The Department of Conservation has backtracked on a decision to decline a permit under the Wildlife Act for Macraes gold mine in Otago, New Zealand’s largest.
Macraes mine, owned by Oceana Gold, a Canadian-Australian firm, applied for a permit to use additional land mainly required for tailings, the material left over after the valuable resources have been extracted.
That permit would have required the relocation of lizards and allowed the killing of approximately 8000–10,000 lizards over the next decade.
The original application was lodged in 2023. The Department of Conservation (DoC) told Oceana Gold that its lizard management plan did not have enough detail. Oceana Gold asked that the application be paused while it gathered that detail and resubmitted the plan.
The DoC declined to give the firm more time, noting there had already been some back-and-forth, and declined the application outright on May 30 of this year. The timing is acute. Oceana Gold says the only time to relocate lizards is between October and April.
If the mine cannot get a permit to find the lizards before then and take them somewhere else, then the future operations of the mine will be imperilled.
A document that was part of the application, seen by the Herald warned of “enormous” consequences if there was no permit by October 1 this year.
The firm said it expects to contribute $700 million in exports this year and employs 700 people directly and 200 contractors.
“A complete stoppage of processing would suspend the work of over 700 direct staff and over 200 contractors along with their staff, leading to layoffs,” it said.
“There are no redeployment options for the vast majority of this workforce.”
Resources Minister Shane Jones told the Herald he had warned that if the enterprise was forced to close as a result of the DoC decision it would show the Government’s “political narrative” around growth was “hollow”.
He suggested the public service was acting as a block to growth.
“Although we have a foghorn on the bridge, embedded in the system there is a cynical force more powerful than the politicians,” Jones said.
He accused these forces of having “an ideological bent which is at odds with our democratically elected Government”.
Jones was in Sydney this week speaking with members of the Australian resources sector. He told the Herald that businesses in Australia had been asking him about the case.
The Herald contacted Conservation Minister Tama Potaka to ask whether he thought the DoC’s actions were justified or at odds with the Government’s growth agenda.
Potaka met with officials on Thursday evening to discuss the matter.
Late on Thursday, DoC deputy director general policy and regulatory services Ruth Isaac told the Herald that she had “received feedback”.
“We’ve received feedback that when we asked for more information from OGL [Oceana Gold] about their lizard management plan, there was a miscommunication, and we weren’t clear enough about what we were looking for and moved to decline the application too quickly without clarifying with OGL,” she said.
“We acknowledge our process wasn’t as customer-focused as it could have been and we will work closely with OGL to progress their application swiftly and pragmatically, alongside the other applications in our system.”
She noted that Potaka had been clear to the department it needed to “clear the permissions backlog” and it had “seen the number of applications awaiting decisions drop from around 1300 to now under 550″.
Earlier this week, Potaka trumpeted these statistics in a press release, noting that clearing the backlog was “accelerating economic growth without compromising conservation values”.
However, it appears that in this case and others, the permits might not have been decided in a way that made the applicants happy.
Potaka’s release noted that after five years, Kokiri Lime had finally had its application approved to quarry a 1ha site located south of Fox Glacier in the Te Wāhipounamu – South New Zealand World Heritage Area (WHA) on stewardship land.
However, the company originally applied for a 15ha site.
Oceana Gold has a new application in with the DoC that covers less than 10% of the original one. The DoC would not say whether, as a result of its backdown, it would now reopen the application it had dismissed or simply progress with the new, pared-down version.
Unusually, for disputes like this, everyone seems to mostly get along. Oceana Gold is seen by some conservationists as a good actor in an industry not usually known for them. The mine provides high-paying jobs in a region that might otherwise struggle to create them.
Maurice Davis, national secretary for the Amalgamated Workers Union, said the mine had a good record environmentally.
“They’ve got a proven track record of transporting the lizards out of a virgin area, mining the gold, and repatriating them in there once they’ve resettled the ground,” Davis said.
He said salaries of over $100,000 were not uncommon at the mine and said the spat raised questions about how far New Zealand would force workers to sacrifice for the environment.
“It actually puts a lot of money into the local community ... that money is needed,” Davis said, noting that the rest of the local economy was services-based, which paid much less.
“Everyone will go to Australia, working in the mines, and there’s no qualms about it, but when you’ve got a mining operation in New Zealand, [it’s] all hell and brimstone,” he said.
“There is a balancing act between protecting the environment for future generations and being able to extract resources so we can have a standard of living that New Zealanders have come to expect.
“You can have the most beautiful country in the world, but if you’re poor you’re poor – you can be poor in a slum, or poor in a rural area, but you’re still poor. That doesn’t give you many options other than looking out your window and saying, ‘what a beautiful place, too bad I can’t do anything ‘coz I’m broke," David said.
Alison Paul, the senior vice-president, New Zealand legal and public affairs for Oceana Gold, said the firm continued to “actively engage” with the DoC to address “long-standing delays in the assessment of a range of wildlife permits which are necessary for ongoing operations”.
“The department’s slow processing and lack of communication are of significant concern for us,” she said.
“In a complex, highly regulated industry such as our Macraes Mine, continued functioning is dependent on a timely response from regulators. Serious delays such as these have the potential to significantly affect our people and our operation.”