Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill.

I am delighted to be speaking on this bill. It’s the only member’s bill that I’ve been lucky enough to have had drawn in nearly 12 years in this House. It’s a bill which seeks to fulfil Labour’s commitment that there be no new mines on conservation land. The 2017 Speech from the Throne set out the Government’s priorities for that term, and it said there will be no new mines on conservation land. Yet, nearly six years later, Tai Tokerau hapū, Forest & Bird, and communities in the north have had to organise to protect Puketi Forest, one of our last remaining unlogged kauri forests, from the prospecting and potentially destructive mining of Mineralogy International, directed by billionaire Clive Palmer.

Kauri forests are nature’s cathedrals. Individual trees can live for centuries. Why would we contemplate mining them? Last term, New Zealand First was a handbrake on that commitment that there’d be no new mines. That handbrake has gone from this House, and for good, I hope. We can act to change the law—in this case, the Crown Minerals Act—to properly protect our public conservation lands. Those lands and waters comprise nearly a third of Aotearoa New Zealand. We need this bill because only half of the conservation estate is protected from mining, through Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act 1991. Schedule 4 prevents access applications for Crown-owned minerals such as gold and coal from being granted in national parks, nature reserves, scientific reserves, wilderness areas, wildlife sanctuaries, marine reserves, and Ramsar wetlands. Apart from things like ventilation shafts, this bill would extend the protection that Schedule 4 provides to prohibit new exploration, prospecting, and mining activities on a Crown land held under the Conservation Act and other conservation legislation, such as the Reserves Act, not just those categories that are listed in Schedule 4. And the bill would prohibit new coal mines on any land after 1 January 2025.

In 2022, there were more than 516 permits and mining licences, extending over more than 424,000 hectares of conservation land, and, since then, just one company, Mineralogy International, has subsequently had minerals permits approved for thousands of hectares on the West Coast, surrounding Kōtuku Moana / Lake Brunner.

New Zealanders need the confidence that their public conservation lands will be protected as places where nature can thrive, where they can walk, tramp, climb, fish, and gather kai without the threat of those places being cleared, dug up, for private profit. Hundreds of New Zealanders have written to the Green Party, saying that they believe our conservation lands and waters should be protected, giving the reasons why that protection should exist. As Peter from Marlborough says—and I quote—“I worked for some years on the West Coast and have seen the terrible mess left by gold mines in recent years. Loss of habitat, biodiversity, fouling of streams with huge amounts of sediment and vegetation, as well as oil from machinery. Conservation land must be just that, for conservation, not for production of assets the planet doesn’t need.” Josh from the Bay of Plenty says—and I quote—“Bulldozing trees that absorb carbon to dig up carbon and put it into the atmosphere is about the worst thing you can do, never mind the habitat destruction and all of the rest of it.” And as Jane said—and I quote—“This is the time to make decisions for the long term, to stick to good agreements made when times were easier and never take decisions which only benefit short-term trade and employment. There are other ways to help those things, but there is no way back once destruction is allowed to happen.”

New Zealanders care. They know that we depend absolutely and utterly on nature for our economy, for our wellbeing, for our lives and the health of our communities. Forested uplands protect steep slopes from erosion. The snow fields and glaciers in the mountain lands of the conservation estate feed rivers and streams which provide water for communities and farmers downstream. We protect these areas and we protect our future. Mining causes significant harm to both protected species and landscapes. Digging huge pits for coal and gold, river terraces for alluvial gold mining, can permanently change landforms and landscapes and destroy conservation values and nature in the process. Former Government mining company Solid Energy New Zealand Ltd decapitated Mount Augustus, the habitat for our giant carnivorous land snail Powelliphanta augusta, in its quest for coal. Where do those remaining snails now live? Largely, in ice cream containers in fridges in the Department of Conservation’s offices in Hokitika.

So mining does create damage. We’ve got acid mine-drainage from big waste-rock stacks. We’ve got a huge pit in the middle of the North Westland wildlife corridor on the West Coast—those forests are supposed to enable wildlife to move from the Paparoa Ranges to the Southern Alps, and, instead, Macrae’s Mining Co. and then OceanaGold Ltd have mined them, there are big tailings reservoirs and big waste-rock stacks which pose a risk to the Īnangahua River and the Kawatiri Buller River. That conservation land has been stripped bare of forest—it won’t recover in our lifetimes.

We need this bill because mining has got an extremely privileged status compared to almost every other commercial activity on conservation land. If you want to do a guided tourism operation, gather sphagnum moss, those activities have got to be consistent with the purpose for which the land is held. Yet, under our current law, mining on conservation land can be approved even if it is inconsistent with conservation outcomes. Economic benefits can be prioritised over conservation even though the Department of Conservation holds the land and is supposed to manage it for conservation purposes.

Of the mining which happens on conservation land, 75 percent happens on the West Coast of the South Island, Te Tai Poutini coast. Most of those permits target gold or coal, they don’t target the essential minerals or materials that would help us to shift to a low carbon economy. And the bill would still allow mining, of course, on the two thirds of Aotearoa which is outside the conservation estate.

We need this bill to protect the climate. It would ban new coal mines from January 2025 to help prevent emissions leakage when coal is mined and then exported to be burnt offshore.

There have been some concerns raised about the impact of the bill on Ngāi Tahu. It makes absolutely no changes to any Te Tiriti o Waitangi settlement commitments, including the Ngai Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act, which gives Ngāi Tahu control of all pounamu; nor does it change the rights of Māori to access customary materials such as obsidian and red and yellow ochre on conservation land. But I understand that alluvial gold mining on the West Coast can uncover pounamu boulders as the miners dig up the river terraces to find material to put through their gold screens. So by stopping new alluvial mines on conservation land, it would make the excavation of pounamu more expensive for Ngāi Tahu because they would have to have their mining directed just at pounamu, but it wouldn’t stop Ngāi Tahu excavating and mining for pounamu.

Ngāi Tahu hapu Makaawhio value aotea. It’s a stone similar to pounamu, it’s found only in the Makaawhio River and beaches in South Westland, including on public conservation land. The Makaawhio have a 40-year mining permit over the river and its headwaters, and if further provision needs to be made in this bill to safeguard access to that stone, then that can happen at select committee.

Supporting this bill at first reading would enable the public to have a say on their conversation lands, which the Department of Conservation manages on their behalf, and any changes that need to be made could be made to address those issues.

This bill would protect some of our greatest natural treasures: the climate, our public conservation lands, the habitat and ecosystems of some of the most special species in the world—species that are only found here in Aotearoa. It would prohibit new exploration, prospecting, and mining on the conservation estate. I commend it to the House and would welcome members’ support for it. Kia ora.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill. I want to start by congratulating the member: if you only get one crack in 12-odd years, it’s good to be something that you really deeply care about. So I’m really pleased that we are spending time—

Simon Court: Does Labour care about it, though?

ANGELA ROBERTS: —considering this. It’s really important. We got asked—we’ve just been asked—on 8 May, our Rt Hon Prime Minister, Christopher Hipkins, reconfirmed our commitment to no new mines on conservation land. So we have got a lot to talk about.

The really interesting thing is we support the intent of the bill. We support everything that encourages us to have a really good debate about how we best protect our conservation land. We appreciate the policy intent. But this bill goes beyond that commitment and it doesn’t actually, I believe, give us a process where we end up in the strongest position for protecting our conservation land.

So we’ve heard about this amazing nation of ours, where a third of our land area—8.5 million hectares of land—is conservation land. Now, for those who would be zoning in from other parts of the planet, that sounds like, “Wow, you’ve got all of these national parks; that’s pretty cool.” I’m very privileged, I live in the shadow of Te Papakura o Taranaki—I never get sick of saying that fabulous new name—under that beautiful maunga, and I’m very, very grateful for the forethought that created that national park so long ago. When you fly over Taranaki and you see that ring plane where, at some point, somebody realised they needed to stop clearing trees, and that recognition is really, really significant.

But of that 8.5 million hectares, we have a whole pile of different classifications and different levels of protection. The intention is to best preserve the natural, historic, and cultural resources that we have within them. So we have our national parks—like our beautiful maunga—and we have our wildlife areas and we have our conservation areas but we also have stewardship land. Most of that stewardship land was transferred across to the Department of Conservation when it was first created in 1987, because it was kind of considered to have some conservation value. But those areas haven’t been assessed since 1987—those areas haven’t been assessed to see if they require additional protection. So there’s this massive piece of stewardship land which we’re not quite sure how we should best be looking after it.

If we think back to 1987—many of us can remember back that far. I wasn’t actually living in New Zealand at the time but I do remember all of the things that we were thinking about in 1987, and we certainly weren’t thinking about our relationship with the whenua in the way that we do today. I think that the maturity that has grown over those decades since 1987, where we have really changed not just our relationship with our land and the way that we think of it—this whole idea of classifying how valuable something is seems, well, a bit 1980s to me; I think that we’ve moved on since then—but our relationship with iwi, and their relationship with the land, and our learning about Te Ao Māori and mātauranga Māori has changed considerably. So the conversations about classification are so different now than they were in 1987.

When I think about the latest Treaty settlement with Taranaki iwi, with the seven iwi that live around our maunga, and the latest settlement, with the way that the partnership has been developed between the Crown, with the Department of Conservation (DOC), and with all of the iwi, it’s been a fascinating process to witness, and it is a really, really different relationship than would’ve been formed 20 years ago. So we’ve got huge opportunities with the shift in the way that we relate to iwi when we have these conversations about what these different classes of land are—for want of a better term—and our relationship has changed.

The problem with this legislation, unfortunately: it goes beyond our commitment to no more mines on conservation land, and it goes before. So the problem is it goes before a true engagement in partnership with iwi about the implications for them. There’ve been quite significant assumptions about the four Treaty relationships that may be impacted—there probably are more—and it goes before we have completed the process of reclassification that we have been involved in. We know that the reclassification, that 2.5 million hectares, 9 percent of land area and 30 percent of the DOC estate, which is the stewardship land which needs to be reclassified so that we can actually add greater protections, further protections, to protect that conservation land, should be done before we have this blanket piece of legislation which will in the end be less robust and will not have the longevity that taking our time and our care to really make the most of the relationships that we have with iwi and with the reclassification—there’s a lot of land, and we need to take the care. I appreciate the sense of urgency that has been expressed from the other side of the House—I get that completely—but we need to get it right, because it’s way too important to get it half wrong, or half right, and then have some careless gaps in it and for it to not be robust.

I spend a lot of time in my national park. You know, it’s quite a thing when one of my children gets their first pair of—when they graduate from sneakers to tramping boots, because, you know, their feet grow too quickly to wear out their tramping boots, and finally their feet get big enough that we get their first pair of tramping boots. We absolutely cherish our national parks. This Government is completely committed to protecting our conservation land—that is a given. We know this. So many of us in this House have stories of how precious this land is to us. You know, you drag your kids out of bed at 5 o’clock in the morning and say, “You’re going to love being on the mountain for the sunrise.” and they don’t think it’s a great idea, and then suddenly, you know, an hour and a half later, you know, you come around a corner on the track and the sun’s just popped over the horizon and you see Ruapehu and you see Tongariro and you actually realise how small our little country is. And the kids go, “Oh, yeah, I suppose that was all right.”, and they’re just beaming.

You know, how good is it for us to have access to such amazing places? A third of our nation is under the conservation estate, and we have to make sure that we get it right, because if we don’t, then there will be opportunity for loopholes to be exploited. I think there are challenges around making sure that we get it done in a timely manner, but we also need to make sure we get it right.

It is about relationships, and the weird thing is, in 1987, we never talked about our relationship with the national park. You know, at that point we were arguing about, you know, the bumper stickers—you know, who was Egmont anyway? You know, that’s how far we’ve moved since 1987. In 1987, we were arguing about whether or not we should be naming our mountain and our national park after a guy who didn’t even know it existed, and now we have Te Papakura o Taranaki. So our conversation has shifted since then. It’s really, really important that as we reclassify the stewardship land and everything else, we do it properly. Our relationship with the whenua and our relationship with iwi require that of us. It is really, really important that we do it right, and we absolutely respect and endorse the intent of this bill, but it is going not just beyond our commitment but before what we need to do to fulfil our commitment to no new mining on conservation land. And it is because of that that I cannot commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, congratulations to the member, Eugenie Sage, for having the member’s bill drawn. National will not be supporting this member’s bill. Part of the reason is we have just had several cyclones in this country, we need in areas to rebuild bridges, we need to rebuild roads, we are trying to get renewable electricity, and we need to build structures for that—and at the moment, we are still bringing Indonesian coal into the country to generate our electricity.

When we look at the conservation estate, we all want to preserve our natural habitat as much as possible; we all want to make sure we get as close to predator-free as we possibly can; we all want to use our land wisely. I want to mention, at this point in time, our colleague Maureen Pugh, who would love to have been here speaking on this bill tonight. She’s from the West Coast of the South Island, and 81 percent of the West Coast of the South Island holds one-third of the country’s total landmass in the conservation estate and 81 percent on the West Coast. So it’s huge.

But I think the thing that we need to remind people of is that the Department of Conservation holds a lot of this land; the Department of Conservation holds a lot of stewardship land. So when people think about it as national parks, it’s very important to all of us that we preserve our national parks but the stewardship land is in very varying value.

The member before, Angela Roberts, just mentioned that it’s taking a long time to reclassify it. It’s taking far too long to reclassify it. We suggest that there could be some that could be quickly classified into something else, because we don’t see the value of all of it as it’s not all national park, to be sure. Mining only takes place on 0.04 percent of the conservation estate. Maureen Pugh would describe that as an A4 page on a rugby field. That’s probably a much easier way of describing it, because it’s a very small area for a lot.

What I will say is that, historically, there has been damage done with mining, but the mining companies that I talk to—and others in our party talk to these days—are actually building back better. They’re actually replacing some of the biodiversity that’s been lost as part of the process.

As part of rebuilding our country after the cyclones, we’re going to have an and/and; it’s not an either/or. If we went totally down the conservation path and didn’t think about what we need in terms of resources to rebuild and run our country, we would have no money to do conservation. A lot of the philanthropy and money that goes into rebuilding our conservation estate actually comes from the people who take their resources from the land.

I really would love somebody in this room to tell me—I always say: if you can’t graze it on the land, grow it within the land, or extract it from underneath the land, what is it? There is nothing that we build, nothing in this House, nothing that I see anywhere. The only exception to that is probably a fish—and we haven’t seen any of those in the House for a little while, but it has been known.

So, look, miners have to apply for access to conservation land. There is no open access. It’s a rigorous process. There is no mining in national parks, but it is a matter of balancing the economic opportunities with our environmental responsibilities.

The National Party cares deeply about the environment, but would take a different approach towards mining on conservation land. There’s land of variable quality, and in some cases it makes sense; in some cases, we have to mine for these things. I mean, there is no way—we’ve got our energy spokesperson here, Stuart Smith—that we are going to build any new renewable electricity in this country without digging something out of the ground to do that. So many mining projects are there; they’re already acting in good faith with high-quality restoration occurring afterwards. We do not support this bill.

Mr Speaker, thanks for the opportunity to take one of the last calls for the evening on the Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill. I’d also like to acknowledge the member the Hon Eugenie Sage, a very hard-working member, a very conscientious member, and she will be missed from this House when she retires at the election.

Just to start on a little bit of a response to what the previous member Barbara Kuriger mentioned: in terms of conservation land, the member seemed to allude to the fact that we don’t gain an economic return from conservation land like we do in terms of agriculture, like we do in terms of mining. But I would argue that there is a commercial return on conservation land, and that is in terms of tourism, for one. The second one would be in terms of the sequestration of carbon, which is absolutely important. If we don’t do that, we have to buy carbon credits as a country. So there certainly is some economic benefit to conservation land.

As we’ve heard previously, 33 percent of New Zealand is conservation land, and we have some absolutely wonderful conservation land and it is important that we protect it, and that’s what this bill talks about. It talks about protecting the taonga that we have. Just to highlight just one in particular, in an area near where I was born, the Abel Tasman National Park—absolutely beautiful area. Not quite as nice as some areas of Hamilton—Hamilton Gardens, for example—but it’s getting close. Getting close. Look, that’s just a small example of the treasure we have in conservation land, and it’s important. I hear members laughing; I’m not quite sure why, but it is absolutely important that we protect it.

The Government does agree with what the member’s espousing here in terms of protecting our conservation land. Back in 2017, when I first came to this House, I remember listening, and others in this House were there, too. We listened to the Speech from the Throne from the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. As we were sitting there, I accidentally sat on the wrong side. I actually accidentally sat on the National Party side, and I actually heard the Speech from the Throne. The Prime Minister at the time, the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, what she said in that Speech from the Throne is that her Government will make a commitment to no new mines on conservation land—no new mines on conservation land—and nothing has changed from this Government’s perspective. So we are continuing to work in that area in terms of no new mines on conservation land, and we agree with the member on that wholeheartedly, and we’ve heard that from the previous speaker.

However, the member goes a little bit further than this Government is comfortable with at this point in time, because the member also, in her bill, she prohibits the granting of any permits for coal after 1 January 2025 on any land of any tenure to protect the climate from greenhouse gas emissions generated by burning coal. Now, there are some problems there, particularly in terms of the private land. The previous speaker espoused those, so in terms of repetition, I won’t go into that, but just to highlight the fact that conservation land is one thing—it’s an area owned by the Government; effectively, owned by all of us—but private land is a little bit more challenging. But, you know, we will continue to work in that area, because it is important that we do achieve our Paris targets in terms of climate change.

I recently visited a gold mine in the Coromandel region—Thames—and I went underground. It was incredibly impressive. There were some huge trucks going down metres underground. I was genuinely impressed with the work that they are doing in terms of the climate and in terms of the way that they remediate the land. I was impressed with the work that they were doing there. But we all know, in terms of coal mines, it is a sunset industry, and we have made that quite clear as a Government, and many Governments around the world have made that clear as well. That’s something that we’re standing to. So, look, in the last few seconds, just to confirm, we agree with the Minister in terms of no new mines on conservation land, but the Minister goes further than we are comfortable, as a Government, in terms of private land. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I agree with the Hon Eugenie Sage that our natural environment is important and that the Department of Conservation (DOC) has an important role in protecting our very special places, but the Department of Conservation are not doing a good job at that, and they’ve been given an impossible task. In the 1980s, the Department of Conservation was allocated a whole lot of public land that came from State-owned enterprises like the railways, like the Department of Lands and Survey, and Government farming businesses, and that was dumped in the DOC bucket and called “stewardship land”, on the intention that that land be then made available for other economic and social benefits. But it never was. From the 1980s till the 2023s, DOC and successive Governments have done nothing to make that land available for the maximum, the most efficient environmental and economic and social benefits.

That land makes up 30 percent of the DOC estate, or 9 percent of New Zealand’s total land area. That is not the land that I’m concerned about. That is not the land that is in our national parks. That is public land that DOC administers that’s called stewardship land. That land is used for farming on long-term leases, it is quarried and resources are made available, and it is mined by responsible and respectful operators who restore the land in a way that New Zealanders would expect it to be restored—in fact, to a much higher standard if you were to look at mining operations like, say, OceanaGold Globe Progress Mine in Reefton, which saved the tree stumps from the former forest harvesting decades before, saved them, carried out the mining, restored the land, and brought the tree stumps back into the restoration as a habitat for creepy crawlies. I’ve been to that site and I’ve seen how the private sector, how mining companies, can restore nature and restore biodiversity in a way that DOC, with its limited budget, with one or two hands tied behind its back, never could.

So I agree with the Hon Eugenie Sage that there is a problem where the Department of Conservation is not upholding its responsibilities to New Zealanders and, in fact, to our global effort to maintain and enhance biodiversity. So why do people mine on conservation land? Well, that’s because economically viable deposits occur on some of this land, public land, under the control of DOC, because of plate tectonics, because of magma rising from deep in the Earth’s crust that brings valuable minerals from deep underground and then leaves them as deposits near the surface. Now, DOC, the honourable member, the Government, can’t choose where those deposits of gold and platinum and silver and rare earth elements that go into things like this laptop or everyone’s cellphone or your TV or your Tesla—you can’t choose where these are placed because they have been left there as a result of natural processes. That’s why it’s important in New Zealand we continue to have access to these resources and not restrict them on a philosophical basis or on an ideological basis.

And we need to respect the fact that there are businesses which are already carrying out resource development activities and which can put the environment back in a better state than they found it, because that’s what people do. We discover an environment, we discover building materials and natural resources, we utilise them, and we want to make our world a better place. And if that involves recovering resources that we can all benefit from and that create wealth through the resource development, through the jobs that are created—high-paying jobs, particularly in places like the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand; Taranaki; of course, in Northland; and, more recently, around Rotorua and the Taupō volcanic zone, where lithium that’s used in electric vehicle batteries has been discovered. We should be able to recover those resources and be confident that New Zealand engineers and scientists can put the earth back, can restore nature better than they found it.

So ACT won’t be supporting this bill. We support the member’s intent to restore nature; to restore, enhance, and protect biodiversity wherever we find it. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

This debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. Have a good evening.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 9.58 p.m.