How Central Otago’s gold mine debate is being turned into a class war
Sunday, 15 March 2026
Blue collar workers vs Green snobs? Honest Kiwis vs idle elites? A proposed gold mine is increasingly being framed as a battle between the privileged and the poor. Mike White reports.
On a cloudless and calm Saturday in January, around 150 people gathered at a vineyard near Cromwell for an exclusive four-course “long lunch”.
They had each paid $450 to attend, sample local wines, and hear actor Sir Sam Neill and artist Sir Grahame Sydney talk about the threat of a proposed gold mine, a few kilometres away amidst the Bendigo hills.
It was a fundraising event for Sustainable Tarras, a group opposing Santana Minerals’ controversial plans for four open-cast pits and extensive underground tunnelling, along with a 1km-long processing plant and 2km tailings storage area for waste sludge.
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Neill and Sydney, both long-term Central Otago residents, spoke passionately about how the mine would destroy the environment and irrevocably alter the face of the region.
It was an appreciative audience, a sell-out success, with the attendees’ generosity targeted to pay for lawyers and experts who could help challenge Santana’s project.
But while adding crucial money to this fighting fund, along with a parallel art auction, the ‘Wine NOT Mine’ event was in some ways also a boon for supporters of the mine, handing them a cudgel to beat Sustainable Tarras with: here was an elite, a rich coterie, the supporters challenged, a privileged clique of pinot noir swillers who could splash $450 for lunch, while common Kiwis down the road struggled to pay rents.
And so the cudgel was wielded by Sustainable Tarras’s opponents, and the caricature of a class division surrounding the mine grew.
Us and them; the grounded and the out-of-touch; the haves and the have-nots.
And with every blow, a wedge that has been driven through the community by the mine proposal sank deeper, and the split became wider.
Blue collars and rednecks
If you can bear it, you need only look at social media pages discussing Santana’s mine to see how the debate has steadily become characterised.
In the sewers of cyberspace, you will find toxic sludge thrown in both directions.
There’s abuse of mine supporters as “often vulgar, unintelligent and abusive … a bunch of dicks”.
There’s claims their comments are “rednecked” and “misogynist”.
The mine supporters respond with a fusillade about NIMBYS, rich pricks, and champagne socialists, with references to boat shoes, marble bench tops, and Range Rovers.
“They are a bunch of people who speak with a fine English dialect that they talk as if they are ‘aristocrats’ from England and have the right to rule over the ‘dirty miners’.”
Neill, particularly, comes in for personal attack, due to his prominence over the issue: criticised for a “rich entitled spoilt boy mentality” and “a half-decent actor who has no idea of the real world”.
There’s much worse.
And sure enough, before long, someone somewhere calls someone else a Nazi.
But lest anyone think the moulding of the debate into a cultural and class war is purely a social media sideshow, it’s not.
The same stereotypes are encouraged by Resources Minister Shane Jones, a strong supporter of Santana, who promises to “turbocharge” New Zealand’s mining industry.
The New Zealand First MP described Sustainable Tarras’s long lunch as “elitist”, and hasn’t hesitated to deride Neill.
“I’ve got to stick up for the working class, garden variety Kiwis who are desperate to have a life and have a meaningful set of employment opportunities in regional New Zealand,” Jones told the Sunday Star-Times in November.
“I mean, very few of us have been born with the privileged professional existence that Sam has had.”
In social media videos, Jones has railed against “doom-monger, elitist-oozing naysayers”, and cried, “We want jobs, not snobs”.
Jones’ parliamentary colleague, ACT MP Simon Court, has put his shoulder to the class war wheel: “We’re not going to turn New Zealand into a feudal garden park where a handful of millionaires admire the view while ordinary people are told there’s no jobs for them. Mining makes life better for ordinary people.”
“Ordinary” New Zealanders is a term used by Santana’s chairman, Peter Cook.
In an Otago Daily Times opinion piece three days before the Sustainable Tarras lunch, he contrasted those sampling “curated wine lists” with the thousands of Kiwis who had invested in the mining company via Sharesies.
“It is difficult to take lectures about risk seriously by those residing in multi-million dollar estates who will never bear the economic consequences of stopping the project.”
Santana Minerals’ posts on its Facebook page talk of support from “real people, real families”, without clarifying what that means.
But the perceived community and economic divide was summed up by Tom Woodward, a mining scaffolder, who has strongly backed Santana’s plan.
In a social media post directed at Neill, Woodward said many mine supporters “are regular blue collar workers who lack the refined prose, media connections, or deep pockets of the upper-crust winemakers, businesspeople, and land owners who attended the Wine Not Mine lunch.
“They express themselves in a coarser miner’s vernacular, and critics are quick to seize on their tone, rather than the substance.
“But lack of polish doesn’t make their concerns any less real, or their arguments any less valid.”
Mine or wine?
In January, Bill Sanders decided it was time to do something.
Feeling debate about the mine had been captured by critics, the Cromwell businessman started the Santana Mine Supporters Facebook page.
It now boasts more than 7000 members, and is a focal point for those backing Santana’s mine.
Sanders has lived in Cromwell all his life, worked in his father’s butcher shop, on the Clyde Dam which revolutionised the town in the 90s, in freezing works, and on orchards.
But he’s seen plenty of people leave town because they couldn’t get jobs.
Sure, Central Otago has the country’s lowest unemployment, Sanders acknowledges, but jobs in tourism and vineyards don’t pay well, and are often seasonal.
“You can’t run a house in Central Otago on part-time work.”
The Santana Mine Supporters Facebook site is full of those accusing the rich and privileged of spreading misinformation in their attempts to stop the mine, and Sanders himself has posted about prominent New Zealanders who think they know “what’s good for us ordinary folk”, and pointing to “entitled” critics.
But Sanders insists he’s not criticising anyone for opposing the mine, and they’re allowed their opinion. “But we’re entitled to be in favour of it, as well.
“I’m not going to make it into working people having a crack at vineyard owners or anything, because that’s not what it’s about.
“And it’s not about elite people or wealthy people coming here and saying we don’t want anything else to happen.
“It’s about people wanting jobs.”
Sanders says he has nothing against vineyard owners and orchardists who are concerned about the mine’s effects on their properties and produce, but you can’t cherry pick industries.
“People want to get ahead in life. And we didn’t stop vineyard owners and cherry orchard owners from getting ahead in life and setting up here. So why should they stop people getting jobs in gold mines?
“If it’s all right for them to earn their money in a vineyard, it must be all right for us to go and earn reasonable money in a gold mine.
“If it’s all right for them to have their El Dorado, why isn’t it OK for normal working people to have their El Dorado as well?”
The founder and chairperson of Cromwell business group Elevate Central, Dewald de Beer, says the fundamental reason he supports the mine is because it will provide diversity and security for the region’s economy, given the volatility tourism and farming face.
De Beer accepts many view the debate as a battle between the working class and elite.
“That’s the lens they’re looking at it through. I would say that’s a fairly accurate sort of assumption around that.
“But I actually think the real thing here is people for progress, and people against progress.
“It’s a case of people wanting to create jobs and build things versus people just wanting it to stay the same.
“It’s got more to do with the fact a lot of those people, Sustainable Tarras, they just don’t want progress.”
A convenient fiction?
Sustainable Tarras emphatically rejects this accusation.
In a statement, a spokesperson told the Star-Times the majority of its members would support well-run mine projects by reputable companies, where environmental impacts were minimal, locals were given the majority of jobs and business opportunities, and “social licence” was the highest priority.
“But none of that is the case here in Bendigo/Tarras.”
The spokesperson said it was unfortunate and unhelpful some had chosen to frame the debate as an “elite versus working person” issue, which had been amplified by Jones’ comments.
“It is wholly inaccurate and misleading. The aim of this narrative is clearly to create division and mistrust, and can leave communities in tatters. This is not what we want for Tarras, or indeed Central Otago.
“We are not anti-mining, anti-development, or anti-progress, and our members vote across the political spectrum. We have farmers, business owners, employees, entrepreneurs, and even miners amongst us.
“Many live very close to the mine site. Many are concerned that their jobs, the business they work for, or their industry, could be jeopardised by the mine.”
The group said it had provided submissions to the Central Otago District Council’s plans, all supporting further residential development in Tarras, which undermined opponents’ claims it didn’t support progress.
“There is no value in pitching members of a small community against each other.
“Instead, we should all be focussing on being good ancestors for future New Zealanders, and carefully consider the many long-term impacts before we rush into a decision that may cost us dearly in the long run.
Santana Minerals was asked whether it believed arguments about the mine were rooted in social and class divisions.
“On the ground it’s much simpler - whether Central Otago should have more permanent, skilled jobs,” Santana CEO Damian Spring said in a statement. “A lot of locals have already made it clear they think it should.”
He said Central Otago had spent years watching its young people leave for Auckland or Australia, but that trend could be reversed with the several hundred jobs the company was offering.
Already, the company had been swamped with people interested in working at the mine, with many already living in the region.
“Strip away the rhetoric and the picture is pretty simple: a regional workforce already leaning toward a major new employer,” Spring said.
The mine proposal is currently being considered by an expert panel under the Fast-track process, with a decision due to be made by the end of October.