New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals has declined Australian company Siren Gold’s application for a mining permit at Sams Creek in the Upper Tākaka Valley, a decision Golden Bay campaigners have called the best news of the year. The site sits on conservation land in the hills above the Tākaka River, within walking distance of the marble aquifers that feed Te Waikoropupū Springs.
The decision, announced on 20 May 2026, ends a permit application that had been on the books since March 2025 and follows years of organising by farmers, hapū, scientists and hikers worried about what an industrial gold mine could mean for one of the country’s most pristine water catchments. Siren Gold’s earlier exploration permit expired in March 2026, and the company had only been allowed to keep drilling at the site while the mining application was under consideration.
According to RNZ, Save Our Springs coordinator Kevin Moran said he was “utterly elated” when the news came through, adding that he had “tears very close”. Filmmaker and activist Timothy Firkin, who has documented the campaign on the ground, told the broadcaster the outcome “feels like the culmination of a lot of hard work”. Axel Downward-Wilke of the Sams Creek Collective and the Golden Bay Community Board said in the same report that the region had “just dodged a really big, dangerous bullet”.
NZPAM, the division of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment that handles minerals permits, told RNZ that the application did not meet the requirements of the Crown Minerals Act, with national manager John Buick-Constable declining to spell out the reasons publicly on grounds of commercial sensitivity. The Sams Creek Collective said its understanding is that several of the statutory tests an applicant must clear under the Act were not satisfied, a reading reported by Scoop. Geologist Chris Stone, who has reviewed Siren’s filings on behalf of the community, has previously described the application as profoundly inadequate.
Siren Gold has said it is reviewing the decision and is weighing its options, including a possible appeal, and has not ruled out reapplying if the area becomes available for permitting in the future. The application was not part of the government’s fast-track approvals process, so the company would need to start again through the standard route.
The Sams Creek prospect sits on a steep block of public conservation land managed under the Conservation Act, in country that drains down into the Tākaka River. Opponents have long argued that any tailings dam or waste rock pile on that slope would sit directly above the marble karst that recharges Te Waikoropupū Springs, a system that holds some of the clearest fresh water ever measured anywhere in the world and which carries a water conservation order recognising its national importance. Local submitters told the consenting process that arsenic and other heavy metals in mining waste cannot ever be fully remediated, and that even a small leak could find its way through the limestone into the springs.
That argument has united an unusually broad coalition. Dairy farmers in the valley have lined up alongside conservation groups and Manawhenua ki Mohua, the iwi cluster speaking for Ngāti Tama, Te Ātiawa and Ngāti Rārua interests in Golden Bay. The springs are tapu to Manawhenua, and Te Waikoropupū has been the subject of a long Treaty-led campaign to lift its protection that culminated in the 2023 water conservation order. The Sams Creek decision keeps that work intact.
For Siren Gold the result is a setback in a market where the company had been pitching Sams Creek as one of the larger undeveloped gold prospects in the southern hemisphere. The site was first drilled in the 1980s and has changed hands repeatedly. Siren picked up the ground in 2018 and resumed exploration drilling in 2022, hoping to lift a resource estimate that critics say still leans heavily on speculative inferred categories rather than the measured and indicated tonnage a feasibility study needs.
Around the country the decision lands in the middle of a wider conversation about where new mining should be allowed. The government has signalled it wants to roughly double the value of minerals exports by 2035 and has used the Fast-track Approvals Act to wave through projects elsewhere on the West Coast and in Waihi, while community opposition to digging into conservation land has hardened. The Sams Creek refusal shows the standard Crown Minerals Act pathway still has real teeth when an application falls short.
For Golden Bay locals the practical effect is that the drills will now stop and the Upper Tākaka Valley returns to the quiet patchwork of beech forest, manuka and pasture that drew most of the residents there in the first place. The Sams Creek Collective has signalled it will keep watch in case Siren or another operator returns, and is pushing for the block to be formally retired from minerals permitting altogether.
What do you think about gold mining on conservation land in New Zealand? Should Sams Creek be permanently closed to future applications? Leave a comment below and join the conversation.
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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