‘Hook, line and drill bit’: Gold mine debate plumbs new depths between the rich and wordy

Wednesday, 22 April 2026

Sir lan Taylor is the founder and managing director of Animation Research.

If anyone still has doubts about how low the tone of the debate around the use of fast-track legislation to approve the Santana Bendigo-Ophir gold mine has sunk, they need look no further than Damien Grant’s latest opinion piece.

Well, not so much an opinion piece as a thinly disguised PR exercise, literally laced with claims that appear to have come directly from Santana’s $8 million, 9500-page application.

An application that is currently the subject of intense questioning, not just from those “wailing millionaire hobby farmers or academic environmentalists”, but from the members of the fast-track panel set up to examine the very claims that Grant parroted, almost verbatim, from those pages.

But Grant’s article was not so much an analysis of the questions being asked by the many experts now appearing before the panel as it was a personal and demeaning attack on Sir Sam Neill.

It was an attack that even stooped to questioning Sam’s campaign for Pharmac funding of a cancer drug.

As with his arguments around the intergenerational impact of the fast tracking of the Santana application, Sam’s campaign for Pharmac funding isn’t about him, that ball has been passed on in his case. His argument is for those who cannot afford the drug that he has had the benefit of in his own personal battle with cancer.

So where does that place Grant’s claim that Sam “lacks any empathy for his fellow man”?

This is the same Sam Neill whose “Posh Picnic”, the subject of derision by the mining minister Shane Jones, raised over $70,000 for the local Dunstan Hospital.

This is just one example of the quiet contributions Sam makes to the community he is a part of. Contributions that cover more than 30 charitable organisations across the world. He won’t thank me for highlighting these, but enough is enough from those who continue to paint him as someone locked away in an ivory tower with his elitist millionaire mates.

Sam has proudly carried his connection with New Zealand across some of the biggest stages in the world. First in the world of movies and then, back here in Aotearoa, where he has invested in and helped build a global reputation for New Zealand wines, an export business that brings in $2.5 billion a year to the New Zealand economy.

He has done this with a sense of pride and humility that we should all be proud of. I know I am, and I have only ever met him twice.

So, that opinion piece. Grant proudly declares that he has never been to Central Otago; “that pristine environment of brown grasslands and uninspiring vistas that serve little purpose other than as a backdrop for postcards no one will send”.

That is straight out of Shane Jones’s book: “The South Island is full of nothing!” Except maybe frogs or, in this case, lizards. But hey, what’s the difference? They are both slimy little creatures we can do without.

Grant then defers to the Santana PR machine to help him answer the question: “So… how badly will this mine scar the earth?”

Alongside a picture, supplied by Santana, Grant comes to the conclusion that “once the gold has been wrought from the earth, the land will be reinstated and the mild discolouration will gradually dissipate”. That is straight from the book of Santana CEO Damian Spring.

I have asked Spring to share the geospatial data behind the project so we can build a 3D interactive model of the entire mine site to post online for anyone interested to explore from any viewpoint. I have not had a reply to that request.

So let me paint a picture for you instead.

Over the period of the project, Santana will move more than 200 million tonnes of rock. That’s waste that doesn’t disappear once the gold is removed, nor does it go back to fill in the hole. The hole remains forever.

For some sense of scale, 200 million tonnes is the equivalent of over 2 million, 90-tonne truckloads of rock, rubble and arsenic that has to be moved somewhere. Line those trucks up nose to tail, and they would stretch halfway around the world.

And those trucks will be powered by imported diesel. I may have missed it in the 9500-page application, but I imagine that is a lot of fossil fuel being added to our carbon emissions for a foreign-owned company to extract our gold.

And the gold that will be extracted from those 2 million truckloads of rock, rubble and arsenic? Well, it will easily fit in the back of three Toyota utes!

But it doesn’t stop there.

The project’s processing plant and ball mill require a continuous, industrial-scale electricity supply. The exact figure was impossible to find in the application, but the scale is unmistakable.

Macraes mine is one of the largest users of electricity in the South Island, second only to Tiwai Point. Estimates suggest the electricity use at Bendigo-Ophir will far exceed the annual electricity use of nearby Cromwell.

And then there’s the water?

What information is available points to demand in the order of hundreds of millions of litres every year, enough to supply several thousand households.

These aren’t minor inputs. They represent a sustained draw on already stretched resources. And all for the benefit of a foreign-owned entity that will extract our gold and then shut up shop and move on.

But where Grant truly swallows the Santana pill – hook, line and drill bit – is where he makes the astonishing claim that “over 98% of tailings dams dry out, are grassed over, and turn into paddocks”!!!

For context. This tailings dam will contain more than 100,000 tonnes of arsenic that has been removed from its original inert state in the rocks dug up to reach the gold. The dam itself will be higher than the Clyde dam and located in a seismic area where a category 8 earthquake is predicted to occur within the next 50 to 100 years, well after Santana and the jobs are gone.

The dam is at the headwaters of the two major rivers that support all of the downstream industries - agriculture, viticulture and tourism - that have resulted in Central Otago having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.

The Guardian, that upmarket version of The Spinoff that Damien refers to, recently released an independent study on tailings dams.

Its conclusion: Tailings dams are a toxic time bomb that pose one of the greatest risks to their surrounding environment and the people who depend on that environment for their livelihoods.

Sir Sam Neill, like many others, is simply asking the question:

Is the risk worth the reward?

Grant quite clearly believes it is. But then again, he has never been to Central Otago.