Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Well in contrast to the previous member for New Plymouth Glen Bennett and his proposal that New Zealand should simply manage its mineral resources the ACT Party believes we should promote the use and acquisition of our minerals. By doing so whether they are highly valuable and rare minerals or things that we use every day in our cellphones and other technology like gold and silver and platinum or those minerals like titanium for example which are found in association with iron-rich sands volcanic sands off the west coast of the North Island which are used to manufacture steel—and in fact not just manufacture any steel but low-emissions high-quality steel right here in New Zealand—we must continue to promote the use and the acquisition of these mineral resources in order to ensure New Zealand's future prosperity a healthy economy but more importantly healthy communities.It is people who work in those industries who earn some of the highest wages and salaries of any people in New Zealand and it's those wages and salaries that allow people even if they didn't finish high school or go to university and get a degree to earn as much as people who did and put food on the table school uniforms on the kids pay for holidays save for a home and get ahead. That's what promoting access to our natural and physical resources and minerals means—in Taranaki on the West Coast of the South Island in Southland in Canterbury and Central Otago where we have extensive gold deposits and of course in the Coromandel not far from where I live in Auckland where New Zealand has been undertaking gold extraction for over a hundred years. More recently there have been proposed developments to access gold from underneath the conservation estate—from underneath the conservation estate—by drilling a tunnel from private land to get into the gold resource without disturbing a single snail frog lizard or even a leaf on a kauri tree.Hon Eugenie Sage: Dreaming!SIMON COURT: We can promote the use of our natural and physical resources despite what the member the Hon Eugenie Sage says—that we're dreaming. I've seen it done in other places around New Zealand where the resources have been recovered and they've been recovered in an environmentally friendly way such as at OceanaGold's Globe Progress Mine at Reefton on the West Coast of the South Island where that company not only rehabilitated a site that had been used for over a hundred years for all types of informal and less sophisticated mining activities but had actually saved the tree stumps from historical logging activities. When they went to do their mine—extract the gold from the Globe Progress Mine—not that long ago in the last 10 or 15 years they took the tree stumps off the site first before they started digging and they stockpiled them all on one side of the site. Then when they'd finished mining they built a fantastic lake and a wetland. They've landscaped the site they've planted it with hundreds of thousands of trees and they've put the tree stumps back as little hidey holes as habitat for little creatures and insects.That's how you promote the use of New Zealand's natural and physical resources. That's how you generate wealth: you generate export earnings you generate revenues and royalties for the Crown and you pay fantastic wages and salaries to people who might not have finished high school or got a university degree but are active contributors in their community and who are able to put food on the table able to pay for school uniforms and never have to ask for charity. Those people are the backbone of New Zealand because they earn good money in the natural and physical resources sector and we get a much improved environment. Now if now only the Department of Conservation on whose land the OceanaGold Globe Progress Mine—Hon Eugenie Sage: Our land!SIMON COURT: The Department of Conservation (DOC) administers the land. As the Hon Eugenie Sage rightly points out that is our land; that is New Zealanders' land that DOC administers. If only the Department of Conservation could afford to control the weeds and the pests on their enormous estate that they manage maybe there would be a case to say Hey we should be kind of managing minerals in a different way." Imagine if we could actually generate more revenue from promoting the use of minerals and resources and organisations like the Department of Conservation could benefit from increased revenue—from concessions and access fees for example—to actually pay for pest control weed control and all the other things that New Zealanders want them to do well. Well by changing the definition from "promote" to simply "manage" all of that opportunity is put at risk.It was quite recently that a former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright said that mining is not a threat to conservation in New Zealand: it's pests and weeds. And she should know. She's a scientist and was the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. All of that knowledge appears to have been neglected in pursuit of this policy. Now of course every Government has the right to set its policies and priorities to deliver on policies such as when the former Prime Minister of New Zealand Dame Jacinda Ardern as she is now announced no new mines on the conservation estate. Well it turns out actually that represents about a third of New Zealand's land area and that's a very very unfortunate policy because it would sterilise access to valuable minerals not just gold but rare earth minerals that are absolutely vital for the technology that we use today whether it's the cellphone network putting satellites into space or communication technology but it would also sterilise access to valuable resources like aggregates and sands which are also on the conservation estate and which are required for building roads and building infrastructure. There are many places around New Zealand where the Department of Conservation for example has the right of veto essentially over which businesses get access to these resources.So what ACT would say is quite simple: we need to have policies that instead of simply managing Crown minerals and managing them in a way currently which involves an enormous backlog of applications through the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment for access permits from the New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals department—managing currently means a handbrake. It means a whole lot of in-trays but very little going out in the out-tray back to the sector that actually needs permission to get on with extracting minerals. Instead of managing it which is something that nobody trusts this Government to do anyway ACT believes we should be promoting access to these resources whether they're on private land or on Crown land whether they're on land or on sea because what that does is allow us to generate economic wealth social wealth and to take advantage of our natural potential and our human potential.If New Zealand wants to play its part as a 21st century nation one that is committed to a low-emissions future to net zero 2050 we're going to need to play our part by recovering the minerals that are lying under New Zealand either on our continental shelf or on that part of the country that's still above water and we're going to need to recover them so we can turn them into products that use less hydrocarbons such as batteries and all of that other technology. ACT won't be supporting this bill and if we have an opportunity in a future Government we will return the language to "promote" the use of these resources."