New Zealand drops proposal to open up conservation areas for exploration

Mineral exploration in New Zealand was tripped up this week when the New Zealand Government backpedalled on a proposal to open selected parts of the conservation estate for exploration.

PERTH - 

Not only did the Key National Government decide not to unlock some of its Schedule 4 conservation estate but it put it under lock and key and announced it would add new areas.

Some of these areas were placed in national parks by previous governments with administrations and associates who found mining to be an anathema, despite the fact it's a serious contributor to the economy of a country with 4.5 million people.

The two mining lobbies were surprisingly coy about the whole issue, and see a big positive in planned Government-supported airborne exploration programmes in the Northland region of the North Island and on the West Coast of the South Island.

In his explanation of the move Energy & Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee argued that 85% of the country was available for exploration anyway - a generality that conveniently forgets there are large areas of limited mineral potential and large tracts of private land providing limitations for prospecting.

There was a huge campaign against the move by the Greens Party, conservationists and many media groups who painted pictures of the evaluation of mineral potential really being huge open cut mines of Bingham Canyon proportions, and they did a good job of raising concerns among those in the middle ground.

The head of research for Wellington-based stockbroker McDouall Stuart, John Kidd,  said that at the outset it is important to acknowledge that the possible increase in mining of conservation land was never going to be a vote winner.

Kidd said it appears to have been populism that has won the day. Media was labeling the announcement as a major policy u-turn, citing the Government's holding-out of the minerals sector as a cornerstone component of its ‘economic step-change' plan for the nation," he added.

"The protest movement has been quick to claim a resounding victory, and rightly so.  The vocal minority has prevailed, the silent majority has not," Kidd said.

Kidd said though 37,552 people submitted on the proposal, nearly 3 million voters did not.  Most surveys conducted over the past six months have shown the poll of public opinion to be at least evenly split on the issue.

McDouall Stuart's recent poll showed that 74% of people wanted to know more about the extent of NZ's mineral wealth, the strong majority of which still wanted to know even if that wealth lies on or under conservation land.

This, he said, highlights the key shortcoming of the debate the nation has just had: Industry simply does not yet know what minerals might lie where in most parts of New Zealand.

He said where the Government has come up short is in selling the policy to the electorate.  Government started on the back foot by not having done enough of the detailed analysis needed to be able to claim with authority that the prize was worth pursuing.

"Instead of being able to keep the focus of discussion on lifting the public's understanding of the opportunity, the focus of debate was continually deflected to peripheral issues such as defending the precision of the estimated value of the endowment -- impossible to do -- or the potential for exploitation by foreign companies.

"These and other noisy issues served to distract from the debate and give those against ita target to aim at and ultimately dilute the primary objective of the policy: national wealth creation."

Kidd said the hysteria peddled by those most vehemently opposed highlights the extent of lack of local understanding of the resources sector. The perception encouraged by opponents that massive, open cast pits would start being dug all over the Coromandel and Great Barrier within just a few months was entirely -- and probably conveniently -- misleading.

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