The Government needs to start treating New Zealanders as intelligent people. We will not be deluded by ridiculous Government claims that there are "billions" of dollars of minerals in the Schedule 4 National Park and Conservation Reserves available as soon as their legal protection is stripped away.
Everyone in business knows that while you might start with dreams of riches and business success, the reality is quite different. There is an enormous challenge and great risk in building every successful business. Nowhere is this more true than in mining, an industry awash with false promises and shattered dreams.
Unfortunately if you look through the line up of Government Ministers involved in this mining threat to our most precious conservation land, none of them have any experience in building and running real businesses. These have to provide a product or service to meet consumer demand, work with the community, employ people and face all the day to day challenges that this entails. It is far easier for these well paid Ministers to gloss over the technical details and just claim that billions of minerals are there for the taking.
The Prime Minister was a currency trader who, in his time at Merrill Lynch, made his fortune gambling on the manipulation of exchange rates particularly of the $Kiwi..to me one of the most despicable activities of modern society. Financial gambling of this type on currencies and property is the tragedy that caused the current world economic recession.
The Minister of Conservation is a lawyer. The Minister of Energy and of Economic Development has been receiving a Government salary for much of his working life.
If you talk to most experienced people in the mining industry, they scoff at the extravagant Government claims that these conservation areas contain billions of easily accessible mineral wealth.
For Example: The 2009 report by the Government Agency Crown Minerals, located within the Ministry for Economic Development, is the basis for this Government grab for our most precious conservation land. It claims that there are billions of dollars of titanium in the Barrytowm Flats ilmenite sands located 40km north of Greymouth on the West Coast. This "billion dollar resource" has excited people for at least the last 50 years since titanium started being used as a steel hardener.
Fletcher Titanium in 1985 initiated plans to mine the sands. I was on their Environment and Community Advisory Board 1985-89 representing Forest and Bird. They gifted a large reserve of their freehold land that didn't contain ilmenite sands to Forest and Bird. This contained Westland Black Petrels and was named the Forest and Bird Dick Jackson Memorial Reserve. Fletcher Titanium also contributed financially to black petrel conservation. Meanwhile they set up a pilot plant at Barrytown and started to trial the extraction of ilmenite. The trial proved both an economic and technical failure. The whole Barrytown operation was then sold to North Broken Hill and then later NBH was acquired by Rio Tinto, the world's second biggest mining company.
In 2005, Rio Tinto advised those of us still involved in advocating for the protection of the Black Petrels and the Barrytown wetlands, that the Eastern Bloc countries and Russia and elsewhere have absolutely enormous reserves of titanium sands. These reserves dwarf anything that New Zealand has. In Rio Tinto's view, supported by all the world's best mining engineers and business people, the Barrytown sands can never be economically mined.
Rio Tinto on 12 March 2010 took part in a ceremony with the Minister of Conservation where the Barrytown Sands are to be legally protected as a reserve. With Rio Tinto's support, the Punakaiki Conservation Trust made up of community volunteers are now replanting the entire area to become a natural buffer around the Westland Black petrel breeding colonies.
So who are we to believe? Government officials and Ministers who claim billions of dollars of minerals located at places like the Barrytown sands are just waiting to be plucked from the mining tree of bountiful riches? Or do we believe the world's second largest mining company who have just walked away from what these officials and Ministers claim are billions of dollars of titanium!
Come on John Key. Get real. Stand up for the real businesses in New Zealand that pay your salary such as my nature tourism business and all those hard working tourist operators on Great Barrier Island, Rakiura, the Coromandel and at the Paparoa National Park. Our businesses are very reliant on NZ's clean green image and environmental performance and right now this is being tainted by your Government's mining antics.
Forget your idiotic billion dollar mining dreamland. It isn't there and all you are succeeding in doing is damaging New Zealand's green reputation to the rest of the world.