Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Protection of Public Conservation Land Listed in the Fourth Schedule) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Protection of Public Conservation Land Listed in the Fourth Schedule) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1693. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green)  
on behalf of  
Metiria Turei (Co-Leader—Green) 
: I move  
That the Crown Minerals (Protection of Public Conservation Land Listed in the Fourth Schedule) Amendment Bill be now read a first time 
. I nominate that the bill be referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee. I am pleased to speak on behalf of Green co-leader Metiria Turei on her member’s bill the Crown Minerals (Protection of Public Conservation Land Listed in the Fourth Schedule) Amendment Bill. First I want to thank all those thousands of New Zealanders who worked in 2009 and 2010 alongside the Green Party the 2precious2mine coalition iwi hapu and conservation groups to protect our most treasured places from John Key’s “dig it mine it and destroy it” plans. Because of the collective effort of New Zealanders everywhere we stopped National from allowing mining corporates to plunder nature’s cathedrals: our national parks marine reserves and wilderness areas. Like so many New Zealanders the Greens love this country. We will do everything we can to protect our wild landscapes and seabed from the permanent destruction this Government wants in order to generate a few more pieces of silver.  
Before I get into the details of this bill I want to acknowledge that although we won that fight on schedule 4 in 2010 the mining issue continues to divide communities across this country. Some mining in some areas such as small West Coast alluvial goldmines is not problematic. But where mining plans are destructive of our climate such as Solid Energy’s plans to mine low-grade lignite in Southland and convert it to diesel or Bathurst Resources’ plans to dig up the insect kingdom of the Denniston Plateau then we will oppose those plans and we have a strong track record of winning those fights. 
The Green Party stands in support of all of those iwi hapu whanau and community organisations who are fighting the plans of this Government and foreign corporates to mine and drill our seas particularly in Northland and off the East Coast. Deep-sea oil drilling poses a significant risk to our oceans and as the  
Rena 
 catastrophe demonstrates when we have containers still falling off the ship and oil still spilling from it we do not have the resources to manage a disaster of this scale much less one of the scale that happened to the Deepwater Horizon. So all of those who are fighting the oil drilling deep-sea drilling and mining plans which put our marine environment at risk have the Green Party’s full support.  
It was the Green Party that brought John Key’s mining plans to the public attention in August 2009. We challenged the claim that it was just a stocktake of the country’s mineral resources. In October 2009 we revealed that that stocktake included Mount Aspiring National Park among others and in 2010 we dismantled the National Party’s fallacious economic argument. We showed that the minuscule mining royalties are not worth the damage to our economy. They are not worth more than our pride or worth more than our sense of place and identity. By February 2010 we and the public had forced the Government to change its agenda. We had forced National to scale back its mining madness. Yet that pressure continued to mount. We had tens of thousands of New Zealanders marching down Auckland’s Queen Street and making their submissions to the Government. We know that 40000 New Zealanders signed the Green Party petition against mining our treasured places. These are our national parks; they are not National’s parks. These treasured places are too precious to mine.  
Although we celebrated that victory in 2010 we know that more needs to be done and hence this bill. It is only a wee bill but it is a powerful tool for the protection of our most treasured places on land and at sea. That is why I expect that National will oppose it. John Key tried to quietly take away the protection that schedule 4 gives to our national parks to our wilderness areas and to our marine reserves. This bill would stop him. John Key tried to hide what his Government was doing by talking only to industry and not to the people. This bill would stop that. This bill would require a Government to place legislation before this House before it could remove any land from schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act and the protection that that schedule provides. A Government could no longer do that through an Order in Council on the recommendation of the Ministers of energy and conservation. It could not do it secretly. It would have to do it in the full force of the public gaze even if that was done under urgency as is sometimes the case with controversial legislation.  
I expect that National members will oppose this bill because they would prefer not to see 40000 people on the streets of Auckland saying “No leave our treasured places alone. You can’t dig them up.” That march was the biggest in a decade. We had iwi the 2precious2mine coalition Coromandel Watchdog Environment and Conservation Organisations of New Zealand the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society Greenpeace and thousands of people marching down Queen Street to protect our special places. This small bill is the next logical step in carrying those people’s wishes into law. National has an agenda of “dig it up drill it cut it up sell it”. I would be pleasantly surprised if National members support this bill and I would certainly welcome that. We hope that members of this House will show their support for this bill to protect our most special treasured places.