MINING
A promotion on steroids

Fast Track

The last year has been surreal as we fight back against a Government mining promotion that seeks to prioritise development on Department of Conservation (DOC) land by making it a key purpose in the Conservation Amendment Bill. We thought the Fast Track law was bad enough. The first case that wasn’t public infrastructure-related but private profit by a transnational was in our Hauraki Coromandel region. The Waihi North Project was fast tracked in 2025 and Watchdog had 20 working days to make submissions.

As a volunteer group with one part time worker, we did our best in the 20 days we had. We found 16 expert witnesses in the fields of ecology, economics, social impact, water and mining and more. We had four economic experts because the Fast Track is all about economics. They included the redoubtable Geoff Bertram,² Edward Miller, Dr. Glenn Banks, and Richard Meade.

They made the arguments against Shamubeel Eaqub’s minimal evidence of economic gain. He only focused on assumptions around jobs and they focused on the real costs of mining and the weak tax regime, and on questioning the regional and national gains from mining. The Panel, who had all the power, accepted our evidence but there was no cross-examination in the normal sense of the word. The Panel did meet with a range of economics experts including ours, but with a restricted agenda that didn’t not amount to robust cross-examination or involve our lawyers.

Watchdog shared some of our evidence with the iwi groups who opposed the application. Their cultural issues were significant, but they were not heard. Oceana Gold received a 35-year consent to mine further under Waihi town as well as build a new open cast mine there, and to build a vast underground mine under conservation land behind Whangamatā in the Wharekirauponga Forest. Even though there is no independent regional data on water quality risks, they are allowed to blast in the underground water ways, they can build vast tunnels, and they can blast under the habitat of the vibration-sensitive Archeys frog which is a 200-million-year-old species.

They will produce thousands of tonnes of toxic waste which will be dumped in a new tailings dam by the river in Waihi. The Wharekirauponga case is a precedent for our area and a huge risk to the forest in terms of draining the forest in a drought and risking subsidence. Earthquake risk and heavy rain impacts on the tailings dams at Waihi were not seriously considered, although we raised them.

The most frustrating thing about the Fast Track is that it has nil capacity to evaluate complex cases like huge mines in sensitive environments and they limit iwi and public participation. The Panels are also random; if you get a good Chair, you might get a better process or a better judgement. Meanwhile Shane Jones has been doing his best to make the law ever more limited in terms of who gets asked to submit as an affected party. We are all affected by these projects which leave expensive toxic legacies we will have to pay for.

Waihi Gets A Pit & Toxic Waste Dump

A classic example is the vast open pit mine in Waihi township which the mining companies promised they would turn into an amenity lake for the town. It’s just been announced that the mine will not be extended. It will be mothballed as the north face slowly slips away and the town will inherit a pit. The lake idea was never going to happen. It would have been a toxic water body but now it’s going to be a degrading pit forever unless the community pays for a solution. That’s transnational mining, they promise the moon, or a lake and you get a pit and a toxic waste dump to look after in the future. It’s worth noting the 2026 Budget also extended tax exemptions for mining companies.

On the ground our communities have been really active in the last year, holding rallies, stalls, community meetings and monitoring mining activities on conservation and private lands. It has included many early mornings and many banner painting sessions but our presence is growing even stronger in our area. We have met with Mayors and we have submitted to Parliament and have strong public support but we now have an even bigger challenge.

To help the mining companies and other developers take over conservation land the Coalition Government has introduced a new Bill to Parliament called the Conservation Amendment Bill that changes the purpose of the law from conservation to conservation plus the facilitation of economic development to “the greatest extent practicable under law”. They attempted to include sale of up to 60% of the DOC land in the Bill but the push back was overwhelming so they are calling it a “mistake”.

It is important to note that this law is an attack on Te Tiriti rights as the land itself. Once conservation land is developed and the decisions are made by the Ministers, both settlements and future return of land that is all ancestral Māori land is affected. The Bill also proposes extending commercial concession from 30-year access agreements to 60-year access agreements. The ability of hapū and iwi to engage with many aspects of the law is limited to “30 days written comment.” A number of conservation structures have had powers removed to concentrate power away from tangata whenua and the public and into the hands of Ministers.

The Bill is supposed to be reported back in November so our future lies in the hands of the voters at the national election and the degree to which Labour will roll back the worst environmental abuses of this Government. In the meantime, Shane Jones is urging Cabinet to sign on to a Critical Minerals Agreement with the USA so that we can extract minerals useful to their war machine and their tech race with China. This is a seriously bad idea but most people do not know it’s happening. Jones recently held a day for mining investors to sell themselves to US officials—not what we need from a Minister in our Government who is supposed to work for our interests.³

Both the new DOC land development purpose and the Critical Minerals agreement are a threat to our independence, but well aligned with the foreign policy direction of a Five Eyes nation with no moral compass. Beneficiaries of this political environment are the foreign mining companies who are promoting the “friendly regime” and the Fast Track law to their investors offshore.

There are a number of companies circling the land area around the Oceana project at Wharekirauponga, including Rua Gold which is also trying to mine antimony (toxic critical mineral) at Reefton. Plus: Rua Gold, Otagold and smaller companies like Zedex, Tempest and Mineral Exploration, who are all hoping to find a bonanza gold field like Wharekirauponga and make the most of the extractive facilitation policies we currently have to suffer.

Threat From Mining Is National

All over the country from Otago to Te Tai Tokerau the threat of foreign mining is growing, but the reality is that only a few areas have a substantial quantity of gold, rare earth metals, critical minerals and coal. The most vulnerable places are Otago, the Denniston Plateau and West Coast, parts of Golden Bay area and Coromandel. Coal is a greenhouse gas, gold is abundant above ground and critical minerals are often toxic and put to toxic use.

The west coastal waters around Taranaki are also at high risk but they have won the latest round even under the Fast Track, as have the Golden Bay champions of Waikoropupū Springs. Community groups are already weary after these battles of the last few years; we are here to warn, then to pace ourselves as we have been campaigning here for 45 years and many hapū and iwi have fought to protect land for much longer.

The only political party with a coherent policy to protect land from mining is the Green Party, and Te Pāti Māori who have led the fight against Trans-Tasman Resources (TTR) and its seabed mining project, along with other groups, on the Taranaki coast. We will need these parties to get enough support to force an environmentally absent and timid Labour Party into reversing the damaging laws that open the country up to a toxic future.

Every day here at home we face the consequences of a Government that validates the rhetoric of Shane Jones in his attacks on what many people value—the protection of the environment from the predations of foreign capital. The respect for Te Tiriti and the recognition of the other species with whom we share this space. We completely understand the attraction of jobs in the mining industry for people trying to earn a decent living and we will never attack personally mine workers for going to work, but the mining industry is a boom-and-bust extractor and has failed to enrich areas like the West Coast or the Hauraki/Coromandel.

The Fight Goes On

So, we will carry on fighting for the big picture to make sure there is fresh water and forest left after hyper capitalism has done its worst. In the 2025/26 summer cyclone season the Prime Minister came to the Peninsula to offer some platitudes; our protest reminded him that climate change is real and our area is too precious to mine. The local MP Scott Simpson was horrified that we protested, claiming that we were politicising the climate tragedy, because, of course, climate change is not political. Climate change and mining cannot be separated. A sell off of public land and Te Tiriti cannot be separated. Mining, capitalism and toxic waste cannot be separated. The fight goes on.

Watchdog 172 -- August 2026

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