Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9314. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Part 4 of the bill the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill is deeply troubling. It is consistent with the changes elsewhere in the bill to deliberately weaken the powers of the Minister of Conservation and it establishes a new process as Moana Mackey has highlighted where it will be Cabinet through Order in Council rather than the Minister of Conservation that makes decisions about how reserves should be classified and what their protected status should be.There is a large area of conservation land that is stewardship land. That means it has not got the additional protection that reserve status such as scientific reserve or nature reserve would provide. That reserve status does provide additional statutory protection when you have applications to do activities in the reserve areas that might destroy the vegetation and modify the habitat values. The Reserves Act is providing that stronger statutory protection for areas that have the ecological or scenic values that deserve reserve status. So what this part of the bill is doing is making sure that it is a Cabinet decision rather than a decision by the Minister of Conservation as it is at the moment to gazette the reserve and to improve the protective status. Areas that would be affected are potentially a large area of forest south of the Cook River in South Westland which is part of the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. The Department of Conservation was charged with undertaking a national park investigation into this area in the late 1980s but it never had the resources to do that.Now none of that land could be reclassified as scientific reserve or nature reserve without it going through Cabinet. That will mean of course that there will be other Ministers who will object to that and we will have what happened when the Kahurangi National Park was established. Areas that have mineral potential like Sams Creek were being excluded from the park even though they should be part of the park because of their ecological values. Areas like the Mōhikinui catchment were also excluded because there was lobbying at the time the national park was established to exclude these areas even though the investigations by the Conservation Authority had clearly shown that areas like Mōhikinui had status that deserved to be part of the national park.So the problem here is that the technical scientific and ecological reasons for a change in the land status are being dismissed and you are getting political considerations of whether that land can be available for exploitation which will determine whether it is gazetted as a nature reserve or a scientific reserve or whether the protective status is upgraded. Similarly with wilderness areas because that provides for the same process. The Paparoa wilderness area when it was established was controversial because of the mineral potential. So we will see as has happened with the marine reserves on the West Coast where you get commercial industry involved that they will lobby hard behind closed doors and not through the public process and the areas that are finally protected will shrink quite considerably.But one of the very troubling things in section 24(9) inserted by clause 68 of this Part 4 of the bill is where it talks about a change to the classification or the revocation of the reservation status. That potentially means that if the land status is changed areas that go up into schedule 4 that are supposedly protected will be open for mining. I think that is what the Government’s intention is. It says it is about permanent protection through schedule 4 but this clause means that that land status can be revoked. It may not be revoked over the whole of the reserve area but it could potentially be revoked over a part of an area which if it is in schedule 4 at the moment would then be opened up and available for mining.So this provision which allows for revocation without any obvious public process is a potential way in which the Government can undermine the protective status of a lot of areas of conservation land. Certainly there are some criteria in section 24(10) inserted by clause 68 that the Minister must be satisfied that the reserve is no longer suitable for the purposes of its classification but the wording in that clause is very general: “or for any other similar cause;”. That is very broad. That is giving the Minister a lot of discretion when he or she is bullied by Cabinet colleagues that the economic benefits the jobs that will be created outweigh the ecological values of that land. That is because that is what this Government is about—short-term jobs and exploitation rather than having areas properly protected and getting the legal recognition that they deservebecause of the biodiversity landscape and habitat values that would see them classified as a scientific reserve or a nature reserve.The fact that this applies to wilderness areas is also really troubling. Wilderness areas were established to provide areas that do not have tracks or huts and where people can experience nature in a completely unmodified way. They can rely on their own resources. Wilderness areas come from a tradition of recognising that there are some areas that we want to set aside that are totally undisturbed except by factors like climate change. This provision in relation to wilderness areas is potentially going to reduce the ability to have large wilderness areas that protect the capacity for people to walk to climb to enjoy those areas that are untracked and to camp. Again it is just this whole weakening of the Minister’s powers that the bill is all about and this is one of the worst provisions of the bill for that. Thank you.