Here's one promise the Government should never have made
Wednesday, 29 January 2020
OPINION: Was 'no new mines on conservation land' this Government's most incoherent promise?
It featured in the 2017 throne speech seemingly at the behest of the Green Party, the 'supply and confidence' partner in the new Labour-led coalition.
Coalition partner NZ First was clearly opposed to it. And Labour seems silently to have regretted it ever since its first mention.
The promise, like a pantomime horse animated beneath its furry costume by the Green Party and NZ First, has spent the interceding years lurching in circles. Stage manager Labour has preferred to ignore its antics.
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It wasn't tackled in Labour's busy 100-day plan back in late 2017 and early 2018: a great show of rolling up sleeves and getting down to the business of banning and boosting, establishing and considering. And it didn't crop up in the 'year of delivery', either but that was a 2019 production and we're getting ahead of ourselves.
In May, 2018, Conservation Minister and Green MP Eugenie Sage promised to move toward policy to achieve the promise with a discussion document scheduled for release in September of that year.
Kiwis 'expect to see … their wild landscapes and indigenous plants and wildlife protected from being dug up by bulldozers and diggers,' she said at the time.
Snow fell and melted on the high passes and September came and went. The year turned. By September 2019 Sage had changed her language, saying only that consultation would happen 'in the coming months'.
The promise was repeated in a minerals and petroleum strategy document released in November 2019 but the policy remained as illusive as ever. September of 2020 is now in sight, complete with election date, and Sage can't quite bring herself to speak plainly.
'The discussion document on implementing the no new mines on conservation land commitment is still being finalised and it will be released in due course pending Cabinet approval,' she said in a statement.
She could just as well have said that the back part of the horse isn't doing what the front part is telling it to. Nobody said giving NZ First MP Shane Jones control of your furry hindquarters would make life easy.
In fact, the show, better viewed from back-stage, unfolded like this. Sources say a draft discussion document for anticipated policy was written, first by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and Department of Conservation bureaucrats in combination, and later passed entirely to DOC staff.
They also say it was around this time that Jones, as Regional Economic Development Minister, took a look and proclaimed that his party would never allow it.
Since conservation land covers roughly a third of the country and mining provides important high-paying jobs in the regions it was never likely to appeal.
As if to underscore Jones' distaste for the promise, the Provincial Growth Fund, which he oversees, recently approved a $15 million loan to help restart the old Blackwater gold mine near Reefton.
It's not clear whether the Greens consider this a new mine; the last time it was active was the 1950s. And it's also unclear whether it would count as 'on conservation land': access is from private land though the mine certainly tunnels under conservation land.
No doubt the discussion document could tell us; it's understood to be stuck at Government party leaders level and as an election date is now fixed on the horizon it appears to have been written out of this mandate's script entirely. But perhaps its lessons should linger.
Firstly, since that throne speech, there have been dozens of new mines on New Zealand conservation land (National Park land has long been off-limits). Or, more exactly, there have been dozens of approvals for mining activity. DOC refused to provide Stuff with the precise number (it suggested an Official Information Act request).
That industry has all happened within the existing regulatory hurdles, including consent conditions imposed by local authorities under the Resource Management Act and the terms of land access decided by DOC. The Conservation Act, the Wildlife Act and the Crown Minerals Act all apply.
There are many reasons a blanket ban on such activity would be foolish, not the least of which is that underground mining has such a different effect to surface pits on environmental considerations like biodiversity.
It would also be costly to limit quarrying, when aggregate is needed increasingly for state-funded construction projects, and the more distant the rock source the higher the price in both dollars and emissions.
It's also clear that the kind of green future the Government is pushing towards will be powered by mineral hogging batteries. That lithium, cobalt, copper, molybdenum – it all comes out of holes in the ground.
Limiting New Zealand's capacity to mine those minerals with an undifferentiated ban is the clearest folly of the 'no new mines on conservation land,' promise. Though it also seems to recommend against casting Sage and Jones in the same pantomine.