More than 11,000 people have signed a petition asking for Sams Creek in Golden Bay to be added to Kahurangi National Park, a move supporters say would end three decades of worry about gold mining in the hills above Te Waikoropupū Springs, the springs near Tākaka that hold some of the clearest water in the world.
The petition was presented to Green MP Lan Pham at Parliament on Wednesday, RNZ reported. It asks the government to recommend that Sams Creek and adjoining conservation land around the Tākaka River and Cobb Valley be brought inside the park boundary. Among the signatories are former Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Nelson MP and Conservation Minister Philip Woollaston.
Kahurangi, in the northwest corner of the South Island, is New Zealand’s second largest national park. Labour says adding Sams Creek would increase its size by about 4500 hectares, or roughly one percent.
Woollaston, who signed the petition, said the creek was an “obvious hole” in the boundary drawn when the park was gazetted in 1996. He explained how that gap came about.
“There was a prospecting licence over the Sams Creek area before it was made a national park and I think the powers that be at the time just said the easiest thing is to exclude that from the park, rather than trying to take away a prospecting licence that had been granted.”
With no mining or exploration permit now in place over the land, he said it was a good moment to put Sams Creek back “where it always should have been”. He described the exclusion as a running sore for the last 30 years.
“Now is the time when it can just be put to bed and the worry of that can go,” he said.
Clark also backed a fresh look at the park’s edges. “This is an obvious time to look again at the boundary and include Sams Creek within the national park,” she said.
Gold was first found at Sams Creek, in the Upper Tākaka Valley, in the 1970s, and several companies have explored the area since. The most recent was Australian company Siren Gold, which began exploration drilling in 2022 and later applied for a mining permit. That application was declined by New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals in May, as NEWS WIRE reported at the time.
The decline was celebrated in Golden Bay. Kevin Moran, coordinator of the advocacy group Save Our Springs, told Local Democracy Reporting in May the application had been turned down because it did not reach the necessary legal threshold. Siren Gold said then that its exploration permit had expired in March and that it was reviewing its options.
“If the land becomes available for permitting again, the decision does not preclude the company from applying for a further permit,” the company said in May.
That door opened again in August. On 14 August RNZ reported that New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals had made the roughly 20 square kilometre area available through a competitive application process, allowing Siren Gold and rival companies to apply for prospecting, exploration or mining permits. That new round is the reason campaigners say protection needs to be permanent rather than dependent on how the next permit application is decided.
Moran said the group remained concerned about another mining application in the area and wanted to see Sams Creek protected in perpetuity. Save Our Springs started the petition, and a parallel online petition hosted on the Greenpeace community site is also calling for the park to be expanded.
The main fear locally is for Te Waikoropupū Springs, which sit downstream of Sams Creek in the Tākaka catchment. Woollaston said the springs were an international treasure, not just a national one.
“Apart from the prospecting holes they’ve put in, it’s still pristine up there and I think the effect of mining in that area would be very high risk for the Tākaka catchment and the Waikoropupū Springs which are internationally renowned, they are not just a national treasure, they are an international treasure and anything which threatens them should not be allowed.”
In May, Golden Bay Community Board member Axel Downward-Wilke said his particular concern had been the possibility of a tailings dam being built to hold arsenic by-products from mining. He also acknowledged at the time that some residents had supported the mine.
The petition has now become part of the election conversation. Pham called including Sams Creek in the park a “no-brainer” and said it should never have been left out. She plans to hold on to the petition until after the election and then hand it to whoever is the new conservation minister.
Labour conservation spokesperson Priyanca Radhakrishnan said her party supported adding Sams Creek to the park and would start the process if elected.
“The Sams Creek area has outstanding scenic and natural features deserving of national park status, like the land it adjoins. The addition will increase the park’s size by some 4500 ha, or about one percent, and permanently protect Sams Creek from mining activity.”
A spokesperson for Conservation Minister Tama Potaka said he had not been invited to receive the petition and had not yet had a chance to consider it.
Whatever happens at the election, the petition itself does not change the status of the land. Until a future government acts on it, the Sams Creek acreage remains open to permit applications under the process New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals launched in August.
For Golden Bay, where the fight over Sams Creek has run through protests, a drilling site occupation in March and a High Court challenge, the petition is an attempt to settle the question for good rather than argue it again with each new applicant.
Should Sams Creek be added to Kahurangi National Park, or should the land stay open to mineral exploration? Share your view 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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