Ecosystem Integrity
1. It's bad for conservation
If the New Zealand public were getting really good conservation results, losing millions might not be so bad. But we're not.
Rather than protecting our significant conservation values, as promised by the law, tenure review is hastening their demise. A recent study by Landcare Research shows that only a minute 4% of the most threatened habitats for endangered species are being protected under the tenure review carve-up. The rest are abandoned to agricultural diversification and the real estate carve-up .
Tenure Review is betraying conservation because most of the threatened plants and animals live on lower altitude land which gets privatised to farmers, and is likely to be developed. Just look at the $10 million golf course proposed on Glendhu station on the shores of Lake Wanaka. That land used to be ours.
An objective of the Crown Pastoral Land Act (CPLA) 1998 is to enable areas with significant conservation value to be protected. Cabinet has instructed LINZ that privatisation can only occur if significant inherent values are protected. But exactly the opposite continues to happen, violating the spirit of the law and defying the will of parliament.
Tenure review has failed. It cannot fulfill our vision. It must be stopped.
2. Pre-emptive privatisation must also stop
The Crown is allowing farmers to pre-privatise Crown land by issuing non-notified discretionary consents that destroy native vegetation and wildlife, and degrade the Crown's financial, ecological, and recreational interest. LINZ has even permitted lessees to destroy values identified as significant in tenure review inspections, e.g. on Glendene, where significant wetland margins and lakeshores were burned.
Discretionary consents are not 'improvements' in the eye of the taxpayer: they are permits to destroy irreplaceable ecological assets that belong to the Crown. Consents create valuable private property rights, and bleed away the Crown's economic interest in doing so. The law that enables them is a travesty.
Gems that have been ploughed under with permission include the gorgeous grasslands of the Rees Valley and Ashburton Basin. Thousands of hectares of native shrubland on Beaumont Station, and forests and shrublands on the shores of Lake Wanaka have been killed by aerial sprays and fire, with consent from LINZ. Native grasslands on Richmond Station were destroyed and pre-emptively privatised. Increasing areas are being irrigated, destroying native communities, while LINZ argues that no consent is required for irrigation! This fundamentally violates the trust we place in the Crown to look after our interests.
Discretionary consents and associated 'improvements' must stop, immediately and forever. They just allow lessees to enrich themselves and stake a claim to the Crown's land, while destroying precious environmental assets.
3. Manage our ecosystems with foresight
High Country catchments provide most of eastern South Island's water. Privatising them is irresponsible and unfair to present and future generations. The Crown must retain these priceless resources in public ownership in perpetuity.
Under conservation management, many areas below treeline will revert to native shrubland and eventually forest. Our biodiversity-friendly carbon sinks must be protected in public ownership to sequester carbon for our benefit, not those of private interests. New Zealanders - and the planet - need them protected from development for yet more methane-enriching, electricity and water-demanding activities.
We request:
- Keep our high country landscapes intact and resilient, stop the massive carve-up, NOW.
- Protect species, don't pave over biodiversity by subsidising land speculation and destructive development.
- Keep our landscapes for carbon sequestration, not industrial-scale, methane-emitting dairy farms.
- Keep our clean and flowing rivers, don't subsidise their transformation to nutrified slime.
- Destock land where grazing leases and permits have expired or are non-existent, and let indigenous ecosystems recover.