Government ‘not held to account’ in land-use report

by Kerry Worsnop

There is a reason why the recent Ministerial Inquiry into Land Use should have been a Royal Commission of Inquiry.

Put simply, for the sake of accountability.

The report is blunt in its findings, largely heaping the blame for poor land-use controls, lax monitoring and the consequent environmental and social mess at the feet of foresters and local councils.

The report’s most severe criticism was reserved for the Gisborne District Council, facing the stark recommendation that a commissioner be brought in to rectify faults in relation to the management of the local Resource Management Act (RMA).

Somewhat ironically — if this commissioner had appeared years ago with the money to actually pay for these plans and a more straightforward way of achieving them — then they would possibly have been welcomed with open arms.

Further, if the council was imbued with the statutory powers to override their obligations under the RMA (the way the report recommends the Government do, using Order in Council) then many of the suggested amendments in the Tairāwhiti Resource Management Act would likely have been made already, without fear of winding up in costly and protracted court hearings facing well-resourced forestry companies.

As someone who has spent time on council, I can say with some confidence that the processes designed by (Government) statute to facilitate the democratic contributions of local communities are the same processes that continue to make plan changes slow, expensive, litigious and late.

The painful ongoing saga of RMA reform speaks to exactly these issues.

So, who wasn’t held accountable in the report?

Very clearly, the commissioning agent for this inquiry — the Government itself.

The list of land-use incentives for development and change extends back a century or more, right up until the present day.

Tragically, at almost every step there were local voices, impacted in very direct ways, sounding the alarm, only to be ignored.

The cursory recommendation to “review the decision” regarding recent Overseas Investment Office approval of the sales of Huiarua and Matanui stations, supported by almost no one beyond the Government ministers who signed the approval, and directly opposed by thousands of others, is a bitter case in point.

Little reference was made of the many tens of thousands of hectares that the Government paid to plant on precipitous hills 10 years ago, and still less was said about roughly 30,000 hectares of additional land incentivised by the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for afforestation over the last three years, despite widespread public concern and international condemnation for limitless carbon offsetting.

This council, like many before it, inherited a costly mess largely shaped by well-meaning central government intervention, and is possibly the most guilty of one thing in particular — failing to push back hard enough against the waves of chaotic policy flooding out of Wellington.

It should surprise no one that our local leaders ultimately prove to be toothless when faced with the equally desperate need to continually beg for crumbs with which to fix our battered roads and bridges, and to support our flagging economy every time the log price drops.

For proof of the dismal mismatch between central government and local government priorities, it is well worth reading the Gisborne District Council submission on proposals to reform the ETS, which reads eerily similar to the recommendations made by the Ministerial Inquiry.

It highlights that further accelerating plantation forestry in the region may “threaten productive soils and pastoral land, threaten local communities, increase fire risks, reduce biodiversity through increased monocultures, increase soil erosion during and post-harvest”, and finally, “increase the risk of woody debris flows during storms”.

The council was saying these things and the Government ignored them.

It is hardly fair for the Government to now blame councils for failing to put out a fire that Wellington lit, while sloshing diesel all over it, and laughing all the way to the bank (yes, the Government makes money out of the ETS).

The report’s wider recommendations require more words than are permitted here, however, they attempt to provide a response to an issue of incredible scale, a reaction of sorts to a growing catastrophe of remarkable proportions.

The challenge we have as a local community is to ensure that this response is far better considered than the last one, for which we are all so clearly still paying the price.

For this to be achieved we must exercise wisdom of a kind no longer common to the modern era.

Call me cynical, but until we learn from our past, we remain destined to repeat it.