The sale and swap of public conservation land is to be cut from Tama Potaka’s bill, but his critics say the bigger problem remains.
New Zealand First added a provision to the Conservation Amendment Bill that would make economic development a priority over conservation for the Department of Conservation, “to the highest extent practicable”.
Resources Minister Shane Jones maintains a stance that the entire conservation estate ought to be explored for development, so while critics were happy to hear Potaka’s announcement, they still prefer to see the entire bill scrapped.
Speaking at the Environmental Defence Society’s annual conference, Potaka took personal responsibility for the public backlash against his bill.
Potaka says his Government’s intention was never to open up large tracts of conservation land for sale or disposal, but acknowledged “many New Zealanders have been left with a different impression, and that’s on me”.
He says his Government could have been clearer about how the bill would protect natural spaces, and while people could disagree with how the Conservation Act should be modernised, there is agreement that some change is needed in the decades-old system.
“We won’t agree on everything, we won’t agree on every policy and proposal, but the important thing is we keep talking with one another, to one another, and with our children,” says Potaka.
Jones took the stage after Potaka, and he had plenty to talk about.
As Newsroom has previously reported, Jones is keen to break up the Department of Conservation entirely, and open public conservation land to development.
The resources minister says his party has “a profound belief that the DoC estate is an under-utilised resource that can contribute more to the expansion of our GDP”. It’s an issue he says New Zealand First will campaign on.
“God as my witness, if we form a future government, we will be pushing for the DoC department to drive more economic outcomes from the DoC estate, including income to defray the expenses of running the DoC estate.”
He asks the public not to “catastrophise” the idea of using the conservation estate for “extraction business purposes”.
If Jones had it his way, he says this land “would be serving a host of other more commercially orientated outcomes”.
His party’s addition to the bill is a provision that shifts the department’s mandate towards economic development “to the highest extent practicable”, a facet Potaka did not commit to changing.
Caitlin Owers of the World Wildlife Fund says this is her biggest concern, one which would “fundamentally change” the way the department functions, and says further fixes are needed.
Greenpeace Aotearoa’s Gen Toop says the bill is unsalvageable, and that the implications for conservation land due to the change in mandate would make it “as good as selling it off anyway”.
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson feels the same way. “You cannot fix a bill written for developers by trimming the worst bits and hoping no one notices,” she says.
Her comments echo a warning issued by Forest & Bird leader Nicola Toki in 2024, speaking on the nascent fast-track regime.
At the time, public outcry focused on powers of ministerial override, which Toki also called to scrap. But in her submission on the bill, she said she wanted to avoid a “bait and switch” whereby only the most egregious aspect of the fast-track was dropped.
Toki said scrapping these powers – which the Government did, shortly after submissions – was meaningless unless underlying issues were addressed. “I want to make that really clear: that can’t be the only thing,” she said at the time.
Now, with changes made to yet another contentious environment bill, the same critics are making this point once more.
