Delahunty Catherine: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11870. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Back to reality. There is awhakataukī in Aotearoa that says: “Whatungarongaro he tangatatoitū he whenua”. It means “People perish but the land remains”. I want to talk today about the consensus amongst New Zealanders outside this House that looking after the environment for ourselves and for all living things is more important than destroying it. However whether the land remains or not has become a dubious question under this Government as more and more of the land is opened up to block tenders applications and exploration permits of all kinds. However they are out of step these people who are running our country with what New Zealanders have built a consensus around for many years. Although we disagree on many things and although we now face one of the most unequal societies that we have ever seen there is still a core at the heart of our commitment to our environment. New Zealand citizens of all stripes know that without the environment there is no economy and without the economy the people and the environment together we do not have a future.So it is very sad to hear the Minister of Energy and Resources today unable to answer my questions in the House—and indeed last week—about the details of his portfolio because we do need some leadership around protecting the environment for future generations and it is not going to come from this Government. In 2010 there was a very very strong expression of the values of our country when 30000 people marched down Queen Street and 40000 people wrote submissions against mining in conservation land specifically schedule 4 land. That was an amazing expression of resistance to “sexy coal” and “sexy gold”. What it waswas a statement that there are things that we value together that are more important than the narrow extractive 19thcentury vision of how to build a country. The Government had to change its strategy because it had such a clear message from the people of this country. I was proud to be one of the people at the front of that march. On that day I saw a huge diversity of people express the values that the Government has decided to ignore. The Government has done that in a really interesting way. Because it could not win up front it has done it through the backyard. It has done it through the manipulation of the Crown Minerals Act and through incursions into schedule 4.So I would just like to go through some of those interesting strategies of the Government after 2010. In its single economy plan which is to facilitate the multinational mining industry it had to find a way around the enormous public opposition to this plan. It had to find ways to undermine the public commitment that it had made and that it continues to say it makes to this area known as schedule 4. So what the Government did was change the Crown Minerals Act—that was one of the major tasks—in order to hoodwink New Zealanders into thinking that it was committed to no mining but actually it created a law that facilitated joint ministerial decision-making over the Department of Conservation estate. It also gutted the Department of Conservation estate; that was easily done in the Budget. Then there were also other strategies such as paying for aerial surveys over the country to see where the minerals are so that the Government can help the mining companies get hold of them and indeed doing things like beefing up the Crown minerals section of ministries involved in energy and resources and putting out tenders for block offers basically begging foreign large-scale mining companies to come in and take advantage of the minerals which it was determined to allow.But it also had to do something to undermine schedule 4 without anyone noticing. I live in an area called the Coromandel where we notice everything. Although the Minister of Energy and Resources was in short pants when I started working on mining—I have been doing this for 30 years—the people of my area both younger and older are very very clear about what is happening to schedule 4. So basically how dowe get around the fact that there is supposedly a mining ban but we want to send a signal to the mining industry that mining is great? We do that by doing things like allowing drilling inside schedule 4 land. The Minister makes statements about the difference between exploratory drilling and drilling for mining because he does not understand the industry. Actually drilling is drilling and what they do is send a tube down into the earth. They find out what is there and then they decide whether it is worth mining or not. And the Minister has said they can do that in schedule 4 land in the most precious part of Aotearoa where there is the strongest biodiversity where our endangered species live where our iconic landscapes are and which should be set aside for future generations which it allegedly had done. But no they are drilling.So drilling is fine and drilling is the new normal in schedule 4 land. What we have now today is that mining—a dodgy mining permit which allows all kinds of activities and which is supposedly just in an exit shaft but is in fact not—is allowed on schedule 4 land. Watch this space—