Tonight I attended a meeting, a community meeting.

The meeting was about the Industrial water treatment plant proposed for Parker Road in Oratia.

We hear all the time about how there are no communities left any more and how we need to get to know our neighbours and develop communities rather than just neighbourhoods and suburbs.  Well Oratia already has that, Oratia is a community.

I grew up in Oratia, my entire family grew up in Oratia, I attended the meeting with people I went to school with, whose parents went to school with my parents, whose grandparents all knew each other.

Part of the impact of this treatment plant, will be noise, there will be trucks, there will be substantial impact to the enviroment. The biggest impact of all however, in my eyes is the impact to the community.

Parker Road is full of families, the Allens, Davidsons, Gash’s, Parkins, Lipshams, Goldsmiths, Malams, Endts, to name just a few.

These people who have lived in Parker Road for six odd generations, are losing their homes, not only their homes, but also their livelihoods. These homes are built on land that their fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers called home, land that they planted orchards on, worked on, built their dreams on, raised their families on, and still are. This cannot be replaced, these are not sections in the middle of surburbia, this is our heritage, our community, our spirit, our whakapehapeha, our home.
There are alternatives for this plant, in fact there are two, one no better than Parker Road in my opinion, it is in the heart of Titirangi on land covered in Native Bush, and the other – the other is to upgrade the existing site at Huia.
I understand it needs to be done, I understand it is important and we need water, Auckland needs water, not doing it is not an option. But why is building a new plant, displacing generations of families, messing with a precious ecosystem and destroying a community an option over upgrading something that has existed for 80 years?
And why were the people affected not informed??

Please don’t think this will just affect the people who reside in Parker Road, it will affect all of us.

This is an enormous structure, the building of it alone will affect many of us.

     Written by Danielle Latham
So please stand behind the people in the community who are rallying against this, make our voices heard as a community and come along to the meeting:

Tues Feb 21 Oratia Settlers Hall. 6:00pm