New Zealand wants the metal but not the mine

The device you are reading this on began in a pit. The copper in its wiring, the gold in its circuit board and the lithium in its battery all came out of the ground somewhere, because there is nowhere else for them to come from. The house around you contains roughly 250 tonnes of quarried rock, sand and cement. The road outside is thousands of tonnes more. The food in your fridge grew in soil fed by phosphate that arrived by ship, because New Zealand has none of its own.

Yet when tens of thousands of people marched down Queen Street in May 2010 against mining on conservation land, it was one of the biggest protests Auckland had seen in decades, and the government abandoned the idea within three months. Sixteen years later the same argument is running again, from a proposed gold pit in Central Otago to the Taranaki seabed, and the country is no closer to settling it.

New Zealanders, taken together, want what mining provides. The polling says so, the import statistics say so, and the contents of every kitchen drawer say so. New Zealanders, taken together, also do not much want mines. The same polling says that too. This piece lays out both sides of that tension as honestly as the numbers allow. It does not end with an answer, because there is not a tidy one.

There is, however, a deadline. A decision on the biggest gold mine proposed in this country in decades, Santana Minerals’ Bendigo-Ophir gold project near Cromwell, is due by 29 October. The general election follows nine days later.

What every New Zealander takes from the ground

Does New Zealand need mining? By weight, the country’s biggest mineral habit is not gold or coal but aggregate, the crushed rock, sand and gravel under every road, floor slab and driveway. The Aggregate and Quarry Association estimates New Zealand used about 45 million tonnes in 2024 once quarries that do not report to the government are counted in, well above the officially reported 31.5 million tonnes. That works out at roughly 8.5 tonnes per person, about one truckload each, every year. Few countries use more. Australians get by on about 7.3 tonnes a head and Americans on 7.1. Only Canadians dig more.

Unlike most minerals, aggregate cannot practically be imported. It sells for about $24 a tonne, and the industry’s rule of thumb is that trucking it 30 kilometres roughly doubles its cost. Every region uses the rock it quarries nearby. An average house needs about 250 tonnes of it, and a kilometre of two-lane highway about 14,000 tonnes.

The food system runs on imported minerals outright. New Zealand has no domestic source of phosphate rock, potash or sulphur, the raw ingredients of fertiliser, and the Fertiliser Association is plain that the country is entirely dependent on imports for them. Around 700,000 tonnes of phosphate rock arrive each year, much of it from Morocco and Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. The advocacy group Western Sahara Resource Watch says New Zealand’s two fertiliser co-operatives are now the last two companies in the world still importing Western Sahara phosphate. Both Ravensdown and Ballance publish defences of their sourcing.

Then there is the phone. A United States Geological Survey breakdown, dating from 2006 but still the standard citation, puts about 16 grams of copper, a third of a gram of silver and 0.034 grams of gold in a typical handset. A plain gold wedding band, at three to eight grams, holds about as much gold as a hundred phones. The ring is worth remembering, because it turns out to matter more than the phone.

What	Your share	Based on
Quarried aggregate	8.5 tonnes a year	Industry estimate of 45 million tonnes in 2024
Gold mined in New Zealand	About 1.2 grams a year	213,000 ounces produced in 2024
Crown mineral royalties	Just under $4 a year	About $20 million collected in 2024-25
Stockton clean-up liability	$40 to $115, one-off total	PCE estimate of $200 to $600 million

What New Zealand mines today

The industry the country actually has is smaller than either its supporters or its critics tend to imply. Official figures for 2024 production, published by NZ Petroleum and Minerals in November 2025, show 213,000 ounces of gold, about 84 per cent of it from OceanaGold’s Macraes and Waihi operations, and 2.5 million tonnes of coal.

Gold is the money-maker. Export revenues have nearly tripled in three years to about $1.83 billion, Reuters reported in June 2026, on the back of a gold price that set 53 record highs in 2025. Most of it goes to Australia for refining.

The coal trade runs in both directions at once. The West Coast’s Stockton mine exports coking coal, the kind used to make steel, to mills in Asia, while power companies import thermal coal from Indonesia to stockpile at Huntly for dry years. New Zealand makes its own steel at Glenbrook from Waikato ironsands, the only mill in the world to do so, and NZ Steel says it supplies over 90 per cent of the country’s flat steel. The biggest metals plant of all, Tiwai Point, mines nothing in New Zealand. It smelts alumina shipped in from Queensland.

As an employer, mining is small and rich. Infometrics data for 2025 counts 4,208 people in mining and exploration, 0.2 per cent of the country’s jobs, producing 0.4 per cent of its GDP. Output per full-time equivalent is about $459,000 against $174,000 across the economy, and pay runs roughly double the national average. The industry’s own council counts 7,470 jobs and $2.83 billion of contribution, using a wider definition that sweeps in more of quarrying and support services.

What the Crown collects directly is smaller than most people assume. Mineral royalties came to about $20 million in 2024-25, of which gold contributed $11.6 million. Set against $1.83 billion of gold exports that looks impossibly low, and the main reason is that the big operating mines largely pay under older permits grandfathered on pre-2013 terms. Newer permits pay 2 per cent of sales revenue or, for larger operations, 10 per cent of accounting profits, whichever is higher. The royalty regime is under review, with no decisions until after the election.

The Government’s direction is not ambiguous. Its Minerals Strategy, finalised in January 2025, aims to double mineral exports to $3 billion by 2035, and a list of 37 critical minerals now includes gold and coking coal. The Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025 changed the law’s purpose from managing mining to promoting it, and in July the Government backed two West Coast critical minerals plants with $50 million.

What the gold rushes built

The tension has a long memory, and it starts with the fact that mining built many of the places now defending themselves against it. When Gabriel Read found gold near the Tuapeka River in May 1861, Otago’s population went from under 13,000 to over 30,000 in six months. Through the 1860s the province earned 10 million pounds from gold against 3.6 million from wool, and by 1881 Dunedin was the largest town in the country. Gold paid for much of it, including higher education. Mining was taught at the University of Otago from 1872, and its School of Mines opened in 1878.

The West Coast’s turn came in the mid-1860s, when about 29,000 people, one in five European men then in New Zealand, worked the beaches and gullies. Thames held 18,000 people within a year of its 1867 strike, and in 1889 a mine at Karangahake became the first in the world to use the cyanide process commercially, the same chemistry that still underpins gold mining today.

The landscape remembers all of it, and not always the way you might expect. The Blue Lake at St Bathans, now a swimming spot and a postcard, is a hole made by sluicing a hill away for gold. The bare stone tailings at Earnscleugh have sat unvegetated for a century. At Bendigo, the 1860s shafts and stone cottages are a Department of Conservation historic reserve, on the same ridgeline where Santana now wants to dig. New Zealanders have been remaking this landscape since settlement began, a story our interactive map of native forest loss tells over a much longer arc.

What mining left behind

The other half of the inheritance is the bill. The Tui mine above Te Aroha extracted copper, lead and zinc for about seven years until 1973, then its owner walked away. No bond had been required. What remained, about 100,000 cubic metres of toxic tailings on the side of the mountain, was for decades described as New Zealand’s worst contaminated site. The public eventually paid $21.7 million to clean it up, with the work finished in 2013 and the streams below now recovering.

Stockton is the bigger and stranger case. Coal has been mined on the plateau since 1896, and when rain hits the exposed pyrite-bearing rock it makes acid. In 2016, to keep the mine saleable after Solid Energy’s collapse, Cabinet decided the Crown would take responsibility for the historic acid drainage. A Treasury paper released under the OIA in March 2026 sets out what that means in practice. The current operator treats the water under a deed with the Crown, and water quality has improved significantly over 20 years, but the obligation itself is expected to endure for over one hundred years.

Pike River belongs in this ledger too, for a different reason. Twenty-nine men died there in November 2010, and the Royal Commission found the disaster was compounded by the failure of the regulator, which by then had two mine inspectors for the whole country. WorkSafe and the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 came out of that failure. The lesson was not that mining is uniquely wicked. It was that the phrase “our standards are strong” is only ever as true as the enforcement behind it.

Which is why the most consequential document in the current debate may be a letter. In April 2026 the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton, wrote to the Bendigo-Ophir panel about rehabilitation bonds, the money set aside to fix a site if a miner cannot or will not.

A key insight from the international research I commissioned is that rehabilitation bonds have been routinely underestimated historically.

Simon Upton, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, April 2026

Upton noted New Zealand has no specialised system for calculating bonds of the kind used in jurisdictions that have been burned before, that it is unclear whether proposed bonds cover low-probability, high-consequence events like tailings dam failure, and that tailings leachate can continue for decades and even centuries after closure. A sulphate plume has already been documented downstream of a tailings facility at Macraes, in a 2017 journal paper he cites. His conclusion was conditional but blunt. If century-scale assurance cannot be given within fast-track timeframes, he wrote, the Bendigo-Ophir application should be declined.

The record is not all one way. At Waihi, a trust funded by the mining company exists to steward the pit in perpetuity, a model Upton himself points to. Macraes has operated in East Otago for 35 years and produced more than five million ounces, and OceanaGold says the mine has contributed $8.5 billion to the New Zealand economy over that time. Even Waihi’s famous 2001 subsidence, when a house fell into a hole and 26 people lost their homes, traced back to unfilled workings from the 1900s, not to the modern operation.

What New Zealanders think about mining

Two polls this year, by the same polling company for opposite commissioners, map the tension almost perfectly.

The first was run by Curia Market Research for the New Zealand Minerals Council, the industry body, with fieldwork in April 2026 across 1,000 people nationwide plus oversamples in Waihi and on the West Coast. It found 43 per cent view mining favourably and 22 per cent unfavourably. Asked whether New Zealand should mine its own minerals or import them, 58 per cent preferred mining here against 14 per cent for importing, and once respondents were given information about New Zealand’s environmental and employment standards that rose to 71 against 12. Support was highest where the mines actually are, at 72 per cent favourable in Waihi and 83 on the West Coast. More than half of respondents wrongly believed wine earns more export revenue than mining. The top concerns were profits going overseas, biodiversity and conservation land.

The second was run by Curia for Forest & Bird and released in June 2026, as the Government advanced conservation law changes. It found 64 per cent of voters oppose allowing the sale of public conservation land, 46 per cent of them strongly, with 25 per cent in support. That question is about selling land rather than mining it, but it is the same terrain the mining debate keeps landing on.

Commissioned by	The question	The result
NZ Minerals Council (April 2026 fieldwork)	Mine our own minerals or import them	71% mine here, 12% import, once NZ standards were explained
Forest & Bird (released June 2026)	Allow sale of public conservation land	64% opposed, 25% in support

Neither result is an outlier. When the Key Government proposed removing about 7,000 hectares from Schedule 4, the most protected conservation land, the May 2010 Queen Street march drew somewhere between 20,000 people, on the police estimate, and 50,000 on the day’s reported figure. Of 37,552 submissions, the vast majority were opposed, and the Government dropped the proposal within three months. Gerry Brownlee’s reading at the time was that “we know that the numbers are roughly 50-50 on this”. The march suggested the intensity was not.

Put simply, New Zealanders would rather the minerals they use were mined here under New Zealand rules, and they do not want the conservation estate touched to do it. Both of those are majority positions. They collide every time a specific mine is proposed in a specific place.

The case for mining more

The strongest version of the case starts from consumption, not from company profits. New Zealand’s use of minerals does not fall when New Zealand declines to mine. The phosphate still lands at the fertiliser works, the copper still arrives inside cables and cars, the aggregate still has to come out of a hill somewhere nearby. A tonne not mined here is a tonne mined somewhere else, usually somewhere with rules this country would not accept.

Where is somewhere else? The US Geological Survey’s 2025 figures and the International Energy Agency sketch the map.

• Cobalt for batteries comes overwhelmingly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, around three-quarters of world supply, where Amnesty International documented child labour in artisanal mines in 2016. Company due diligence has tightened since, but the concentration has not changed.
• Rare earths are mined about 69 per cent in China, which also controls roughly 90 per cent of refining and magnet production.
• Around half of the world’s lithium and copper is produced in areas of high water stress, on the IEA’s 2021 analysis.

Against that backdrop, the argument goes, mining in New Zealand is not an environmental failure but an environmental responsibility. Massey University’s Martin Brook put the sharp version of it in a 2024 piece arguing that a country which consumes minerals while refusing to mine them is offshoring its own environmental footprint. He receives research funding from MBIE, and the industry makes the same argument in its own voice. The counterpart claim is that New Zealand’s process is genuinely demanding. Santana has spent $17.7 million on the consenting process before winning any consent, and the Waihi North approval came with conditions including proof of financial capacity to fix unauthorised damage.

The economics are real for the places involved. Mining pay runs about double the national average, and the approved Waihi North project is expected to support about 800 jobs, with the panel estimating $425 million in government revenue and OceanaGold planning around a billion dollars of investment.

And the demand curve is not flat. On the IEA’s 2021 analysis, an electric car needs about six times the mineral inputs of a conventional one, and an onshore wind farm about nine times the minerals of a gas plant per megawatt of capacity. New Zealand’s own consented and proposed generation pipeline reached about 32 gigawatts in late 2024, roughly three times the capacity the country currently has, almost all of it solar, wind and batteries. Every megawatt of it is copper, steel and concrete. The cleaner the energy system gets, the more mined material it takes to build.

The case against more mining

The strongest version of the other case starts from scale and endings. Mining is 0.4 per cent of GDP and 0.2 per cent of employment. The Crown’s entire mineral royalty take of about $20 million a year is less than the cost of a suburban school rebuild, while the gold it flows from earned $1.83 billion offshore, and most of the profit accrues to overseas shareholders. That gap between what leaves the ground and what stays in the country was the public’s single biggest concern in the industry’s own poll, and academics writing in The Conversation in 2025 have argued the claimed benefits of fast-track mining projects deserve harder scrutiny than they get.

The endings are the other half. Tui and Stockton are, in the Parliamentary Commissioner’s words, the best-known examples of clean-up costs falling on the public, and his April 2026 letter says bonds have been routinely underestimated. A pit is temporary income and a permanent landform. Bendigo-Ophir’s tailings facility would sit in the Dunstan Mountains above the Clutha catchment, in country susceptible to large earthquakes, with eleven possible failure modes identified in the application’s own risk work and, on the PCE’s reading, possibly 50 years of active water treatment after the mine closes.

Opponents also point at what the gold is actually for. On the World Gold Council’s full-year 2025 figures, technology takes about 6 per cent of gold demand. Jewellery, bars, coins, funds and central banks take most of the rest, and recycling already provides about 28 per cent of total supply. Nobody’s phone depends on a new gold mine, the argument runs, so of all the mining the world must do, gold is the most optional. The industry disputes that framing, noting gold’s export earnings are exactly why the Government put it on the critical minerals list, and the Curia survey found net support of plus 45 per cent for more gold mining specifically.

Then there is the place itself. Sustainable Tarras, the community group leading opposition to Bendigo-Ophir with more than 3,500 supporters, has raised the quality and availability of water, seismic risk, the loss of tranquility and the long shadow a mine casts over generations in a district that lives on horticulture and tourism. Santana rejects the criticism. Chief executive Damian Spring has said the company remains confident of a positive outcome, and its application projects 300 to 350 operational jobs at salaries well above the regional norm and more than a billion dollars in taxes and royalties. Those are the applicant’s figures, and testing them is the panel’s job. What nobody disputes is that an open pit a kilometre long does not go away.

What the fast track has decided so far

The Fast-track Approvals Act was sold as the way through this impasse, and its record on big mines so far is neither the rubber stamp its critics predicted nor the brick wall its backers feared.

Project	What it is	Where it stands
Waihi North (OceanaGold)	Gold, including tunnelling under conservation forest	Approved, December 2025
Taranaki VTM (Trans-Tasman Resources)	Seabed ironsands	Declined in draft, application withdrawn, February 2026
Bendigo-Ophir (Santana Minerals)	Gold, open pit and underground	Decision due by 29 October 2026
Buller Plateaux (Bathurst, BT Mining)	Coking coal	Decision expected in 2026

Waihi North became the first major mine approved under the Act in December 2025, after a panel process that ran 112 working days end to end. Two months later a different panel issued a draft decline for seabed mining in the South Taranaki Bight, citing risks to marine life it did not consider manageable, and Trans-Tasman Resources withdrew rather than take the final ruling, twelve years and one Supreme Court loss after it first tried. One approval, one refusal in all but name, two pending. The panels, at least, are reading applications rather than waving them through.

The politics around them is less measured. Resources Minister Shane Jones told Parliament in December 2023, in words reported by the Otago Daily Times, “if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy”. Heading into the 7 November election, New Zealand First campaigns on returning half of mining royalties to the regions that host the mines, the Greens have a member’s bill drawn from the ballot to ban new mining on conservation land and say they would revoke fast-track mining consents, and Labour says it would amend the fast-track law. The royalty review is parked until after the votes are counted. The Bendigo-Ophir decision is due nine days before them.

The same argument everywhere

None of this is a New Zealand eccentricity. Norway, the country that banked its oil into the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, voted in 2024 to open 280,000 square kilometres of its seabed to mineral exploration, then froze all licensing under coalition pressure in December 2025, until at least 2029. The European Union has gone the other way. Its Critical Raw Materials Act sets a target of mining 10 per cent of Europe’s own consumption by 2030, a deliberate reopening of an industry the continent spent decades closing, because dependence on China now frightens it more than pits do.

Recycling narrows the gap but does not close it. Recycled material supplies about 28 per cent of the world’s gold and roughly a third of its copper and aluminium, and demand keeps growing faster than scrap comes back. The wealthy world is going both ways at once, freezing mines with one hand and reopening them with the other, and every country doing so is having a version of the argument New Zealand is having now.

A decision due in October

Sometime before 29 October, a panel chaired by a KC will decide whether the biggest gold mine proposed in New Zealand in four decades gets consent. Nine days after that, the country votes, with one governing party campaigning to share royalties with the regions and one opposition party promising to revoke the consent if it is granted. Whatever happens, the phones will keep arriving, the fertiliser ships will keep berthing, and the trucks will keep leaving the local quarry at a rate of one load per New Zealander per year.

The case for mining more is that the minerals will be dug up regardless, that doing it here means doing it under scrutiny this country can actually apply, and that the jobs and export earnings are real. The case against is that the money reaching the public is modest, the liabilities run for centuries, and some of what would be dug up, gold especially, the world wants rather than needs.

Both cases are honest. Both are supported by the record. They cannot both win in the same place at the same time, which is why the question never stays settled, and why it is about to be asked again, one consent at a time, starting in Central Otago in October.

Where would you draw the line, and would you draw it differently if the mine were in your district? Let us know 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 🙂