Editorial: Muddled Govt mining stance fatally flawed

Photo / Greg Bowker

Only through extraordinary misadventure can a Government approach designed to achieve one objective end up accomplishing precisely the opposite.

Yet such is the fate of the plan to start mining conservation land. Last August, the Resources Minister, Gerry Brownlee, talked of providing "a solid platform for improving and increasing access to conservation land for responsible mineral exploration and mining activity".

Yesterday, he announced that not only would specially protected Schedule 4 land be off-limits to mining but another 12,400ha would be added to it, and that all future national parks and marine reserves would be equally untouchable. In sum, the amount of highly protected conservation land is greatly expanded.

So ends a saga that has seen the Government waste much time and energy. Greenpeace depicted its about-face as "a heartening example of people power in action".

But, in fact, this was always a one-sided fight and the Government's proposition was doomed from an early stage. The debate about mining conservation land was always going to revolve around the need to balance the risk of disfiguring the environment with the economic benefits of mining for a region and the national economy.

Astoundingly, the Government never spelt out those benefits.

All that emerged from a stock take by the Department of Conservation and the Ministry of Economic Development were vague pronouncements about the potential value of minerals.

Forty per cent of the country's total mineral wealth was said to fall within the Schedule 4 areas, the restricted conservation lands that comprise just 13 per cent of New Zealand's land mass.

But there was no in-depth assessment of the number of jobs that would be created, the benefit in increased economic growth or the Crown's financial gain from royalties if mining were to take place on the Coromandel Peninsula, Great Barrier Island and other pristine environments.

Many warned that the focus on mining a plateau on Great Barrier Island for gold and silver was a Government ploy. Its final decision would abandon this as a sop to environmentalists but open up other Schedule 4 areas to mining.

We now know there was no coherent Government strategy, let alone Machiavellian intrigue. Its whole approach was untidy. This left the field open to those who marched up Queen St in protest and sent more than 37,000 submissions to the Beehive.

Mr Brownlee said yesterday that "we heard the message loud and clear". Cue the Prime Minister's pragmatism. In this case, it was at least well justified. The sparseness of evidence to offset the downside of mining gave the Government no ground to plough blindly ahead in the role of principled leader.

As a face-saving gesture, Mr Brownlee said there would be further assessment of mineral wealth in Northland and the West Coast, some of it on less protected conservation land.

The people in those areas are more favourably disposed to mining. One has high unemployment and the other a history of extractive industries. Mining could deliver a sizeable economic benefit.

Depending on the risk to the environment, a strong case could be made for it. As such, there is good reason for this initiative - and no need for it to have been tied to Mr Brownlee's grander scheme.

But even mining in these regions will strike opposition if the economic case for it is not made effectively. And miners will be loath to paddle in such sensitive waters.

They, more than anyone, will be dismayed that a welcome mat laid out to them has, thanks to the Government's ineptness, turned a vivid green.