Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill

Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill, of course, deals with the Conservation Act, which is very pertinent on “Love DOC Day”; on a day that we on this side of the Chamber are showing our support for the work the Department of Conservation does. We want to say to all of the staff of the Department of Conservation that even if the National Government does not appreciate what they do, we certainly do. So it is very, very timely—

💬 Hon Member: So do we!

Well, the National Party members might say that they do, but then they cut the funding, which clearly shows that it is all lip service.

But coming back to the Conservation Act, the changes being made under the Conservation Act are typical of the problems right through this piece of legislation. There are some very good things in this legislation, there are some very positive changes that are being made, but it is always one step forward, two steps back with the National Government. So although under Part 2 of this legislation we are very pleased to see the automatic inclusion—[Interruption]

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Order! There is far too much background noise going on. It is totally discourteous to the honourable member trying to address the business of the Committee. Please be considerate of others.

As I was saying, with the National Government it is always one step forward, two, three, four, five steps backwards. Although in Part 2 of this bill we are very pleased to see that new reserve land will be automatically included in schedule 4, what is more disappointing is once again the dilution of the powers of the Minister of Conservation. Under the changes to Part 2, whereas it used to be the preserve of the Minister of Conservation to decide on the status of the land, now that is going to be taken away from the Minister of Conservation and handed to Cabinet by Order in Council. So we are seeing right through this piece of legislation a weakening of the role of the Minister of Conservation.

It is important to remind members that the Minister of Conservation is the Minister who is responsible for the stewardship of the Department of Conservation estate on behalf of New Zealanders—that is their mandate. So we have seen in Part 1 of this bill that where there is an application for a mining activity to be carried out on Department of Conservation land, it used to be the Minister of Conservation who weighed up what the impact would be on Department of Conservation land and made that decision in the best interests of the preservation of that land for all New Zealanders. Now half of that responsibility has gone to the Minister of Energy and Resources. So the Minister of Energy and Resources, who clearly has a vested interest in seeing those projects going ahead, now has half the decision-making power, and that is entirely inappropriate. It is not just inappropriate; it is an absolute boon for lawyers, because this is going to result in judicial review after judicial review after judicial review.

You see the Minister of Energy and Resources out there constantly promoting mining, making it quite clear that they want projects to go ahead, going to opening of company offices, doing all the things that a Minister of Energy and Resources does—and there is nothing wrong with a Minister of Energy and Resources doing those things; that is their role. But then to say that they are unbiased or have not predetermined their choice when it comes to actually making a decision about a concession on Department of Conservation land, I do not think that that is going to be feasible. It is going to result in people who are unhappy with the decision taking a judicial review saying that a proper process was not followed because the Minister of Energy and Resources had made up their mind all along. The simple thing to do would be to leave things as they are and leave it to the Minister of Conservation, because that is where it is appropriate.

As I said, we are pleased to see the automatic inclusion of reserve land in schedule 4, but are very disappointed to see that despite the fact that the Government has claimed to have backed down on mining on schedule 4 land, we are already seeing more exploratory work being done. It is like the Japanese with whaling, you know—this is just scientific research, nothing to see here, we just want to see what is there. Well, the only reason you would want to see what is there—and it is private companies that are doing this, not the Government—is that if at some point the Government said to them: “You know what? Yes, we are going to let you”—

We are speaking on Part 2 here of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. I will say in the Committee that perhaps I was a little harsh on the Government when speaking on Part 1 yesterday; I just find it very difficult to praise the Government very much these days.

Part 2 does deal with the conservation parts of the Crown minerals legislation, but can I go back and make reference to Part 1, because, of course, there is the ability now to include in the permitting provisions requirements around health and safety. Indeed, we have, hopefully, through the lessons of Pike River learnt that we must include protection for human values, for human lives, for health and safety up front in the permitting regime and the mining oversight regime from the department—the new super-department, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

It was perhaps pertinent that yesterday we were talking about that, because I must make brief reference to the report—it is an independent report, of course, we are told—to the chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the new department. It is very, very sad reading. It says there have been systemic failures in parts of a now superministry, which, we are told, have been addressed. I am not quite sure whether they have been. The point is that if those systemic problems have not been addressed, then we are further exacerbating the problems through the superministry oversight implemented with the passage of this Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill. It has good intent in some areas, but, as my colleague Moana Mackey said, it does step back from safeguards for the natural values that of course are important to us, not just now but into the future. So in making one step forward in protecting health and safety and human values, the Government is taking one step backward in protecting natural values.

The restructuring that has gone on in combination with the changes in this bill do leave a lot of New Zealanders wondering whether we are simply opening up the Department of Conservation estate to rampant development. On top of that there is a lot of experience within the Department of Conservation, particularly in the West Coast - Tasman area, where the department’s people have found the right balance between allowing wise and responsible mining on conservation land and protecting the natural values wherever possible.

Part 2 deals with changes in the area of the conservation estate. It does allow the securing of some areas should they be deemed to be schedule 4 or of schedule 4 value, but the question around other conservation land remains—that is, if you gut the Department of Conservation, if you—oh, I see. If you remove the capacity—I am not allowed to use the word “gut”—within the department to astutely assess what is happening, then people wonder whether, in fact, we are going to now see, as we did with human lives, a destruction of conservation values. That is not something that anyone wishes for any industry—mining, agriculture, forestry, or whatever.

So in summary, I have to remind the officials and the Minister of Energy and Resources that if you can let the Department of Labour get to the point where “Its performance as a health and safety regulator of Pike was ineffectual and dysfunctional.”, then this is the kind of oversight that can occur in a Government department if it is squeezed of resources. That is what the Minister of Conservation is doing to the Department of Conservation, and that will lead to the same kind of dysfunctional oversight if we are not careful.

So in Part 1 of the bill the Government has made some progress, off the back of a terrible tragedy, to implement some health and safety measures, some requirements in the permitting regime for mining, and some requirements in the ongoing oversight, and that we welcome. In Part 2, rather than learning from the lessons of tragedies like Cave Creek and tragedies like Pike River, we are making changes around the area of mining and conservation. I hope we are not setting up the department for a big failure.

Although the Minister of Energy and Resources shakes his head, his colleague the Hon Dr Nick Smith is not gutting but almost exterminating, and certainly removing from the front line responsibility across the Department of Conservation, and removing capability, removing experience, and destroying the livelihoods of people who have committed to conservation and the Department of Conservation all their working lives. They have been told that they are down the road because they are no longer needed. This is being done at a time when the Minister claims we are going to boost the capability of mining and we are going to allow mining companies to work in areas of conservation land. That is something I acknowledge we should do, but we need to uphold the ability of the department to negotiate in a way that ensures the strictest of guidelines and protections for the water, for the soil, for the natural values, and for all the protected species on Department of Conservation land.

So this bill comes at a crucial time, a time when we should be learning from the lessons of the past. A Green colleague today—and she is probably speaking here later on in the bill—raised the very sad issue of Cave Creek. I was a member of Parliament then. I dealt with the Minister of Conservation at that stage. He walked, because he acknowledged that they had squeezed the department—just as the current Minister is doing now—to the point where the passion and the commitment to conservation by the individuals on the ground meant they got out and did work themselves. It was work that was proven not to be up to standard, unfortunately, in the issue of Cave Creek. But there is that same passion and that same squeeze on resources that is referred to in the Department of Labour report. Resources were not there to carry out the responsibilities of the Department of Labour, and it gave rise to a dysfunctional and incapable Department of Labour in the area of upholding health and safety. The Ministers over there smile, they shake their heads, and they give reassurances. Some of those Ministers were in Government in 1990 when they did the same thing to the Department of Conservation.

Part 2 of this bill deals with the issue of conservation. Unfortunately, it does not deal with the issue of resources for conservation management. This very day people up and down this country are out marching, protesting to try to protect and uphold conservation values. As an MP from an area of huge and spectacular conservation estate and resources, I want good people to protect and look after that area. I also want mining, and I want safe mining.

So in this one piece of legislation we are summarising so many real issues that are at the front of the minds of people not only in my electorate but up and down this country around health and safety, around the ability of the Government to regulate and oversee industry in the proper way, and around the issue of the Government’s ability to manage conservation land on behalf of each and every one of us. We want that land to be there for our children and our grandchildren. We want jobs, and mining is part of that economic mix, but it must not be at the expense of New Zealanders’ lives and it must not be at the expense of the desecration of our environment or conservation land. This bill raises more questions than it provides answers for, and I want assurances from that Minister that resources will go back into the Department of Conservation to properly negotiate in the areas of responsibility that are laid down in this bill.

Like my colleague Damien O’Connor, who has just resumed his seat, I think that it is particularly appropriate and really sad that we are debating these changes under Part 2 of this legislation, the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill, on a day when throughout the country people are offering their support to our Department of Conservation workers whose jobs are under threat. Their jobs are not under threat because they are inefficient. They are not under threat because the legislation has changed and somebody thinks they should not be doing the work that we have had them doing since 1987. They are under threat because the National Government has savagely cut the Department of Conservation’s budget, and there is no way that it can live within its budget without massive job cuts. The cuts we have seen indicated will affect 140 people around the country. The people who are out in the regions, implementing the very Conservation Act that we are amending in Part 2, are going to be losing their jobs, but at the same time there is going to be a bunch more people put into the head office in Wellington.

That, to me, completely undermines the purpose of this bill, and it means that despite our support for the provisions in the bill we have even more concerns surrounding them. We would like to be supporting this legislation. We said that right at the start. We said that there were some fundamental concerns that we had, and if they were addressed through the Commerce Committee, then we would be delighted to support this legislation.

The best thing that this Parliament can offer to people who want to have confidence in our conservation management and to the business community that wants mining is clear guidelines—a strong message from this Parliament. What they have got now is a total mess, and I have to say that the Minister of Energy and Resources, who is in the chair at the moment, has made it significantly worse with his rammed-through Supplementary Order Paper 205 and Supplementary Order Paper 210 that we debated in Part 1. That is in stark contrast to the way his predecessor behaved. The Hon Phil Heatley—who is not used to being praised by me, because I tell the truth—on this occasion actually picked up the recommendations from the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. He took them to the select committee, and the chair of the select committee, Jonathan Young, quite properly ensured that the select committee considered those recommendations as an extra bit of work and came back to this House having debated them properly. That is what should have happened to Simon Bridges’ Supplementary Order Papers, but, oh no, he knows more than anyone and thought he could just ram them through at the last minute. Well, his arrogance and his pride will trip him up. It will be a significant fall, and I know that a lot of people are waiting for that to happen—particularly his colleagues, I understand.

The biggest concern that we have, which was raised right at the very beginning of this debate, is outlined in Part 2, and that is the new dual decision-making power. Instead of the Minister of Conservation having the decision-making authority, mandate, and responsibility under the legislation, it is now being given half and half to the Minister of Conservation and the Minister of Energy and Resources. That is entirely inappropriate.

My colleague Moana Mackey pointed out earlier in the debate about the vested interests that the Minister of Energy and Resources has. Quite rightly—we are not saying this is inappropriate—the Minister of Energy and Resources really has a responsibility not just to regulate the sector but also to promote opportunities for the sector, and, obviously, mining is a key part of that. How can that possibly be balanced against the need and advocacy of the Minister of Conservation to protect our public estate? It just does not work. It is a stupid idea. Heaven only knows who thought of it—probably Steven Joyce, I imagine—but it has got no part to play in clear legislation, which should state, so that the public understand, our responsibility as a Parliament to ensure the protection and management of our conservation estate and, separately, under a different regime, the need to have energy proposals pursued.

I am very pleased that the reserve land now has an automatic inclusion in schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act—that is one good thing that has come out of this. My colleague Moana Mackey also talked about the exploratory drilling that is under way at the moment. The Minister Simon Bridges must think that every member of the public is completely stupid. There is only one reason for a private company to invest in exploratory drilling in schedule 4 areas, and that is that it knows that at some time in the future the Government will give it the sign-off. Otherwise, it would not waste its money; it would do exploratory drilling somewhere else.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. Thank you. I would like to pay particular tribute to the speech by Damien O’Connor, who comes from the West Coast, which has had two tragedies: Cave Creek and Pike River coalmine. The latter was due to a failure of regulation, which this bill, the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill, goes some way to addressing.

In terms of the West Coast, the Cave Creek commission of inquiry looked into the circumstances around the platform collapse and highlighted that the department had been starved of resources and did not have the number of staff or the resourcing provided through Vote Conservation that it needed to do its job well. That is what we are seeing with this Government, and that is why hundreds of people around New Zealand today have turned up at Department of Conservation offices to post their messages of support for the department and the professional ability of departmental staff and the work they do. That is because New Zealanders love and treasure the places that the department is charged with managing.

What we have in Part 2 of the bill is a major change, so that a decision to reclassify land as a nature reserve or a scientific reserve will not be a decision just for the Minister of Conservation but will be a Cabinet decision. So the whole philosophy of the Government here is that you cannot trust the Department of Conservation to manage conservation land properly and you have to bring Cabinet in. When you bring Cabinet in—with the Minister in the chair, Hon Simon Bridges, and his responsibilities under this bill to promote mining—we will see conservation lands, our public protected lands, opened up to much more development.

Where will that hit most? In areas like Coromandel and in areas like the West Coast, where there are already some hundreds of alluvial goldmining licences. There is already a large-scale, open-cast goldmine, OceanaGold, in the forests behind Reefton, and it makes a huge hole in the Victoria Conservation Park and the wildlife corridor that connects the central Southern Alps with Paparoa.

It is those sorts of big developments, which destroy forests and pollute streams, that this Government wants to encourage on conservation land. That is why it is depriving the department of staff and resources. The cuts last year saw the loss of a lot of the planning and technical staff who would make submissions under the Resource Management Act on applications to mine but who no longer do because that brings them into conflict with the mining companies, and the cuts deprive the department of the staff who are responsible for overseeing applications that are granted to mine on conservation land. If you strip out that, you are stripping out the ability to supervise mining operations and you are stripping out the field staff who are doing the work of predator control and actively protecting our plants and wildlife.

Although the Minister of Conservation said today that he is confident that the department will continue to do its work, his comments have been seen as insulting by the families of those who are losing their jobs in the staff cuts. We have had an open letter to the Minister in Wilderness magazine, which showed that there are front-line staff positions that are being cut. It is not back-room people. It is not the bureaucrats, the paper shufflers whom the Minister refers to; it is people who are doing vital conservation work. They are doing work around threatened species. They are also doing work in supervising mining. If you strip out that, you strip out the ability for the department to properly manage our public protected lands.

This bill highlights how hostile the Government is both to conservation legally and, in terms of its budget decisions, to the department’s work on the ground, because it is taking out the staff who have got the professional capability to do that work. So this bill is about not trusting the department. It is about the resource use Ministers—the Minister of Energy and Resources, the Minister for Economic Development, and the Minister of Science and Innovation—wanting to get their hands on conservation lands to promote more commercial exploitation, focusing very much on the short term not the management of these lands to protect their conservation values now and for the future.

So it is very short-term thinking and it is showing a complete lack of understanding of how the department operates, of how much work is actually done in the field, and that you cannot replace that professional work with volunteers. Nor can your replace it by commercial sponsorships, because of the variability in those. This bill shows that the Government does not trust the Department of Conservation.

Obviously, the irony of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill coming back to the House on “Love DOC Day” does not escape anybody. Although this part of the bill does not draw a great deal of criticism from us, because it amends the Conservation Act in ways that are probably quite constructive, the irony still remains that it is a very odd thing to have this piece of legislation, which in other parts works against conservation and the protection of the environment, being brought into the Committee on this day when people are protesting up and down the country about the cuts to the Department of Conservation.

I want to add my concerns to those of others who have expressed their views about cuts to staff in the Department of Conservation, but I want to use a particular local example that is of significance. If one looks at the numbers alone, as the Minister of Conservation has done in the recent past, it would appear that only 4.5 full-time equivalent positions will be taken out of the Nelson region of the Department of Conservation. In fact, he conveniently ignores the fact that there are currently 10 vacancies. So we are losing 14.5 people out of that region.

If this Part 2 of the legislation is to be upheld and implemented in a way that enhances the protection of our conservation estate, it is a truism to say we need more people, not fewer. If the argument of the Minister of Conservation in the House earlier today that, in fact, there is a way forward for maintaining these wilderness areas or sanctuary areas or whichever part of our country is going to be included and renamed into the conservation estate, which is what Part 2 covers, then the partnerships with the community seem to be the poor man’s way of achieving optimal protection. It is the cheap way to use volunteer labour of committed people up and down the country and relegating the Government’s responsibility for the conservation estate to the back-burner, because it is with that idea in mind that the Department of Conservation with its reduced numbers will have to engage with the community in order to get any ongoing protection.

My ongoing concern about Part 2, although it has words in it that I applaud and I do not have a particular problem with it, is that there will not be the infrastructure and the personnel available in the Department of Conservation to allow Part 2 to be implemented and to be observed in the way that I presume the Minister intends it to be. So a conservation area, for example, under Part 2, “declared to be held for the purpose of a wilderness area, a sanctuary area, or both, under this section must be managed in a manner that is consistent with that purpose or those purposes (as the case may be).” I am quoting from clause 57(4) of Part 2. So if a conservation area that is held to be a wilderness area or a sanctuary area is to be managed in a way that is consistent with that purpose, then it needs to have the requisite personnel and the suitable oversight and resourcing given to it by the Government to meet that purpose, and this is not what we are seeing. Thank you very much.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. I feel an urgent need to take a call on Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill because, after what I have just experienced in the last 24 hours around both this bill and around schedule 4, I am afraid that this part is fatally compromised. I was positive about this part of the bill, and the Green Party was positive about it, but now that we know that schedule 4 may be open to drilling rigs, I feel less confident at the fact that pieces of land or other areas of sanctuary will go automatically, into schedule 4. That is no longer the good news it should have been. I agree with the comments from my colleagues from the Labour Party that we need to uphold the core values of conservation, but if schedule 4 is now open for drilling—and the Minister of Energy and Resources at question time would not rule this out—that shows you just how serious the situation is.

New Zealanders expect Part 2 to mean what it says. New Zealanders marched—more than 40,000 people—and made submissions so that Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill would have some meaning, so that, in fact, areas like the Ramsar Convention wetlands, areas like sanctuaries and scientific reserves, and other reserves that are also covered later in the Reserves Act but are on the conservation estate—all of those—would have some meaning. So what we see now is the Minister—and I have a legal opinion to say that the minimum impact does not include drilling—is going to ensure, through this bill, that, in fact, because of other sections of this bill, Part 2 will be literally undermined.

Let us get real about what goes on, on the conservation estate, at the moment, when you are talking about protection of special places in schedule 4. Archey’s frog is the rarest frog on the planet. It is the ancient amphibian that gives birth to live young. It is a tiny little frog. It is an absolutely amazing little creature, which is very hard to see with the naked eye. In an area that should be in schedule 4 right now, an area called Wharekīrauponga, just south of Whangamata, in the hills behind Whangamata, right now there is a mining company called Newmont Mining Corporation with drilling rigs in that area. Now, if we want to move that area into schedule 4, we will have to go through an Order in Council; it will no longer be purely the word of the Minister of Conservation.

Even without some of the other parts of this bill that are very deleterious to the environment, we are concerned about how we are going to get areas into schedule 4—let alone the protections once they get there. Take this little frog, the most ancient and the rarest frog on the planet, which you would think would be an iconic New Zealand species that everyone would uphold. What has happened is the consultants who were brought in—because the Department of Conservation does not have the resources to actually look at the activities of this frog—did a 2-hour, daylight survey in the area where the drilling rig was going to be brought in, and said “Oh, well, nothing is there.” I spoke to Dr Phil Bishop, who is from University of Otago. He is the international head of the Amphibian Survival Alliance, which is the group that is trying to keep the rarest frog in the world alive, and he said nobody, not even the world expert, which he is, could have found that little frog in daylight. It is simply impossible, let alone in 2 hours in the middle of the forest. It is simply not how a proper conservation expert would go about these things.

That supports the point that others have been making, which is for Part 2, you have to have robust support systems in order to make sure that the management and the sustaining of the conservation estate can be carried out. Instead, after today, I find we are going to have drilling rigs in schedule 4 land. So that means that the public are going to find out, and are finding out today, that a Government that said “No mining” actually meant “No mining, except you can do everything but, and then you can lobby us and maybe”—apologies, Mr Chairperson, not you. But maybe lobbying will help, because if one has identified a gold reserve say, for example, in the middle of the Archey’s frog habitat, perhaps the Government would look at schedule 4 again.

So what we are seeing in this bill is that Part 2 talks about these very good values, but, as well as the risks to schedule 4 that we have learnt about in the last few hours, there is also the problem that the Minister of Conservation is no longer the sole arbiter of what gets added to schedule 4. So although the bill is at pains to say that it will not remove anything schedule 4, if it has to go via Order in Council—i.e., Cabinet—rather than the Minister’s word, the priorities of the Government of the day, rather than the person whose job it is to uphold the guardianship values, will hold sway. We talked about this in Part 1, but it also applies to this part of the bill, in Part 2; you have to be able to apply those values. Any weakening of those values will result potentially in the loss of a species such as the Archey’s frog, the rarest frog on the planet.

The Government may be quite comfortable with that, because, actually, for the Government, mining for gold—a mineral that is mainly not used for anything particularly essential. Twelve percent of gold is used in electronics. The rest of it is in jewellery or it is locked up in banks.

We are talking about destroying the ecosystem, destroying the environment that has been set aside in schedule 4, for a whole lot of stuff that could be recycled from your cellphone and mine, or from a landfill. But gold fever knows no bounds. Gold fever is about an obsession with a metal that can be found above the ground. There is lots of it above the ground sitting around doing nothing. Instead, under this bill, these special places can be sacrificed.

The other thing that they are looking for in parts of the conservation estate, of course, is coal. Nobody mentioned it last night, but, guess what, it is a fossil fuel, we have a climate crisis, and we need to transition away from coal. So what we are looking for is not a cure for cancer; what we are looking for are metals that can be recycled and minerals that we can also transition away from. There is no commitment and no vision behind this bill. All it is, is how we can get into the conservation estate and make sure that we have access, above all other things, to these things like gold, silver, coal, or oil. Anyone would think that climate change was not real to anybody who supports this bill—clearly it is not.

So we have a bizarre situation where we have the Archey’s frog, the rarest frog on the planet is endangered. The communities have opposed this. The people all over the country, including Ngāti Hau just the other day on Radio New Zealand National saying that it does not want the conservation estate or its own land at Puhi Puhi dug up because of the mercury risk—all of these people are going to find that this bill is a facilitator bill. Part 2, which ought to be a strong protection, is fatally undermined.

It is very, very disappointing because we are serious about conservation, but there is no point in playing games and setting up these ideas of X protection and then undermining them in the next breath. And that is what has happened today. In the next breath, schedule 4, which is protected in Part 2, is being undermined by the Minister, who announced today that he would not rule out drilling rigs. There is only one reason you bring in the drilling rig. You have done your surveying. You have done your aeromagnetic surveying. You have done it all and you want to mine. The mining companies want to mine and the Government is saying: “One day, boys, this will all be yours.”

Just before I call the next speaker, I just want to draw to members’ attention in the Chamber that this is a debating chamber. It is not a place to receive phone calls during sittings of the House. We are not a call centre. Phones should be on silent mode when they are brought into the Chamber.