Delahunty Catherine: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9306. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chairperson. I feel an urgent need to take a call on Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill because after what I have just experienced in the last 24 hours around both this bill and around schedule 4 I am afraid that this part is fatally compromised. I was positive about this part of the bill and the Green Party was positive about it but now that we know that schedule 4 may be open to drilling rigs I feel less confident at the fact that pieces of land or other areas of sanctuary will go automatically into schedule 4. That is no longer the good news it should have been. I agree with the comments from my colleagues from the Labour Party that we need to uphold the core values of conservation but if schedule 4 is now open for drilling—and the Minister of Energy and Resources at question time would not rule this out—that shows you just how serious the situation is.New Zealanders expect Part 2 to mean what it says. New Zealanders marched—more than 40000 people—and made submissions so that Part 2 of the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill would have some meaning so that in fact areas like the Ramsar Convention wetlands areas like sanctuaries and scientific reserves and other reserves that are also covered later in the Reserves Act but are on the conservation estate—all of those—would have some meaning. So what we see now is the Minister—and I have a legal opinion to say that the minimum impact does not include drilling—is going to ensure through this bill that in fact because of other sections of this bill Part 2 will be literally undermined.Let us get real about what goes on on the conservation estate at the moment when you are talking about protection of special places in schedule 4. Archey’s frog is the rarest frog on the planet. It is the ancient amphibian that gives birth to live young. It is a tiny little frog. It is an absolutely amazing little creature which is very hard to see with the naked eye. In an area that should be in schedule 4 right now an area called Wharekīrauponga just south of Whangamata in the hills behind Whangamata right now there is a mining company called Newmont Mining Corporation with drilling rigs in that area. Now if we want to move that area into schedule 4 we will have to go through an Order in Council; it will no longer be purely the word of the Minister of Conservation.Even without some of the other parts of this bill that are very deleterious to the environment we are concerned about how we are going to get areas into schedule 4—let alone the protections once they get there. Take this little frog the most ancient and the rarest frog on the planet which you would think would be an iconic New Zealand species that everyone would uphold. What has happened is the consultants who were brought in—because the Department of Conservation does not have the resources to actually look at the activities of this frog—did a 2-hour daylight survey in the area where the drilling rig was going to be brought in and said “Oh well nothing is there.” I spoke to Dr Phil Bishop who is from University of Otago. He is the international head of the Amphibian Survival Alliance which is the group that is trying to keep the rarest frog in the world alive and he said nobody not even the world expert which he is could have found that little frog in daylight. It is simply impossible let alone in 2 hoursin the middle of the forest. It is simply not how a proper conservation expert would go about these things.That supports the point that others have been making which is for Part 2 you have to have robust support systems in order to make sure that the management and the sustaining of the conservation estate can be carried out. Instead after today I find we are going to have drilling rigs in schedule 4 land. So that means that the public are going to find out and are finding out today that a Government that said “No mining” actually meant “No mining except you can do everything but and then you can lobby us and maybe”—apologies Mr Chairperson not you. But maybe lobbying will help because if one has identified a gold reserve say for example in the middle of the Archey’s frog habitat perhaps the Government would look at schedule 4 again.So what we are seeing in this bill is that Part 2 talks about these very good values but as well as the risks to schedule 4 that we have learnt about in the last few hours there is also the problem that the Minister of Conservation is no longer the sole arbiter of what gets added to schedule 4. So although the bill is at pains to say that it will not remove anything schedule 4 if it has to go via Order in Council—i.e. Cabinet—rather than the Minister’s word the priorities of the Government of the day rather than the person whose job it is to uphold the guardianship values will hold sway. We talked about this in Part 1 but it also applies to this part of the bill in Part 2; you have to be able to apply those values. Any weakening of those values will result potentially in the loss of a species such as the Archey’s frog the rarest frog on the planet.The Government may be quite comfortable with that because actually for the Government mining for gold—a mineral that is mainly not used for anything particularly essential. Twelve percent of gold is used in electronics. The rest of it is in jewellery or it is locked up in banks.We are talking about destroying the ecosystem destroying the environment that has been set aside in schedule 4 for a whole lot of stuff that could be recycled from your cellphone and mine or from a landfill. But gold fever knows no bounds. Gold fever is about an obsession with a metal that can be found above the ground. There is lots of it above the ground sitting around doing nothing. Instead under this bill these special places can be sacrificed.The other thing that they are looking for in parts of the conservation estate of course is coal. Nobody mentioned it last night but guess what it is a fossil fuel we have a climate crisis and we need to transition away from coal. So what we are looking for is not a cure for cancer; what we are looking for are metals that can be recycled and minerals that we can also transition away from. There is no commitment and no vision behind this bill. All it is is how we can get into the conservation estate and make sure that we have access above all other things to these things like gold silver coal or oil. Anyone would think that climate change was not real to anybody who supports this bill—clearly it is not.So we have a bizarre situation where we have the Archey’s frog the rarest frog on the planet is endangered. The communities have opposed this. The people all over the country including Ngāti Hau just the other day on Radio New Zealand National saying that it does not want the conservation estate or its own land at Puhi Puhi dug up because of the mercury risk—all of these people are going to find that this bill is a facilitator bill. Part 2 which ought to be a strong protection is fatally undermined.It is very very disappointing because we are serious about conservation but there is no point in playing games and setting up these ideas of X protection and then undermining them in the next breath. And that is what has happened today. In the next breath schedule 4 which is protected in Part 2 is being undermined by the Minister who announced today that he would not rule out drilling rigs. There is only one reasonyou bring in the drilling rig. You have done your surveying. You have done your aeromagnetic surveying. You have done it all and you want to mine. The mining companies want to mine and the Government is saying: “One day boys this will all be yours.”