Anger is brewing among conservationists and Maori across Northland over Government plans to open up the region for widespread mining applications next month, according to Te Wakameninga o nga hapu o Ngapuhi spokesman Bryce Smith.
For the past 10 days a delegation of six government officials and Far North Mayor Wayne Brown had been pitching Northland to multinational mining companies in Canada, including at the world's largest mining trade fair in Toronto, he said, pursuing opportunities after almost the entire region north of Warkworth was surveyed last year, using aerial geomagnetic imprinting technology to show where different minerals lay.
The survey had been carried out without landowner consent, over private and public land, and land under Treaty claim.
"Mining puts our homes, land, rivers and sea at risk, and we won't take the government trying to impose this on the region lightly," Mr Smith said, adding that despite Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee being reported in 2010 as saying no areas of kauri forest would be targeted, only one area within the Waipoua kauri forest had been exempt from the survey.
"This puts forests covering Tutamoe, Waima, Puketi and Omahuta potentially in the firing line, and proves Gerry Brownlee directed otherwise," Forest and Bird Far North branch chairman Dean Baigent-Mercer said.
