The Rakaia salmon fishery used to be one of the best in New Zealand. It's now in absolute crisis.

OPINION: By all accounts in the media, life in New Zealand isn't getting any easier.

Whether it is health services, housing affordability, food or energy prices, there are always major nationwide issues looming. Maybe it has always been this way, or maybe New Zealand is just becoming a nation of haves and have-nots, winners or losers just like the rest of the world.

Trying to be positive, I've always believed that New Zealand and New Zealanders are special.

In my opinion, what always made us great as a country were the egalitarian bonds that held us together whatever our economic or social standing. Egalitarian bonds that were borne over generations, by early settlers, on the battlefield, the rugby field, or in the mountains, rivers or sea.

Jack or Jill were as good as their masters, and our extensive public wildlands were the envy of the world.

Trout and salmon teemed in local waterways, trophy stags roamed the highlands, ducks and geese flocked to wetlands and estuaries, and vast kai resources of snapper and scallops could be harvested easily by recreational families.

Enter the harsh realities of modern life: financial imperatives, agricultural intensification, globalisation, urbanisation, immigration, mass tourism, and a burgeoning local population to boot, as things started to go horribly wrong in the outdoor scene.

Those special places where individuals and families could escape to find inspiration, solace, rest, relaxation, challenge, recreation, and game and fish to harvest came under increasing pressure and threat.

Access issues, riparian development, plantation forestry, pollution, irrigation schemes, commercial exploitation, tourism overcrowding, eco-system poisons, and just plain bureaucratic mismanagement combined into a perfect storm as certain sectors of our economy began to dominate the limited and finite resources we have available on two rather small islands isolated in the Pacific Ocean.

To some people, the extensive range of complex outdoor issues may seem frivolous and minor when compared to other challenges that flash across media screens and newspapers every day. But all outdoor people are affected by the very real consequences of actions imposed upon them, against their will, and inevitably by using their own taxpayer and ratepayer money to do so.

The outcome is alas, a major affront to outdoor values, recreational identity, and to the very way of life we live as New Zealanders.

Lately I seem to have been to a variety of meetings and made a range of submissions to bureaucratic consultation processes which can be a recipe for depression.

The current sad state of the environment leaves no corner of New Zealand untouched as trout streams run barren, insect populations (mayflies & caddisflies) collapse, ducks disappear, valued public deer herds are assassinated, and fish stocks such as scallops implode into oblivion.

Many clubs are clearly under stress with ageing memberships and few younger people coming on-board as outdoor resources crumble and modern lifestyles change.

Supplied It sure is colder, but getting out among the great outdoors is the only way of keeping the dream alive.

​Volunteerism is declining in an ever-busy world and filling unpaid club positions such as president, treasurer, secretary, and committee members can be tough work. Clubs and incorporated societies struggle against government funded policies and bureaucracies, and their ideological prerogatives, which grind recreational groups down.

Disillusionment, discontent & frustration are rampant, with bureaucratic collaborative models failing to deliver meaningful outcomes. Even the Resource Management Act doesn't work being known as the 'salami syndrome' where resources keep getting chopped in half until nothing significant is left.

Sometimes though you just have to put all the negativity aside and just get out there and do it.

Rafting a local river recently with my son Jake lately was a 'Cast & Blast' success. The ducks were pretty scarce but Jake did manage to shoot some pukekos and a black swan while we drifted downstream. I tried a few casts with a lure rod in several places and was pleasantly rewarded with some strong hook-ups despite the river fishery declining over a period of many years for a myriad of reasons.

This past weekend I resolved to do better and travelled to Christchurch to the Annual General Meeting of the New Zealand Federation of Freshwater Anglers Inc. (FFA), an umbrella advocacy group representing individual anglers and fishing clubs throughout New Zealand. It was a sobering experience, and at 50 years old I was the youngest person at the meeting – I even got elected onto the national executive.

Tales of political, bureaucratic, and company wilful blindness were rife, most disturbing being the almost total collapse of the Canterbury Salmon Fishery.

The reasons are many, but North Canterbury was once home to an internationally acclaimed salmon fishery contributing 28 per cent of the collective Fish & Game national licence revenue.

According to North Canterbury Fish & Game Council Chairman Trevor Isitt who briefed the Federation, the salmon fishery is in an absolute crisis with the worst spawning count ever in the history of the fishery. According to Trevor, another two seasons like the one just gone and there will be no fishery left.

Another delegate briefed us on the once mighty Rakaia river that is on the point of ecological collapse through low flows, rising temperatures, pollution, and sedimentation.

Zane Mirfin Getting outdoors is a New Zealand past time. In this case, it's rafting with son Jake Mirfin, 17.

Being a braided river, the Rakaia needs large water flows to mobilise suspended sediments which are now setting like concrete, choking the river to death, and leading to lethal summer water temperatures near the sea for baitfish, sea-trout, salmon adults, smolts, and juveniles.

After central government and Environment Canterbury authorisation to change the existing Rakaia Water Conservation Order, the Wilberforce tributary of the Rakaia is now diverted almost entirely into Lake Coleridge by electricity generators, who now store the water for summer use within the Central Plains Water Scheme.

Alas, independent science in New Zealand has been slashed by successive governments and what is left appears to have been prostituted by big business, where science goes to the highest bidder.

The scale of upcoming outdoor issues is ominous and never-ending.

As New Zealanders, we all need to do more to protect our environment, our proud recreational history, and our outdoor legacy for those generations as yet unborn or we risk losing what made New Zealand great in the first place.

These issues will never go away and continual vigilance is the modern price of outdoor freedom.

It's an old cliché from various authors but "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men (or women) do nothing".