Tauranga City Council voted by majority to add a developmental neurotoxin to their community water supply.

On 14 October the Tauranga City Council voted by majority to add a developmental neurotoxin to Tauranga’s water supply, permanently damaging the brains of the next generation of the children to be born in Tauranga. They did so because they voted to follow, rather than challenge, the directive from the Director-General of Health, Diana Sarfati, to fluoridate the city’s water supply.

We applaud Mayor Drysdale and councillors Glen Crowther and Marten Rozenboom for doing their utmost to prevent fluoridation from starting.

However, from the discussion it was clear that councillors had received seriously false legal advice which led to the other councillors being too afraid to take a stand.

Councillors were clearly under the misbelief that even if they applied for and received an interim injunction against the directive, they could still be breaking the law. This is not the case They also seemed to believe that the Council, and perhaps themselves personally, could be fined under these circumstances.

They seemed to have been led to believe that following due legal process put them in the same category as residents who refused to pay rates without going through such a legal process. It does not.

The privilege in the legal advice received belongs to the elected members, not the executive. Therefore, we call on the elected members to release the legal advice they received, in the spirit of open democracy.

The real culprit here is the Director-General of Health. She has refused repeatedly to look at the latest science that shows, without any real doubt, that fluoridation is not only ineffective in reducing tooth decay but is seriously damaging health. This has been known since at least 2006. Instead, she quotes a WHO decision (from thirty years ago), and New Zealand reviews that were cursory in nature and contain serious flaws. The 2014 Chief Science Advisor’s Report contains a serious error where it claims the 7 IQ point loss from higher fluoride (described as “less than one standard deviation”) as “of no functional significance”. The 2021 follow-up review carried on the misconception. 

To put this in perspective, the Ministry of Health kept insisting that Lead -in petrol and paint was safe for 20 years after the rest of the world had stopped it. The Ministry has never admitted that 245T (which it endorsed) caused cancer. The Ministry continues to proclaim Mercury amalgam tooth fillings are safe when Sweden (for example) banned it in the 1990s, and the rest of the world is about to ban it, and our Food safety Authority tells us not to eat more than 250gm of fish a week due to ovoid overexposure to Mercury. The Ministry continues to support the poisoning of our forests with 1080 when the rest of the world has banned it.

Councillors have the legal means to push back– they just need sound (rather than unsound) legal advice and the moral fortitude to do so.