Rudman's city: Puketutu's future still hangs in balance

By BRIAN RUDMAN

The rape of Auckland's unique volcanic heritage continues. The latest episode involves the already heavily damaged Puketutu Island just off Mangere in the Manukau Harbour.

For some years now the owners, the Kelliher Trust, have been sweet-talking critics, planning commissioners and Uncle Tom Cobley and all that mining would end on the island in 2003. That's when the contract with Winstone Aggregates expires.

But it seems as though the lure of mining royalties was too great to resist and when Winstone indicated it wanted to apply for an extension of its licence, the trust said it would not object.

Despite opposition from local Maori, planning commissioners acting on behalf of Manukau City and the Auckland Regional Council have agreed to a 10-year extension of the mining.

You could argue that since quarrying began in 1958 to provide base material for the adjacent airport expansion, the western end of the island has been so devastated that a bit more excavation is hardly here nor there.

But that misses the point. Like family violence, it's time to stop turning our heads at the little incidents and to adopt a policy of zero tolerance.

Since 1958, several cones on the little island, including the highest, called Puketutu - later named Pinnacle Hill by European settlers - have been destroyed. With Puketutu went more than 800 years of history.

Occupied from the earliest times of Maori settlement, it and other cones on the island had been terraced and fortified. Eventually, it became a place of cultural and spiritual significance.

Back in 1958 such considerations meant little to the airport builders. Obviously they meant little more to the commissioners considering the latest application, too.

Trust manager Gary Fitzpatrick, of Guardian Trust, tells me the trust still hasn't decided whether to extend Winstone's lease beyond 2003. I want to believe him.

I also want to believe the trust meant its various assurances over recent years that mining would end in 2003.

What makes believing so hard, though, is that if the trust really meant it, why did it send Winstone on a wild and expensive goose chase through the planning process?

The one glimmer of hope is that Manukau City Mayor Sir Barry Curtis has invited interested groups, including the Conservation Board and the Department of Conservation, to a discussion next Wednesday on Puketutu's future.

It is to be hoped that this will produce a better future for the remnants of Puketutu, but what is really needed is a major conference on the future of the region's overall volcanic heritage, not just an ad hoc gesture here and there trying to pick up the pieces.

It's amazing that we have a Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park but nothing in place to look after our unique volcanic setting. The best we have are regional view shafts that protect sightlines between various cones from being interrupted by new buildings. But we have nothing that protects the cones themselves for all time. Talk about weird.

Closest to midnight on the volcano doomsday clock is poor old Mt Roskill. In mid-June, Auckland City planning commissioners gave Transit New Zealand approval to bulldoze a motorway through the cone's northern slopes.

This morning, representatives of DoC, the Conservation Board and the Volcanic Cones Society meet to plan a rearguard action. They have a few days to file an appeal to the Environment Court and, I hope, all three will.

Unfortunately, DoC, the senior player in this possible coalition, will have one hand tied behind its back. In the original hearing, for some unfathomable reason, the conservationists wimped out.

Instead of opposing Transit's rape of the lower slopes, DoC took the defeatist view that Transit would win and argued for ways to mitigate the impact of the route. It lost out there as well, so can now only appeal in these narrow areas.

The DoC-funded Conservation Board, like the Cones Society, argued for a more northerly route avoiding the foothills, so it can continue the battle for this case before the Environment Court. Of course, as I've argued before, saving Mt Roskill doesn't need a time-wasting, money-wasting trip to court.

What it needs is for Conservation Minister Sandra Lee to front up and express publicly and officially her long-held view that volcanic cones such as Puketutu and Mt Roskill are henceforth inviolate.

It might strengthen her resolve if we Aucklanders were to give her a lead.