P.M. tours high country

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 3

P.M. tours high country

By

HUGH STRINGLEMAN,

‘farm editor

It was in the interests of all New Zealanders that weed, pest, and erosion damage to the high country at least be contained, said the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, at Tekapo last evening.

“Action must be taken now,” he told a meeting of about 300 high-country people after he had spent a day touring the Mackenzie Country. It was a fact-finding tour on three main issues — the threat from rabbits and the widespread weed, hieracium or hawkweed; and land tenure.

Mr Lange said to runholders he met on the helicopter tour, to the news media, and to the evening meeting that he was impressed by the

gravity of the threat of land degradation posed by weed and pest problems. He challenged runholders and the Agricultural Pest Destruction Council to press the debate over the introduction of the viral disease of rabbits, myxomatosis.

Farmers who tackled the problems of pastoral production from the high country were a special breed, he acknowledged. He hoped his visit would alert city people to the realities of the high country and its farmers. Mr Lange’s visit was a coup for the Mackenzie branch of Federated Farmers, and leaseholders responded to the opportunity by turning out in force, coming from as far afield as Marlborough and Southland.

While there was plenty of anger about the wors-

ening economic plight of all farmers, as well as the special concerns of highcountry leaseholders, Mr Lange was disarmingly frank and reassuring. “We were very impressed by his grasp of the issues," said the Mackenzie branch chairman of the federation, Mr Alaistair Munro, “but it is a long way down from him through the bureaucracy to the local administrators.”

Mr Munro was referring to the concern of many runholders about their security of tenure on pastoral leases or renewable leases, the Government’s reorganisation of land and environmental administration, and the “protected natural areas” investigations which are under way. Mr Lange gave repeated assurances that

pastoral leases were secure “titles” and the Government was not proposing to buy farmers out of chunks of high country. Nor would leasehold land, which was “alienated" from the Crown in legal terminology, come under the new Department of Conservation. It would definitely remain with the new Land Management and Development Corporation, he said.

Mr Lange toured in an R.N.Z.A.F. Iroquois helicopter with Mr Munro, and the national president of Federated Farmers, Mr Peter Elworthy. They visited Haldon, Stoney Creek, The Wolds, and Godley Peaks stations as well as the Electricity Department control centre at Twizel, and Tekapo Military Camp.