Pitched as a way to cut red tape and restore confidence for farmers while still protecting waterways, this National-led reform rewrites the freshwater rules the previous government put in place.

The Policy: National Freshwater Farming Plan — 2023 Election →

What it does:

• Replaces the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management 2020 (NPS-FM), the rulebook councils use to manage rivers, lakes and groundwater. The Government says the existing version became too complex and costly to implement.
• Targets "Te Mana o te Wai", the principle that puts the health of water first. Consultation in 2025 offered three options: keep but de-emphasise it, revert to the looser 2017 wording, or remove it entirely.
• Eased on-farm rules in 2024: the low-slope stock-exclusion map was scrapped (so non-intensively grazed beef and deer no longer must be fenced off from waterways nationally), and the intensive winter grazing regulations were repealed. Dairy cattle still must be kept out of wide rivers.
• Redesigned freshwater farm plans: about 8,000 smaller, lower-risk farms were exempted, the size threshold lifted from 20ha to 50ha for sheep, beef, arable, orchard and vineyard land, and certification was shifted to industry assurance schemes to cut duplication.
• Consulted on relaxing the 190kg/ha synthetic nitrogen cap and the related fertiliser reporting rules for dairy farms.

The result:

The Government has delivered the easier on-farm rules it promised: the 2024 stock-exclusion and winter-grazing changes are in force and the farm-plan system has been pared back. Sector bodies welcomed the relief; Beef + Lamb New Zealand called it a reprieve from a "one-size-fits-all" compliance burden. But the headline pledge, a replacement NPS-FM, is still being drafted after a process the Government itself said would take 18 to 24 months, so the core rulebook is not yet rewritten. The reform is contested on the environment side of the ledger. The data backdrop is poor: about 68% of monitored river sites sat above the nitrogen guideline value in 2020-2024, and two-thirds are graded D or worse for E. coli, meaning generally unsafe for swimming. Critics argue loosening rules against that backdrop risks locking in degradation. Forest & Bird chief executive Nicola Toki described the wider reforms as a "conservation retreat", Green Party environment spokesperson Lan Pham (a former freshwater commissioner) said they put profit ahead of water, and Choose Clean Water's Tom Kay called them a blow to community and water health.

The impacts to watch:

• Whether removing or weakening Te Mana o te Wai shifts how councils weigh farming against water health when granting consents, a point challenged by Maori leaders.
• Whether relaxing the nitrogen cap and reporting rules slows or reverses recent gains at the minority of sites where some nitrogen indicators were improving.
• Whether cheaper, narrower farm plans still capture enough higher-risk land to manage catchment-level run-off.