Eugenie Sage's mining ban bill

A ballot for one member's bill was held today, and the following bill was drawn:

• Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill (Eugenie Sage)

The bill is pitched as protecting conservation land, and it does immediately do that. But it also goes further, doing exactly what it says on the label: prohibiting all new prospecting, exploration and mining permits, on conservation land or not, from 1 January 2025 (and new permits of any sort for coal immediately). It also requires existing permits to be surrendered immediately where protected wildlife is on the specified land.

There are a number of strands here (protecting schedule 4, protecting endangered species, banning new coal, banning all new mining), each of which could have been its own bill. And I think the "no new mining at all" provision is problematic, because it covers things like quarries, which actually seem necessary for a while longer. The other provisions though seem like a very good idea, and in the case of the coal ban, doesn't go far enough - to save the climate its not enough to ban new coal mines, but to shut down existing ones as well. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer's Prohibition on Seabed Mining Legislation Amendment Bill shows the method we need to adopt there, and has a number of useful provisions around extinguishing existing permits which could be stolen. The only question is the sunset date we choose, and how long we give the coal industry (and the industries dependent on it for energy) to manage an orderly shutdown and transition.

The end of tenure review?

High country tenure review is organised corruption, which has seen the privatisation of huge swathes of our country. Hundreds of millions of dollars of public land has been effectively given to farmers for free, and then flicked on for enormous profits. But now, finally, it looks like the process will end:

The Government is about to scrap tenure review.

Land Information Minister Eugenie Sage won’t confirm the move, but Newsroom has been told by multiple sources that the controversial process, dubbed “organised corruption” by opponents, is finished. What’s unclear is how Sage intends to deal with two crucial elements: whether the 40 properties already within the process will be allowed to continue; and what clamps might be placed on the powerful Commissioner of Crown Lands.

Using Sage’s previous comments as a guide, it could be expected that those properties at the “substantive proposal” stage of the process, at least, will go on. That is likely to upset opponents of a massive dairy development at Simons Pass Station, in the Mackenzie Basin.

An official announcement may be made by Sage as early as this weekend. It’s expected to be bundled with promises of tougher management of South Island high country leases. That will include more scrutiny of discretionary consents to farmers and better monitoring of their effects.

Good. But obviously, I'd prefer it if they just stopped it dead and walked away entirely. This is public land, and should be kept in public ownership, and the fact that a previous corrupt government opened negotiations on a corrupt transaction does not give any right for that transaction to continue. As for the long-term, we need to end the pastoral lease rort entirely, and start charging these parasites commercial terms rather than subsidising their environmentally destructive lifestyles. But one step at a time...

Mushrooming the Minister

Ministers are supposed to be able to rely on public servants to give advice on the areas they request so they can make good decisions. Normally here the concern is public servants being too timid about telling Ministers things they don't want to hear. But Newsroom reports a case of the opposite in DoC: a department censoring information the Minister had specifically asked for, in an apparent attempt to mushroom them:

In January, Eugenie Sage asked for a Department of Conservation (DOC) briefing on biodiversity values in the Mackenzie. She specifically wanted it to come from Christchurch ecologist Nick Head, one of the country’s foremost experts on the Mackenzie.

Head, who left the department in June and is pursuing a personal grievance claim, provided the two-page briefing to his bosses on January 24. But emails released to Newsroom under the Official Information Act show that DOC’s principal Mackenzie adviser, Jeremy Severinsen, deleted several key passages before it was sent to the Minister’s office.

It’s clear from the DOC emails that those passages related to Crown lease properties in the Mackenzie going through tenure review, their ecological values, and how they might help form a drylands park.

According to Forest & Bird, the censored advice showed that past tenure review decisions had undermined the environment and compromised the possibility of a drylands park. It is unclear if Severinsen was involved in those decisions, or simply covering up for people who were, but either way, it doesn't look good. While there's obviously a process of curation and quality control over anything that goes before a Minister, this seems to go a bit beyond that. And in the context of DoC's internal culture war, it looks decidedly dubious.

I can't imagine Sage, or any other Minister, putting up with this sort of behaviour, and i expect there'll be some pointed words directed at DoC's Chief Executive to ensure it does not happen again.