I have spent much of this last week visiting farms and what I saw is as devastating as it is infuriating, because so much of the damage could be prevented if only the Resource Management Act (RMA) could get sorted out with urgency. Environment Canterbury is operating to a piece of legislation that is utterly useless. Farmers have spent 10 years being prevented from clearing out their rivers. They are 2 metres deep in shingle that could have been dug out had they been allowed to. Many of them have dutifully gone and planted out their riparian fences; they've been swept away. I hope the Minister for the Environment, as he redevelops the new RMA legislation, takes into account that people have been asked to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on fencing along flood-prone waterways.