A Whangārei councillor is pushing for his council to halt its fluoridation plans as the deadline looms for adding it to the local drinking water supply.
Kauri’s Gavin Benney has lodged a formal notice of motion for Whangārei District Council’s (WDC) meeting next week calling for the council to stop its fluoridation plans.
The council is required to add fluoride to its water by March 2025 under a directive from former director-general of health Sir Ashley Bloomfield to 14 councils in 2022.
Benney’s push comes in spite of WDC already having installed about $4 million of new fluoridation infrastructure into its five drinking water plants, including at Whau Valley.
He said he wants councillors to vote in support of his notice of motion to halt WDC’s fluoridation plans. New Zealand Dental Association (NZDA) president Amanda Johnston, of Whangārei, said councillors shouldn’t support Benney’s motion.
Johnston said the fluoridation decision next week was important for the oral health of the region’s residents, whether or not they were on reticulated city drinking water supply.
“We (NZDA) support community water fluoridation,” Johnston said.
“We would encourage the council to go ahead with fluoridating its drinking water.”
However, Benney said he was strongly against what he called the mass medication of community water fluoridation.
His WDC call is part of a larger pushback against the Government’s fluoridation directive.
Benney wrote to Director-General of Health Dr Diana Sarfati on November 5 requesting she paused the fluoridation directive.
He said he wants to wait until at least the completion of a pending Ministry of Health challenge against a High Court decision in 2023 that found the fluoridation directive’s process was unlawful.
Benney has also written to politicians — including the Minister of Health, Associate Ministers of Health, Local Government Minister and local MPs — asking for a legislation reversal so councils can once again decide whether to fluoridate, rather than the Government.
WDC faces up to $200,000 in fines for not fluoridating in the face of the July 2022 directive, and further fines of $10,000 a day during which the offence occurred.
Benney said the threat of fines shouldn’t put the council off halting plans.
He is also pushing for other New Zealand councillors to lobby their local councils to do the same — as their fluoridation implementation deadlines also issued by Bloomfield start to kick in.
Benney said he had been contacted by councillors from around New Zealand wanting to similarly respond to their council’s fluoridation directive.
It’s not the first time the fluoridation debate has erupted around WDC’s top table.
In December last year, WDC councillors voted in a narrow 7-6 majority to proceed with its fluoridation plan.
NZDA’s Johnston said areas such as Whangārei district had been directed to fluoridate their water because they were the most high-risk areas for dental disease.
Fluoridated toothpaste had helped with dental disease but more needed to be done and fluoridating drinking water created a major advantage.
“We want the best oral health for everybody in New Zealand,” she said.
Deputy director-general public health Dr Andrew Old would not specifically commit to whether councils that failed to fluoridate would be fined, or whether councillors could be individually liable.
“The Ministry [of Health] considers any non-compliance by local authorities to the fluoridation directions on a case-by-case basis,” Old said.
“It takes into account a range of factors to inform the type of response.”
Recent legal advice to Tauranga City Council, ahead of it kickstarting its fluoridation directive, indicated elected members could be personally financially liable for certain decisions, a WDC meeting agenda item said.
Benney said the spectre of councillors potentially being individually liable for these fines did not change his position.
“If I was worried about that, I wouldn’t be doing this,” Benney said.
Local Democracy Reporting is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air