Shane Jones' orc fantasy

There's a scene in Lord of the Rings where Saruman is directing the orc "renovations" to Isengard, where he instructs the orcs to rip down all the trees. And that's basicly Shane Jones' speech during the address-in-reply debate last night. NewsHub highlighted comments about the government not meeting "the 2030 dreamy, fairy-tale, aspirational figures that we'll be freeing ourselves of fossil fuels as a source of generating energy", stopping work at the Ministry for the Environment,a nd restarting oil and gas drilling. But reading the full speech its a lot worse than that:

In those areas called the Department of Conservation (DOC) estate, where it's stewardship land, stewardship land is not DOC land, and if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it's impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy. We are going to extract the dividend from mother Nature's legacy on the DOC estate in those areas previously called stewardship land.

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Couple more things: we will have a strategic, fast-tracked piece of legislation in this House... Stand by for the fast-track process where the authority rests with the politicians. Fast track for aquaculture, fast track for mining, fast track for energy, fast track for infrastructure.

Last time the government tried to mine the conservation estate, they were greeted with 50,000 people marching down Queen Street. Next time there will be more. This isn't the twentieth century anymore, and people are no longer willing to tolerate the rape of the environment.

As for the second, the lesson from Australia is clear: putting resource consent decisions in the hands of politicians is a recipe for total corruption. But Jones probably sees that as a feature. After all, his party's secret foundation demonstrably took secret donations from interested parties in exchange for policy changes on housing, fisheries and racing. Being able to extort vig from every aquaculture or mining project and every property developer probably sounds great to them.

This is the government we have now: fundamentally corrupt orcs. We need to throw them out at the first opportunity. If not, we'll end up like Queensland.