by frog
The latest idea from renowned friend-of-the-earth Gerry Brownlee is to scour 20% of Mt Aspiring National Park for nickel, chromium and gold.
“The rumble of Brownlee’s bulldozers just got louder,” said Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei. “…this flies in the face of previous claims by Ministers that mining National Parks is not their intention, and that any mining would be of small areas of ‘low value conservation land’.
Please don’t confuse this news with last week’s Gerry Brownlee news, which was about ripping up more of the Coromandel (perhaps that’s why we need a new bridge at Kopu so urgently).
Today’s news broken by Metiria Turei is about Aspiring and advice from officials who are fuelling the Government’s ‘stock take’ of oil, coal and precious metals in our national parks and conservation estate. Their cunning plan is to just remove a portion:
It is therefore recommended that the northeast sector of the national park (the part which approximates the known extent of the carbonatite formations, and which amounts to about <20% of the land area of the park) be considered for removal from Schedule Four.
Remember how last week Tip Top was in the gun for making smaller ice creams rather than putting up prices?
Not only is mining a bad idea, the mining debate is being conducted in bad faith.
Gerry obfuscates about a ‘stock take,’ murmurs about responsible modern mining techniques (military intelligence anyone?) and tries to dismiss every new piece of evidence as Greens-inspired hysteria.
The ‘hysteria’ is based on fact: Government is taking advice on how to mine our favourite place – oil in Fiordland, metals in Mt Aspiring, gold in the Coromandel.
Love it, don’t mine it.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, November 30th, 2009
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Aspirational stuff from National.
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Great. New Zealanders want better living standards.
Like Australia. Who dig money out of the ground.
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I just hope the officials are thinking about their kids when they’re making these recommendations, and that Cabinet is doing the same when they are making their decisions.
I think there are some in Cabinet who just do not understand one basic truth – without an environment there is no economy. Conversely I think there are those that do, and I hope they have the final say about what happens on conservation land.
How much land is administered by DOC (regardless of it’s conservation ‘value’)? For argument’s sake, lets say 27%. Well that leaves 73% to generate an economic return from! It’s apparent that officials can’t figure out a way to move us up the OECD ladder using what they’ve got. Hence the response is ‘that’s too hard but there are billions of dollars worth of minerals under the ground so lets dig them up and increase our wealth that way”. Well, I don’t think that’s clever. I think that’s base. It would be clever if they could find a way to make do with the greater part of the country which they have already. In fact, I reckon if we said to the officials “fine, have 100% of the land AND all the sea too” then they still couldn’t find a way to move us up the OECD ladder and keep us there for more than 10 years. And that’s exactly why we shouldn’t let them go anywhere near our conservation land, regardless of how they define “conservation value”!
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