A conservation group says a flaw buried in the government’s new conservation law could quietly strip mining protections from large parts of the Coromandel Peninsula, and it wants the bill rewritten before it goes any further.
Forest & Bird has raised the alarm over the Conservation Amendment Bill, which is now before a parliamentary select committee. The group says the bill leaves Coromandel Crown land off a list of areas the government has promised it cannot sell or swap. If that land were ever sold, it would lose the shield it currently enjoys under Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act, the part of the law that keeps the most treasured public land off limits to mining companies.
Richard Capie, Forest & Bird’s chief advisor on conservation policy, said the omission was serious enough to demand a change in the law itself rather than a verbal assurance from ministers. “The protection has to be law. So we need to see the bill change,” he told RNZ. He said the group had been forced to puzzle over whether the gap was careless or calculated. “We’ve needed to ask the question, is this a mistake? Is this an oversight? Or is this deliberate?”
Conservation Minister Tama Potaka was quick to reject any suggestion the government had set out to open the Coromandel to drilling rigs. He said the omission was not a deliberate decision to enable mining on protected Coromandel land, and that officials had advised the gap was an accident of drafting. The interaction between the bill’s land exchange and disposal provisions and the Crown Minerals Act, he said, may have created an unintended consequence that nobody had planned. He pointed to the select committee process as the place where any such problems would be ironed out.
That reassurance has not settled the matter. Catherine Delahunty, who chairs the campaign group Coromandel Watchdog and is a former Green MP, said the southern end of the peninsula was already firmly in the sights of mining interests. She noted that the company Oceana already holds a fast-track mining consent in the region, which sharpens the worry about any land losing its protected status. For communities that have fought mining proposals on the Coromandel for decades, the idea that a single line missing from a bill could undo those protections is far from reassuring.
The Coromandel question is really one corner of a much bigger argument about what the Conservation Amendment Bill does to public land across the country. The bill would make it far easier for the Department of Conservation to exchange or dispose of land it manages on behalf of every New Zealander. According to Forest & Bird’s reading of the proposals, up to 60 percent of the current conservation estate could become eligible for sale or swap, provided it does not contain threatened species or stand as one of the best surviving examples of local plants and wildlife.
Some places would stay firmly protected. National parks, wilderness areas, nature reserves, scientific reserves, marine reserves and wildlife sanctuaries cannot be sold under the bill, and two scenic reserves, on Kaikōura Island and Rakitu Island, are named specifically as off limits. But Forest & Bird’s mapping points to plenty of well loved country that would not enjoy that certainty, including parts of the Tararua Range, Kaimanawa Forest Park and even portions of the Te Wāhipounamu world heritage area in the South Island. Land gifted to the nation through the Natural Heritage Fund, such as beech forest near the Lewis Pass and the Korowai Torlesse tussocklands, could in theory be put up for disposal too.
The reason the government wants this flexibility goes to the heart of how it sees the department. The bill gives DOC a new function that asks it to weigh economic activity alongside protection, on the argument that conservation and economic development do not have to sit in opposition. The government has paired this with a proposed levy on international visitors that could raise around $60 million a year for the department, with proceeds from any land sales also flowing back into its work. Ministers frame the package as a way to improve conservation outcomes by giving DOC more money and more room to manage its sprawling estate sensibly.
Critics see a different picture. The New Zealand Deerstalkers Association has warned that letting the department profit from selling the land it is meant to safeguard risks creating perverse incentives, where the body charged with protecting nature has a financial reason to part with it. Forest & Bird’s Capie put the public mood more bluntly, predicting that “New Zealanders will be furious” once people grasp how much of the country’s shared backyard could change hands.
For now the bill sits with the select committee, and the public still has a say. Submissions on the Conservation Amendment Bill close on 2 July, which gives ordinary New Zealanders a narrow window to tell Parliament what they think before the detail is locked in. Whether the Coromandel gap turns out to be a genuine slip of the drafting pen or something more, the wider debate over selling public conservation land is unlikely to fade. You can read Forest & Bird’s case on its Save Conservation Land campaign page, and RNZ has mapped the areas that could be affected.
With a general election due later this year, the future of public land is shaping up as one of the dividing lines between the parties. If you want to see where each one stands on conservation and the wider issues before you vote, our voting tool is a good place to start.
What do you make of the plan to make it easier to sell conservation land, and should the Coromandel gap be closed before the bill moves on? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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