KEY POINTS:
When will the Department of Conservation ever get it right over Auckland's volcanic cones? After the latest fiasco, the whole management team should be packed off to some isolated windswept corner of their empire to grub gorse until further notice.
And for good measure, if anyone can find a leader among the Ngati Whatua o Orakei, let's toss him in as well.
Last Saturday, we'd been invited up Mt Eden to hear Prime Minister Helen Clark announce "the New Zealand tentative list of World Heritage sites".
Helen Clark was to have announced what many of us had long campaigned for: that Auckland's unique field of volcanic cones was now on the list of tentative World Heritage sites. Better still, I understand she was to have declared Auckland's cone field had jumped to the top of the wish list, and was to be submitted to the annual meeting of Unesco's World Heritage Committee in Christchurch this month as the country's sole nomination.
However, on Thursday, DoC postponed the event, claiming the Prime Minister was unable to attend. This was not true. It was canned because the Ngati Whatua suddenly decided they had not been sufficiently consulted.
Conservation Minister Chris Carter admits DoC could have done better. But so too could Ngati Whatua. They must have known of the long campaign for world recognition of the cones. Why didn't they signal any trepidations years ago?
Though what they could be escapes me. Surely if there is anything every Aucklander can see eye to eye on, it's the need for every extra bit of protection and recognition our mountains can get.
Mr Carter says the nomination will still go ahead. But what an inauspicious way to begin the four-year process through the Unesco bureaucracy. It's rather a kick in the face also to Tumu te Heuheu, paramount chief of Ngati Tuwharetoa and chairman of the world heritage committee.
Mr te Heuheu's ancestors gifted the three mountains making up the Tongariro National Park to the New Zealand government in 1887, and this park was the first New Zealand site added to the World Heritage list in 1993.
True, DoC's concern for the Auckland volcanoes has been half-hearted. In 1995 the Auckland conservancy did declare World Heritage site status an integral part of its conservation management strategy for the region. But then it stood aside while Transit New Zealand's bulldozers lined up to drive through the side of Mt Roskill. Luckily the volunteers from the Volcanic Cones Society were there to save the day.
Then in January 2005, when DoC released a list of "six tentative candidates" for World Heritage site listing, Auckland was missing. Instead were dinky little towns like Oamaru and Napier, and the distant Kermadec Islands. These were supposed to rub shoulders with world monuments like the Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China and Tower of London.
It's more than two years since further nominations to this tentative list closed, and to my delight, the Auckland cones have not just made it, but are now apparently top of the list. And with only one nomination per country allowed each year, we're first up.
But with the annual Unesco meeting kicking off in Christchurch on Saturday week it doesn't leave much time for Ngati Whatua to get on board.
Mr Carter says the Government is going ahead with the nomination regardless, and in doing so he deserves the support of every Aucklander.
For those who brush aside such listings as mere tokenism, my view is, Auckland's cones need every bit of tokenism going. As you read this the Waiouru cone in Manukau City is being irreparably defaced by the developers of the Highbrook subdivision.
In a recent letter to Manukau City Council calling for action, Dr Bruce Hayward, convener of the geological reserves subcommittee of the Geological Society, says that "virtually the entire northern slopes" of this cone have been "reshaped to create building platforms with steep excavations and huge stormwater traps cut straight into the bedded tuff".
Dr Hayward challenges Manukau City to invoke the recently rediscovered 1915 act, which protects Auckland's cones from such savagery. That such cutting and hacking and nibbling of the cones continues unabated shows the need for any recognition going.
