both the 2030 reductions of 43% below and these more slightly more ambitious 2035 reductions. So there's a consultation paper that was released this month in August 2026, and submissions close on the 18th of September. And really, there'sn't been a number of issues that have been raised in relation to people's kind of early reactions and responses to the review. And I'll talk about four of them. One of them is whether or not our baseline decline rate between 2030 and 2035 needs to change from this 4.9, what what it what it needs to be instead in order to meet the new target. Whether the current scheme with its emissions trading kind of focus is actually working to create the reductions or the decarbonisation, frankly, that we need to be talking about. Or, as many people would argue, it's just enabling offset purchases. So it's just enabling pay to pollute.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then another question that's being raised, and this is more coming from industry, is how trade-exposed so-called carbon leakage plone facilities be treated? And how should the mechanism incorporate recommendations from a parallel carbon leakage review? So just to talk very briefly about what carbon leakage is, it's this idea or an argument that if Australia regulates the emissions of certain facilities too strictly, and I'm using inverted commas there, frankly, what it will do is that some those same projects will just move offshore into less regulated jurisdictions, and that this will lead to the same, if not worse, emissions at the global level where it actually, you know. I feel that this is just another version of the so-called drug dealer's defense, this kind of idea of we don't have to count our scope three, because if we don't do it, someone else will. There's always a market for coal, etc. Like the entire convention, the framework, the agreement, it's all based on do what you can in your own backyard across all fields, do it properly with good faith, and expect others to do the same. Not use others as your excuse for continually delaying um action. And that's what carbon leakage seems to me, just another what fancier way of doing that same thing. So really, this is just it's it's just coming into that field where d the key critique is essentially that really we've been leaning too heavily on carbon credits. And again, as we've discussed before, there's massive concerns around the integrity of the carbon trading schemes. We've seen that offset use has risen around 45% each year. Um, but there've been very modest cuts to actual emissions. And, you know, we've seen very big concerns around whether or not these offsets are actually resulting in genuine emission reductions. So yes, it'll be interesting to see what happens with this review. It's this kind of classic false again tension between industrial competitiveness or the economy and jobs and really complying with the city.
SPEAKER_01And now there's a lot of money tied up in carbon credits and offsets too. So we've just added capitalism into the response to climate change as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Which, you know, it's exactly why everyone went, please not everyone, but enough people said this is not a helpful way of engaging. The market is not going to solve what the market caused. Yeah. And yeah, so we're there. Alright, some good news stories. Um the there's been a recent, very recent, 5th of August High Court decision in the Emperor Emperor Aboriginal Corporation and the Minister for Territory, Families and Urban Housing. This is um in relation to the Northern Territory and around the judicial review of a water license. So it was granted for 30 years to extract a really high volume of water from an aquifer, groundwater, in a very dry part of Australia, at the north and in the centre. So this relates to native title rights, which some people may not be as familiar with, but essentially there's sort of a common law recognition of some kind of traditional rights of First Nations peoples to land and water in Australia under certain pretty narrow circumstances, frankly. And when native title rights have happened, this leads to the establishment of a body corporate to hold and represent those rights. And that's where we've got at this sort of indigenous corporation as the litigant in this in this matter. And so they hold native title rights over Singleton Station, which is a large pastoral property in Central Australia, north in the Northern Territory, um, and they hold water rights, non-exclusive water rights under that native title. In 2021, the Northern Territory granted an agribusiness company company, Fortune, a license to extract up to 40 gigalitres of groundwater a year from the aquifer for 30 years to grow commercial fruit. And under the Water Act, the decision maker needed to be satisfied that special circumstances justify granting it for longer than 10 years. Essentially, that was not complied with. So when the license was challenged, it was lost in both the Territory Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, but it won in the High Court really for two reasons. One, the High Court found the decision maker had not turned her mind to whether special circumstances existed for granting this 30-year term, making the grant invalid, whether or not it was ultimately justifiable. So just classic administrative law. And second, again, administrative law, they found there'd been a breach of procedural fairness. So the decision maker had in fact asked the company to prepare an assessment of the license's impact on Aboriginal cultural values, but this was all prepared and imposed without giving the native title holders any notice or a chance to be heard about it. So it was done in the absence of their input, and this was found to be a pro breach of procedural fairness. So the license has been quashed and the matter has been sent back to be decided according to the law. So it's a win, but for now. So another good news story is that the police have dropped charges against a total of 125 rising tide protesters. So two years ago, rising tide had a protest, which they're now having every year, at the Newcastle coal port, and where they blockade the port. They stop ships coming in or out through, you know, sort of canoes and kayaks and what have you. And at the 2024 protest, the police charged a very large number of the protesters with criminal protest charges, which all had the risk of imprisonment associated with them. And we have a relatively new legal organization in Australia called Climate Defenders, who essentially just focus on doing legal work for climate protesters, for climate defenders. And so they had taken a test case to court, I think it was last year, and they had the charges dismissed against the small number of people that they used as their test case, which were some of the more serious facts. And their hope was that in response to losing that that case and being responsible for costs, the police would drop the remaining just over 100 charges. But instead they just left them hanging. So ultimately these poor protesters had more than two years of criminal charges hanging over their heads, which affected their capacity to travel and left them in a state of anxiety. And now finally they've dropped those charges. But really, although that's brilliant, it should have happened a long time ago. Then internationally, I wanted to note that the Solomon Islands High Court has awarded $62 million to be jointly shared by three communities in the Isabel Province in relation to unlawful logging operations by a sort of two companies, the Isabel Logging Company and the King Solomon Development Company, which is actually Malaysian.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that is compensation for damage that's been caused to water sources, including rivers and streams, to gardens, forests, and culturally important sites, with around 15 million of that supposed to cover remediation. And the court's noting here that some of the damage, particularly to cultural sites, to cemeteries and things, just simply can't be undone. And then in South Africa, a very exciting case that was handed down on the 14th of August, so just a few days ago.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, I saw this one because I think Cormac Cullinan was working on this one.
SPEAKER_02I think that's true, yes. So this is Sustaining the Wild Coast, NPC and others, and the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy and Others, Natural Justice, and another Minister for Resources, Energy and Others. So it relates to an exploration right, which to me sounds like a license, but it's called an exploration right that was granted to a company called Impact Africa by the Department of Mineral Resources back in 2014 and enabled them to search for oil and gas off South Africa's wild coast, as it's called. This exploration right was then renewed twice. And in 2021, Shell acquired a 50% stake in the right. So from that point on, the right was half to Impact Africa and half to Shell. A whole range of communities, fishers, and environmental groups challenged the right. This included sustaining the wild coast, but also Greenpeace, for example. And they argued there'd been no meaningful consultation and that decision makers had ignored the harm to marine wildlife, the cultural and spiritual rights of local communities, and climate change impacts. The High Court agreed and set aside the exploration right and its renewals. That was brilliant. It was appealed, and the Supreme Court also upheld the finding of unlawfulness, but instead of setting it aside, they suspended the order of invalidity and gave the oil companies a chance to so-called cure the defect through consultation during this third application for renewal. So they were effectively going to kind of just keep everything on foot. So it was appealed to the constitutional court, and it was the court was split, but six two out of a bench of eight, with the majority holding that the Supreme Court was wrong to just suspend the order of validity. They said that consultation at this third renewal stage just wasn't capable of fixing the defects in the original grant. It was just too late. And that since that date there'd actually been a moratorium on new offshore expiration applications applied. And so you couldn't make it right now. So they restarted, they reinstated the High Court's original order, completely setting aside the expiration right and its renewals, basically permanently invalidating them. The two judges that dissented really disagreed with the Supreme Court. They were willing to let that process of engaging with consultation go ahead, and costs were awarded against the minister and the oil company. So yes, that's everything.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I did I did contemplate and I did I sort of very briefly mention that you know we have been witnessing some pretty awful news coming out of the UK in relation to um a professor at Cambridge University and his subsequent death. I didn't want to say nothing. I didn't want to ignore just I guess how awful that was to watch it unfold, to watch the almost inevitable, I'm surely not inevitable, but the really predictable result that occurred from that just horrendous feeding frenzy that occurred. But I also don't want to dwell on it too long because I just feel as though there's so much noise.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That that is adding to the damage. So this is my attempt to have my cake and eat it too in some respects by saying it's really disturbed me. It's really reminded me of some of my deep concerns that academia still inextricably beds embeds whiteness as a signifier of quality and of merit, and that we have utterly failed. Failed to disentangle that. And that there are incredibly damaging horrible consequences, not just for individuals, but actually just for the benefit that academia can provide the world as a result. And that this was a very awful reminder of that fact, and a reminder of the need to keep doing that work and to take it really seriously.
SPEAKER_01Because it's not safe as it is and it's not okay. Yeah, I think it's been pretty horrendous to see that play out in almost in real time in front of us in the last few weeks, and I feel really sorry for his family right now. Yeah. Same. Because they're still being subjected to it.
SPEAKER_02So I guess if we turn to our next segment, what are you working on and what's coming up on the horizon for you, Liz?
SPEAKER_01I have a guest lecture this week that I'm giving in the water master's postgrad course, and I'm doing sort of as a favour for some friends and colleagues about water governance. So I need to actually do some prep for that. It's on Wednesday. And I'm gonna be digging up a paper from Ocean Symposium with Karen Fisher and Dan Hackero and Linda Faulkner that we haven't we still haven't finished that. So I said to Karen, I've got a bit of spare time, so I'm gonna have a bit of a look at that later in the week and get a bit of a game plan because we've got a whole lot of material that we captured. We talked about some of this on our ocean special of the podcast. But we were gonna write a paper. We haven't done it yet, but we've got we've got it laid out, so I'm gonna try and make some progress on that. I'm planning a workshop in September at Wanango, which you're gonna come over for, Chrissy. So I'm pretty excited about that and getting on to early planning for that, being quite efficient. Um, and then also we're having another Wananga for my living relations Canadian project. And I think we've got like 30 Canadian researchers and First Nations leaders who are traveling out here and being hosted at Waidewa Murai, which is one of the local Nai Tahu Murai here. Um and I don't think I have to do a whole lot to organise that, but I do have to be there on the day. And unfortunately, that clashed with my plans to come to Australia to the Society for Ecological Restoration Australia conference that was going to be h held in Adelaide, and then I was gonna come to Melbourne and and see you and do some other stuff. So that's in October, that's literally the exact same date. So I'm not gonna be going anywhere other than up the road to Lake Wadua. That's it really for me at the moment, other than some painting and getting better. How about you? What do you got on?
SPEAKER_02So I have teaching. Yeah. I also have one day uh workshop before coming over to your workshop, please. So that's all in the same week, which is a teaching break.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02My local workshop, we're looking at the issue of climate-safe housing in Australia and some of the legal responses and issues that are coming up there, and and maybe we're we're bringing some practitioners and some academics together for the day to kind of really look at that and give it a good hard look about what kinds of actions we could take. Kind of highlight this growing legal issue and and to come up with some ideas for responding to it. And that is going to be followed by a panel in the evening, which will be online, but everyone in the room will join, which is about climate and heat. And so in that panel, we will have uh Jack McLean from the Human Rights Law Centre, who's been working on the Papania climate-safe housing case, which I mentioned I think last week in the NT. We also have the lawyer for the Mulna and Austria case, which is before the European Court of Human Rights in relation to Austria's climate mitigation policies and their impacts in this case on a person with disabilities with the heat exacerbating his MS symptoms. Um, and then also a board member from the Klimasignorina case, which is the Swiss women elder woman's case, which was successful before the European Court of Human Rights and also related to heat. So that's going to be a really interesting panel. Um, and we're we're sort of working on all of that though that day's various proceedings and flights and things like that. And then planning a workshop in November that's around this sort of water theft project that uh Rachel and Erin and I, along with some other people now, are continuing to work on, and we're bringing a bunch of people, we're hoping to bring a bunch of people together for that workshop, and and we've just gotten the funding for that. So putting some workshop planning boots on, I guess. And that those are my I've got some articles that are going back to journals and and and other things of that nature, but that's those are the two kind of big things that I've got coming up.
SPEAKER_01Cool. You should let me know about that water theft thing, because I is it do you have any interest in Alterora participants? That's a good point. I will let you know about it. That's good. Since I'm not coming over anymore in October. Alright, so before we wrap up, I just wanted to say that I have received some pretty cool messages and fan mail from some of our um listeners. And in particular, I've heard from Callum Stewart, who's in Scotland, and Pip Abbott, who's in Sydney, Jasmine Hodder Swain, who's local here, who's at Lincoln Uni, who have just reached out to say that they really enjoy the podcast and they have enjoyed a mixture of kind of hearing some of our legal updates, but also hearing us talk about some of the challenges of being an ACR and starting a career in academia. So it's really nice to get that feedback and feel free, listeners, to send us feedback and tell us what you've enjoyed and maybe what you haven't. And you can contact us via the send us a text button at the top of the show notes in Buzzsprout, but you can also leave us a review in Apple Podcasts or in Spotify. Um you can share the link with a friend, or you can just contact us directly. You know how to find us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I also received a message from a new colleague actually, Paul Satter, who's not in my uh department, but who mentioned that he had been enjoying listening to the pod. He said it that it was filling his cup in the last few months, which was unbelievably delightful to hear, especially from a new university colleague, and and we are gonna meet up for coffee. So it's it's been a really nice kind of way of connecting with a like-minded person at my new university. That's been really nice. He's gonna feel like he knows you from what's he's doing. So that's all from us. Before we go, I want to thank you all for joining us for this episode of Lore at the End of the World. And I just remind you that all views expressed by us on this podcast are our own. You can find the show notes from each episode at one word, law at the end of the world at buzzsprout.com. And you can find both of us on LinkedIn, as other people have, and on Blue Sky. Liz is there under the username prof Mac.bsky.social. And I'm Christy Clark, C-R-I-S-T-Y-C-L-A-R-K. Bsky dot social.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Christy. Bye.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, Liz. Bye.
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