Plans to streamline mining law revealed

Press, 1 June 1989, Page 2

Plans to streamline mining law revealed

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

L in Wellington

A new system for assessing mining proposals has been announced by the Government, intended to streamline the mining laws and allow more community and landowner involvement. The new system has been criticised already by the conservation movement for leaving national parks and other outstanding conservation lands at risk.

The Minister for the Environment, Mr Palmer, the Minister of Energy, Mr Butcher, and the Minister of Conservation, Ms Clark, announced the new system yesterday. It was part of the resource management law reform exercise and covered the allocation of mining rights, environmental assessment and landowner consent to mining. This was a complex area of the law and it was hard to reconcile the many different interests involved to meet everyone’s objectives, they said.

The mining industry needed certainty and prompt consideration of its proposals; owners of land affected wanted, to influence conditions and in some cases have the right to reject mining there; the community expected the mining industry to meet the same standards as any other developer.

At present, the three Ministers said, mining activities were not covered by the same environmental laws as other land uses and there were anomalies within the various mining laws themselves. Under the new system, the Government would retain responsibility for allocating mineral and energy resources.

The Minister of Energy would draw up strategies for using the various mineral and energy resources — such as coal, gold and petroleum — which would outline matters such as depletion rates, and public input would be sought. "Once the ground rules have been established, the Crown would then be able to allocate rights to mine on a commercial basis,” the three Ministers said. Landowners’ consent would be needed by developers before they

could prospect or mine. The Planning Tribunal would be able to test if a landowner was being reasonable in denying access to a developer. The Crown would be treated in the same way as a private landowner. The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society said that because the Government was keeping the requirement for joint Ministerial consent to exclude any conservation land from mining, Ministers of Energy were likely to continue the tradition of vetoing such exclusions. Dr Gerry McSweeney, conservation director of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, said the Minister of Energy’s powers of veto had been used for decades. As a result, throughout the entire country mining was excluded from only a handful of small areas — such as the white heron colony at Okarito.