Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
[Volume:662;Page:10547] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker and happy Pink Shirt Day. It is a day when we focus on stopping bullying so let us start with each other and the Earth. I hope that the Minister for Economic Development is not playing favourites when it comes to facilitating mineral exploitation. The Green Party was deeply worried this week after seeing the Minister on the Greenpeace video. It said that the Hon Gerry Brownlee has fallen for “sexy coal” and was losing interest in gold. Of course it is pretty hard to tell because the Cabinet papers contradict the consultation document that the public is trying in good faith to respond to. Perhaps we need to communicate more deeply with our Prime Minister on this issue. I know he is getting quite a few letters on the subject. 
How does the Prime Minister feel about gold bling? After all it is shiny and popular and one can access about a teaspoon of it for every tonne of earth dug up crushed up and then piped or trucked to a toxic waste dump. Then there is the acid mine drainage from the mines themselves as well as from beneath any tailings dumps. This effect is not as pretty as gold and the drainage is still leaching its orange toxic slime into the Hauraki Gulf from numerous small mine sites from 100 years ago. The Government has budgeted $17 million to try to clean up a small mine on Mount Te Aroha. The mine closed in the 1970s and is still leaching 5000 kilograms of heavy metals per year into waterways and the Hauraki Gulf. 
It is curious how the traditional goldmining areas have experienced a total collapse of their economies and have had to develop other more sustainable industries. West Coast and Waihi streets should be paved with gold. Of all the towns in the Coromandel region Waihi should be thriving on the vast profits and so-called sustainable jobs that Martha Hill mine and Favona underground mine have delivered to the citizens. It may surprise the advocates for so-called modern mining to realise that Waihi has just hit the bottom rung of the Ministry of Social Development’s deprivation index. It has slipped from level 9 last year to level 10 this year. I do not think that being literally at the bottom of the heap is that sexy for the people of Waihi who have no higher education services after high school in their town and have high levels of drug alcohol and mental health issues. 
But the people of Waihi have a tailings dump containing 40 million tonnes of toxic tailings which are heavy metals such as arsenic cadmium zinc and mercury. The Waihi tailings dump is 300 times bigger than the Tui mine tailings dump so just imagine what it could cost to clean up in 60 years’ time. Newmont Waihi Gold which is an “ever-responsible” citizen has put aside $10 million for the lucky local trust that will own this toxic dump when it has left town. This trust which consists of tangata whenua and local authority people will be responsible for any problems with water quality or dump collapse in the foreseeable future. That $10 million will not cover the scoping report let alone the clean-up of some of the drains and ditches polluted by that vast dump. 
I say to the Prime Minister that gold is really sexy is it not? Seventy-seven percent of the world gold resource above the ground is used in jewellery and gold jewellery is the symbol of real value. When all those financial markets get shaky which of course has nothing to do with greed and financial speculation there is always gold. I ask the Prime Minister whose gold it is. Several hui this week with Hauraki tangata whenua raised the matter of their whakapapa which connects them from the top of the sky to the centre of the earth in places where they hold mana whenua. Hence they state unequivocally that the Crown does not own the gold; in fact the gold is owned by them. They have never received any royalties for that gold extracted in the previous goldmining days and they will not be receiving any gold in the future. So if they say that the Crown does not own it how can the Crown do a stocktake and sell it off? Not only is this a concern but we are also concerned about the fact that the goldmining industry is being facilitated by a Government that does not understand even the real cost-benefit analysis. It has been happy to admit in this House that it never did a cost-benefit analysis of the real price of gold.