While driving 2000km from Wellington to Te Anau and back in the school holidays I focused on the cost of EV travel compared with diesel or petrol powered.
EV was three times cheaper to run than petrol vehicles at current petrol prices (five times cheaper if you remove the RUC and fuel excise duty). I was thrilled that EV chargers are available across the South Island, even in the remotest regions of the Mackenzie Basin and Central Otago.
My success story with EV travel through this region soon moved this North Islander to question why the beautiful landscape near Cromwell and Tarras, the Dunstan Ranges, is about to be marred, turned into rubble, to excavate for gold.
The intended wholesale attack on the countryside by Santana, with no respect for prior inhabitants and their history — and how quickly they have moved in on the back of relaxing of legislative controls through the Fast-track Approvals Act and the Ministry for Regulatory Standards — is of great concern.
It seems nothing gets in the way of fast-track.
Other risks abound, including Santana’s lack of expertise mining in New Zealand conditions and the inherent risks in the contracts.
Mining is not called an extractive industry for nothing. Nothing for the sovereign country, all for the extractor.
Another major concern is changes to the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill 2026 targeting the responsibility of any health and safety issues to the persons directly in charge at the point of operation (the leading hands, team leaders etc), not the chief executive or directors despite the fact that the lower ranks often have no ability in their own right to approve any necessary funding to address safety concerns or halt operations.
Once this Bill becomes law it will be virtually impossible to charge the owners of Santana for any disasters causing loss of life or business.
The Clutha River supports local rural industry including export dairy and meat plants, power stations and there will be impact on coastal seashore and marine life. The waters are stored and used in the Roxburgh and Clutha power stations.
Where consequences are enormous, the probability of failure is regarded as very, very small — conventionally the risk is calculated as very low.
Current thinking on catastrophic risks is not consistent with this analysis, and prefers to assume while the likelihood is very low, the time frame for risks of a tailings dam failure is effectively infinite.
The very small probability or likelihood over an exceptionally long period of time actually represents a high probability of failure.
This probability is increased by the fact that once the commercial operation filling the tailings dam ceases to operate maintenance standards fall or disappear, increasing the likelihood of the failure occurring.
In the case of the Bendigo-Ophir tailings dam the contents of the dam will effectively end up in the Clutha River system and will turn both Lake Dunstan and Lake Roxburgh into secondary tailings containing structures which will be enormously difficult to decontaminate to allow continuing operation of a significant part of New Zealand’s renewable generation capacity without damage to the equipment of the hydro-electric power stations.
Failure of the Bendigo-Ophir tailings dam would have widespread effects as water from the Clutha system is widely used in viticulture, horticulture, orchards and general irrigation and public water supplies.
The economic effects on New Zealand’s export and tourism industries must be factored in, along with the high impact on the local economy and New Zealand’s reputation.
As the area is one of the outstanding landscapes of the world there is an international obligation to protect this region.
Not to mention the indigenous history that is yet to be discovered in the region and the known indigenous and settler history that contributes to our current society.
Seismic events and the complexity of fault lines, and severe weather due to global climate change will add to the risk in ways we could not have anticipated 30 years ago.
The effort made by the Ministry of Works in ascertaining the risks of developing the Clyde Dam in the 1970s and 80s provides an example of the extensive caution that needs to be taken into account when developing a project intruding into a natural landscape with extensive fault lines and unknown seismic risks, erosion and slip potential.
Given the extensive risk and guaranteed destruction of past and present in this unique environment and risk of contamination not just locally but across the entire Otago region, the Bendigo-Ophir gold project should be stopped in its tracks.
• Gail Duncan is an economist and past co-president of the Public Health Association of New Zealand.
