Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — Referral to Commerce Committee In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — Referral to Commerce Committee In Committee[Sitting date: 10 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9263. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): New Zealanders love and want to protect the places in our country—our distinctive and unique and precious plants and wildlife their habitats and our quite dramatic landscapes. They do not want miners to have a go first and that is why 50000 people marched down Queen Street. So I am pleased to stand here for the Green Party to speak for nature and for those wild places that so many New Zealanders treasure to speak for a smart and sustainable economic plan and to oppose this Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill.The bill represents a profound change in the way conservation lands are managed and the way in which mining applications are considered. It is a major change in our whole philosophy about the place of conservation in New Zealand. As Damien O’Connor noted when those 1991 changes came in with the Crown Minerals Act and the Conservation Act in 1987 there was a recognition that as manager of conservation lands holding them in trust for all New Zealanders the Minister of Conservation had a right to say no to mining applications in the same way that private landowners through the Crown Minerals Act in 1991 were also given the right to say no. This bill makes a major change to that because it puts the Minister of Energy and Resources as the decision maker alongside the Minister of Conservation for any applications to prospect and mine on conservation land. By doing that it is failing to give adequate weight to the Crown’s other statutory responsibilities in the Conservation Act. But we know that this Government does not care about conservation because it has cut the funding to the department it has axed 140 jobs and it is proposing new legislation to further change the Conservation Act potentially to weaken it so that it can “extract greater value” from conservation land. This is what the bill is all about having conservation land opened up for mining rather than for the preservation and protection of the species and landscapes that we value.I would like to talk specifically about clauses 31 and 32 and the changes they make to section 61. It is there that we have got these changes that put the Minister of Energy and Resources inside alongside the Minister of Conservation as a joint decision-maker. There was a small change by the Commerce Committee to restrict this to tier 1 applications for exploration and mining. But given that the threshold between tier 1 and tier 2 is how much the mining company estimates it will spend on its work programme for exploration permits and what it estimates will be the annual production and royaltyfor mining permits I imagine that most applicants will make sure that their estimated expenditure exceeds the $1.25 million threshold.One of the very troubling things in this clause—that is clause 31(1AA)—is that it is not only giving this joint decision-making power to new applications but also potentially making the law retrospective because the joint decision-making power applies to a variation to an existing access arrangement if the purpose is to allow significant exploration or mining activities. So that means as I read it that any existing mining or exploration permit that has been granted can potentially be significantly expanded and the Minister of Energy and Resources will have a role in that decision rather than just the Minister of Conservation. It is potentially allowing existing applications on conservation land which the Minister may have decided to restrict to smaller areas with less impact to actually significantly expand.This whole joint decision-making power implies that the Minister of Conservation as advised by the department cannot be trusted and is not competent to assess the effects of mining applications and decide them. As submitters noted and I would like to quote Linda Conning who said: “it is an unwarranted increase in ministerial power where there is no … obligation to promote the purpose of conservation and it is an undesirable precedent for joint ministerial responsibility to enable interference in other portfolios.” We do not see the Minister of Conservation able to make decisions alongside the Minister for Primary Industries on the total allowable commercial catch regardless of the fact that fishing has a lot of impact on our wildlife and on marine biodiversity so why should we have the Minister of Energy and Resources making decisions on conservation land? Are we going to see under the new changes to conservation legislation that have been highlighted in the briefing to the incoming Minister the Minister of Tourism having a joint role in decisions about tourism concession applications? It is showing the double standard that the Government is applying to the exploitation of our public protected lands that is at the heart of this bill.It is interesting that when National amended the Resource Management Act in 2009 to remove the Minister of Conservation’s role in relation to restricted coastal activities such as big reclamations or major dredging that was done because it was seen to be inefficient to have two decision makers: the regional council and the Minister. Yet here when we can encourage exploitation of our conservation lands the National Government is quite happy to have joint decision-making. There is nothing in the legislation that highlights what happens when there is a difference of view between the Minister of Conservation and the Minister of Energy and Resources and as Damien O’Connor noted there will be significant pressure applied to the Minister of Conservation to do what the Minister for Economic Development who is actually pulling all the strings here wants. So we will have the Minister of Conservation who is supposed to be the guardian of our protected conservation lands not having control over what happens on those lands. As Mr Finlayson noted words are important.The Conservation Act is about the preservation and protection of natural resources. That is a completely different statutory test to the one in this bill about the promotion of mining. So where you get the Minister of Energy and Resources involved it will be overriding protection and preservation and overriding the fact that in 1987 the Conservation Act highlighted the views of all New Zealanders that these landscapes should be protected for present and future generations so that we could protect their intrinsic values and we could enjoy those lands recreate in those areas and enjoy wilderness. This bill actually cuts across that by opening up the conservation estate for much greater exploitation. The other way it does that is by the change in the decision-making criteria and the introduction of a new test of direct net economic benefits of the application. That will have to be weighed alongside the impacts of the application onconservation values and the impacts of the application on recreational use. But with economic benefits as we all know it is much easier to quantify jobs and much harder to quantify intrinsic values so you will get the jobs that are potentially created—short-term jobs often by people coming from offshore—trumping intrinsic values and trumping conservation values.So there is a fundamental change in this bill that undermines the way in which conservation has been valued since 1987 through the establishment of the Department of Conservation and the protection of the conservation estate. That is because this Government has a very empty economic agenda which is all about the exploitation of nature. It is not about sustainable economic growth; it is all about short-term dollars setting aside areas that have been protected just to allow companies like Bathurst Resources to come in. That is another noxious part of the bill the transitional provisions which mean that the Bathurst Resources application will potentially benefit from this joint decision-making. Where the Ministers in answer to questions have already flagged that they support this Bathurst Resources application we potentially see those protected conservation lands on the Denniston Plateau with those distinctive ecosystems being opened up for large-scale mining open-cast mining which would destroy those pygmy pines those quite special landscapes just to provide a few short-term jobs for a Perth Australia-based mining company. This bill is bad law because it reneges on the protection of conservation values and the Green Party will oppose it.