Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I’m standing to oppose the Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill.

Now, there are different ways to get things done in this House. There are members’ bills which the Government of the day just simply does not agree with. It goes through a process, and that’s the end of it—it dies a death. There are other members’ bills, however, that the Government actually supports in principle, but for whatever reason, the Government of the day decides that the more robust process in terms of achieving your policy outcome is for this to go through a Government process as opposed to the member’s bill process, and this is one of those bills.

Now, this is an important bill. It’s something that in principle, the Labour Government supports, and as a former Minister of Tourism, I understand the value of living the brand—you know, we go out to the world with “clean, green” and “100% Pure”. That’s how we sell ourselves globally, and at this point in time, it is incredibly important that we actually walk the walk and that we live the brand. That is why this piece of policy is very high on the Government’s work agenda. At the moment, we’ve got Ministers and we’ve got officials who are actually doing the work with regard to this piece of legislation out there at the moment.

Now, let me just walk through the processes. If we supported this as a member’s bill, what would happen is it would go to a select committee. It is time-restrained, and a select committee with cross-party consultation does work, albeit with officials that attend the select committee. But the bottom line is it is constrained through the processes, which are also constrained through the select committee process.

If this is sponsored by a Government or if this is part of the Government’s policy agenda, then it is not constrained by the same limits that the select committee process is. One of the really important things with regard to this is to identify the key stakeholders, understand what their concerns are, work through those concerns, and come out with a piece of legislation that, when it’s introduced to the House, the really heavy lifting has been done.

So of course when a bill around this piece of policy does come to the House, it will still go through that select committee process and there will still be an opportunity for robust debate, but the heavy lifting will have already been done by Ministers and by officials in a way that allows full consultation and in a way that allows us to understand the issues and, hopefully, come up with solutions that are suitable and that are amenable to those key stakeholders for whom this is a really important issue. So I’m not saying that by the Government’s adopting this sort of policy statement or this principle, it doesn’t go through a proper process—it absolutely does—but by the time it comes to the House, then we’ve ironed out a lot of the problems.

Also, there is a lot of work being done. As a member of the Environment Committee, I can say that we have heard from officials about this very issue. I mean, we understand that this is important for Kiwis—we really do—but we also understand that there is a high level of complexity. It’s not a matter of just saying that we’d ban everything in the conservation estate. If it was that simple, it would have already been done. But there are key stakeholders for whom the consequence of what we are talking about in this member’s bill isn’t recognised and it isn’t dealt with. We believe—the Government believes—that we could end up with a piece of legislation, if we followed this member’s bill, that was far from ideal, and there is no doubt about it that when you’re doing something with regard to our conservation estate, we need to get it right.

That is why the principle behind this is supported, but this member’s bill isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t be seeing something come to this House at some point under a Labour Government in the next term that doesn’t deal with this issue—

💬 Damien Smith: Ha, ha!

Yeah, I know. Well, it may come sooner—you know, it may be within the first six months—but I can’t make any promises. But what I can say is because a lot of the work will be done, it’ll be high on the next Labour Government’s agenda.

So all I would say to those who are watching, and all I would say to those for whom this is a really important issue—and I understand that it is for a lot of people—please don’t think that the Government’s opposing this bill means we oppose the policy intent, because we don’t oppose the policy intent. We support it, but we just believe that the work needs to be done so that when the legislation is introduced, it has integrity, we’ve worked out the issues with the key stakeholders, and when it goes to the select committee, it is in a much better space than this bill is. So Labour opposes this bill. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thank members for their speeches, but I guess my response is: if not now, then when? An Official Information Act document from a briefing, Conservation portfolio priorities, released under the Official Information Act—that briefing, 2 March this year. The Department of Conservation’s advice to the Minister, and I quote, “We consider the key priorities for the remainder of the term, with the biggest impact for conservation and biodiversity outcomes, are deliverables relating to no new mines on conservation land, the oceans work programme, and a number of other matters.”

The Department of Conservation has listed the no new mines as being a key priority, yet we have seen absolutely nothing from the Labour Government on when that priority, that comes from the 2017 Speech from the Throne, will actually be advanced. So it’s well and good for the last speaker, Stuart Nash, to say that it’s coming, but it has been coming since 2017, and in this term there’s been absolutely no obvious work on it.

Other speakers like Angela Roberts claimed that the review and reclassification of stewardship land needed to occur before this bill could proceed and before we could have legislation which protected conservation land from mining. That review is not the answer. It won’t deliver the protection which our indigenous biodiversity needs, either on the West Coast or in the Hauraki-Coromandel region. That’s because on the West Coast 82 percent or some 530,000 hectares of stewardship land has been proposed for reclassification by the national panel, and that’s been recommended for historic reserve or conservation park status. So 82 percent of the land proposed for reclassification is not going to get any additional protection from mining, because “conservation park” is the weakest and lowest form of legal protection, and Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act doesn’t include conservation parks in the lands that are protected from mining.

There’s 180,000 hectares inland from Greymouth near Kōtuku Moana, Lake Brunner, that’s recommended as historic reserve. That historic reserve wouldn’t be protected from mining either. So the reclassification of stewardship land that a number of Labour members have referred to in their speeches is not the answer, because it doesn’t provide adequate legal protection by strengthening the legal status of the land that’s being proposed for reclassification.

Jamie Strange talked about visiting an underground gold mine in Coromandel and being impressed by remediation. I’ve been to that mine, I’ve been underground there, but that provides no defence for species like Archey’s frog, threatened with extinction from vibration and blasting under conservation land, which is currently being proposed by OceanaGold. Archey’s frog has been on the planet as a species for around 200 million years. We in the Greens think that species like that and our biodiversity deserve protection.

It’s only the northern part of the Coromandel Peninsula which is protected by Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act. This bill would ensure that the southern part and the conservation lands there, which are just as important ecologically as those on the north of Coromandel Peninsula, are also protected.

Stuart Smith talked about—well, made it sound as if we were trying to stop mining throughout Aotearoa. Two-thirds of New Zealand is outside the conservation estate. The bill does not affect that at all, except for no new coal mines, and that’s important to protect our climate.

Labour speakers have also mentioned concerns about pounamu. The bill may make it more expensive to mine pounamu, because fewer pounamu boulders would be uncovered in the course of alluvial mining on public conservation land. But there’s absolutely nothing in this bill to prevent the mining of pounamu. If the wording needed to be changed to make that clearer, we could expect that to happen in the Environment Committee.

So Forest and Bird polling has shown that two-thirds of New Zealanders want public conservation land protected from mines. We’ve been hearing a petition from Coromandel Watchdog in the Environment Committee, signed by more than 11,000 people. That is seeking, if the Government is not going to implement that Speech from the Throne commitment or pass this bill, to at least to put a moratorium on all new permits.

The Green Party says: if not now, then when? The Department of Conservation has said that this is a priority, but we’ve seen no action. We need to see action to protect our biodiversity, in a nature crisis, from further mining.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break, and the House will resume at 7.30 p.m. this evening.

Sitting suspended from 6.02 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.