SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Brownlee’s lament

SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Brownlee’s lament

By Pattrick Smellie

July 20 (BusinessDesk) – Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee cut a lonely figure in the Bellamy’s lunchroom at Parliament this morning.

Chowing down with a couple of staffers around 11.30, the place was virtually deserted. Less than an hour before, he had endured a larruping from a Press Gallery pack gleefully feeding on his humiliating backdown over proposals to mine the most protected conservation lands.

Comfort food was definitely in order.

Not that Brownlee is a man given to admitting defeat.

Challenged to conduct some “self-analysis” on the way the mining issue played out, Brownlee was more inclined to suggest today’s pullback was all part of the plan.

Had the government suggested only that there be more mining on private land or Crown land outside the conservation estate, he reckoned the visceral reaction from the environmental movement would have been the same. Asked whether today’s announcements would mean more mining could be achieved than previously, he replied: “High likely.”

Maybe. But even BlackAdder would have been stretched to come up with this cunning plan.

With the benefit of hindsight, launching a pro-mining policy by proposing taking a pick and shovel to the so-called “jewels in the crown” of the conservation estate looks almost potty, and the ultimate outcome almost predictable.

Yet if that were so, why was Prime Minister John Key still talking up the removal of substantial chunks of untouchable conservation land, protected under Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act, as recently as his speech opening Parliament in February?

The reality is that the policy looked, for some months, to be achievable. It provoked almost no immediate green lobby outcry and happened to fit well at the time into the rhetoric of “catching Australia” – a goal in search of a policy which gained much-needed substance when tied to something as concrete as going hell for leather for extractive industry, or as Brownlee calls it, “fast growth.”

He never pretended more mining would be the country’s saviour, but he did argue rightly that it had become overlooked and, under Labour, stigmatised to the point where an obvious source of national wealth was going begging.

With that thought driving him, Brownlee gave a speech last September in which he floated, without much in the way of 9th floor Beehive permission, the idea of rootling through the conservation estate for precious metals.

In the absence of environmentalist outcry – perhaps the focus was on the Copenhagen climate change summit – the focus went quickly to the Schedule 4 lands, where an unfortunate amount of the nation’s mineral prospectivity coincides with some of its wildest, remotest, and most scenic spots.

The sorts of places that any nationalist will get dewy-eyed about, even if – perhaps especially if - they never actually go there.

In hindsight, it seems almost as if Brownlee became so convinced that the policy was achievable that somewhere over the Christmas period it ran out of political momentum. To his cost, this coincided with the moment when the green movement finally got off its chuff and made a fuss.

A leak in March that suggested Great Barrier Island and Coromandel Peninsula were in the frame caught the government off-balance, and the rest is history. A huge crowd marched in Queen Street, the chattering classes all agreed with one another that mining was an awful grubby business, and the scene was set for another victory for high-minded self-impoverishment.

If that assessment makes your blood boil, just think about this. A person working in tourism earns on average something close to the average wage or worse, since so much of that industry is casualised and part-time.

A mining industry employee can expect to earn several times the average wage, and the value per hectare of the tiny proportion of the country that’s mined eclipses the value of any other known land use. Dairying, the farming choice du jour, is a positively embarrassing commercial prospect by comparison.

Brownlee now seeks to explain it all away. The debate has been healthy, he says, because New Zealanders have been reawakened to the truth about our mineral wealth and its potential to help lift this tin-pot country out of its low-growth, high expectations rut at far greater speed than the achingly slow and risky process of building brain-powered new industries.

To those who say there’s something immoral about mining, the only answer can be, how are you reading this column? It only appears on-line so you must have a computer full of rare earths and precious metals which, like energy, are the invisible juice of modern society. We expect their presence without acknowledging their source.

In other words, there’s nothing more immoral about those metals coming from the ground in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. It’s just silly to suggest that such activity would have destroyed every inch of the vast acreage of conservation estate, and it’s a fact that Labour stuffed huge tracts of extra land into Schedule 4 during its time in office.

Perhaps Brownlee is right, and there is now at least in play in the New Zealand political psyche the idea that mining could be an economic help.

What’s hard to deny, though, is that there are certain immutable laws in politics. Sure, one of them is that you should always aim higher than you really mean to go. That certainly happened in this case.

But also, you should never bite off more than you can chew. By the time the government announced its proposal to carve out 7,000 hectares of Schedule 4 land for possible mining, it had already retreated to its fall-back position.

The only way to retreat from there was to capitulate.

Yes, there will be an aero-magnetic survey undertaken in Northland and the West Coast - pliable parts of the country where mining is not only welcomed but even begged for. Perhaps there will be mining there quicker than would have been case under, say, a Labour government.

Other than that, the government has ended up behind where it started.

Just watch. There are more than 80 mining concessions granted over conservation land outside Schedule 4 today.

If there are any more by election day, I’ll eat my hat - which, thankfully, would make a passable broth at a pinch.

(BusinessDesk)

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