Solutions

We ask the Crown to defend the public interest.

The Crown owns the high country, definitively and outright. It holds title, and subdivision rights worth millions of dollars. The Crown holds this land and these rights on behalf of the people of New Zealand. We have a government to manage the high country in our interests. It is similar to the way an individual trusts a mutual fund manager to manage her investments for her benefit. In handing millions of dollars in development potential to lessees, the Crown is failing to protect our interests in the high country.  The Crown has betrayed our trust.

We call for the Crown to stick up for us: for OUR financial, recreational, and ecological interest in the high country.

  1. Stop Tenure Review. Now.


  2. Do not recommence tenure review. Ever.


  3. Re-read the 1948 Land Act and the Crown Pastoral Lease Act 1998 (CPLA) which both state that the Crown owns the land and the subdivision rights. Advocate for the Crown's interest, not the lessees' interest.


    • Protect Crown assets, don't pay to give them away.
    • Manage our assets with the public's interests in mind, not the lessees' interests. Pastoral lessees are looking after their interests, but LINZ and DOC are failing to look after ours.
    • Stop privatisation. Continue with leasehold.

  4. Review all high country rentals. Rentals need to reflect amenity values: Recreation potential, exclusive occupation, trespass rights, location. These are values attached to the land, they are not 'improvements'. Charging an average of $0.95 per hectare annual rent is an insult to New Zealand taxpayers. This buys you less than a litre of petrol! The average high country station pays less in rental to the Crown than what a student pays for a room in a run-down Dunedin flat.


    • Subsidise those who need our help, not those who own helicopters.
    • Stop subsidising subdivision and land development, it's profitable enough without taxpayer help.
    • Offer rent relief for retiring from grazing land with high conservation value.
    • Offer rent relief for generous and practical public access.
    • Provide the Crown with first right of refusal of all high country leases offered for sale.

  5. To add to conservation land, buy grazing rights outright on whole leases, but slowly, and in a planned manner. Protect ALL areas with healthy indigenous vegetation cover or the potential for regeneration and areas with recreation value, and establish practical access lines. Don't trade them away. The Crown can then auction land suitable for subdivision, farming and other intensive use. Put the proceeds into buying more grazing rights.


  6. Stop discretionary consents for activities which disturb plants, wildlife and waterways. While farmers call them 'improvements', they degrade the Crown's financial, ecological, and recreational interest in the land. In granting discretionary consents that destroy irreplaceable ecological assets, the Crown violates the trust we, the public, have placed in it. This must stop, entirely and forever.


  7. Manage the land for a sustainable future.


    • Keep our high country landscapes intact and resilient, stop the massive carve-up, NOW.
    • Protect species, don't subsidise 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.

  8. Plan for community based recreation and tourism that benefits all, not a privileged few.


    • Establish high country conservation parks in public ownership.
    • Establish practical public access lines to conservation areas, free for all to use at all times.
    • Make generous allowances for free foot acces to lakeshores of our popular lakes, and for walking and biking tracks near towns and villages.


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