Assert our collective authority over our collective legacy

We have a busy little government, pumping out as much legislative change as it can before the axe (vote, vote, vote,) falls in November.

One of those legislative changes is the Conservation Amendment Bill, which amends protections to the public conservation estate.

The Bill is currently at select committee. Submissions are still open and will close on July 2.

As always, you don’t have be a legal expert or conservationist to make a submission. The parliamentary website has everything you need to have your say, as short or long as you prefer.

I have urged many submissions on many Bills in this column, often to the raging ire of some. This is one that absolutely every New Zealander needs to weigh in on whatever your political bent.

The conservation estate is our collective heritage. We are a very small country with limited land, and the public conservation estate is the collective legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren for many generations.

From the 1887 gift of Tongariro, the first ever national park, by Te Heuheu Tūkino IV, rangatira of Tūwharetoa to the 1970’s Maruia Declaration to protect native forests to the 2025 addition of Mātai Moana gifted by Taranaki Whānui o te Upoko o te Ika, we have a long history of protecting these pristine places for their own sake.

That protection is at extreme risk under this legislation. The key protective aspects of the law that keeps communities as decision-makers, and therefore business and government in check, are about to be eroded or removed by the Bill.

The public accountability structures, peopled by ordinary New Zealanders, are set to be undermined and curtailed. Public rights to be heard on concessions applications will be removed unless approved by the minister.

The New Zealand Conservation Authority (I was a member from 2022-25) and the regional Conservation Boards will have an advisory role only, removing the rights of New Zealanders to be decision-makers in the public conservation estate.

Instead, ministers will hold the decision-making power.

That matters because the conservation portfolio is not a priority portfolio and tends to be passed along to nearly every new minister who joins Cabinet.

The conservation portfolio is used to test their skills before they move on to bigger things. We have had five Ministers of Conservation in six years.

The portfolio is not a government priority and each new minister will be making irreversible decisions with little experience of, history in or commitment to conservation. It is a recipe for terrible decisions that seriously risk the integrity of the estate.

The government has also done a slight of hand in relation to section 4 Treaty obligations. While retaining the original language, clause 4A of the Bill details how the department is to engage with iwi and hāpori (communities), restricting that engagement to a tick-box exercise that presupposes a shallow relationship between DOC and iwi.

These relationships have been difficult in the past and many in DOC and in iwi have worked really hard to improve those relationships because of the importance of protecting the conservation estate and upholding mana whenua.

The amendment directly attacks the Treaty settlements of iwi and deliberately undermines DOC’s good iwi relationships.

Iwi have been extraordinarily generous in their contributions to the public conservation estate, which is now repaid with hollow rhetoric and reductive anti-Māori legislative undertows.

It may then come as no surprise that the amendment Bill will remove the concession protections for iwi affirmed by the Supreme Court in Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki Tribal Trust v Minister of Conservation. That must grate on the Minister who was a previous CE of Ngāi Tai ki Tamaki and responsible for working with that decision on behalf of the iwi.

The value of the public conservation estate to the country is in the billions of dollars. It includes about a third of New Zealand’s land, over $10 billion in ecosystem services like fresh water and carbon sequestration, $134b in natural and physical assets and $500 million in recreation services.

Its continued protection has to be a major priority for New Zealanders, the land that we can walk as our inheritance. Once it has gone whether to mining, to commercial development, to land exchange and disposal, it is lost for good.

Now is the time assert our collective authority over our collective legacy.

■ Associate Prof Metiria Stanton Turei is a law lecturer at the University of Otago and a former Green Party co-leader.