GUEST BLOG: Murray Horton – WE’RE ON THE FAST TRACK TO NOWHERE The Great Leap Backwards

Three Unwise Men

This is a Government that does things by threes – it is headed by the Gleesome Threesome of Luxon, Peters and Seymour. Now it has given three other Ministers – Chris Bishop, Shane Jones and Simeon Brown – the power to decide all projects that fall under the ambit of the new fast track approval legislation.

This covers a sweeping range of projects, from roads to aquaculture, housing to energy plants and mines. Basically, this is plunging far back into the past to the good old days (not) when “development” was bulldozed through, ignoring any other considerations. I swear I can hear the posthumous cackle of delight from Piggy Muldoon at his Think Big philosophy being resurrected nearly 50 years later. There’s even the same use of two-word slogans. Piggy had Think Big; this crowd has Fast Track

This resurrection of Muldoonism should not be a surprise. Winston Peters actually started his political career as a National MP in the 1975-84 Muldoon government. And Shane Jones is clearly channelling Piggy, in his exhibitionist desire to be as obnoxious as possible.

Actually, he is a mixture of Muldoon and Mike Moore, both obnoxious and incoherent. For example, this is what he had to say about the protesters who forced a June 2024 New Plymouth energy industry conference to retreat to being held online. “They are undermining and trashing democracy. This intimidating behaviour moves us towards the Venezuelan slope (WTF? MH), that investment, the exchange of free ideas, industry, it suffers”.

“Those of us who are leading the charge against this ideological rabble, we’ve got to gird our loins and get ready for a long, robust struggle to recover our country from this woke-riddled rabble”. In the same article: “He spoke dismissively of the tens of thousands of submissions received on the Fast Track Approvals Bill, calling 4 Watchdog – 166 August 2024them ‘AI (artificial intelligence) generated submissions’”

(Stuff, 11/6/24, “Protesters Derail Energy Conference, As Battle Over Environment Heats Up”).

Jones admits that he delights in deliberately winding people up. He has been asked about his notorious speech to Parliament in December (2023), when he said, “if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddie” (he later went on to say: ‘We have had an absurd situation where frogs have now been deified. Frogs are not gods; snails are not ecclesiastic figures. Frogs and snails have been used by people who are opposed to any mining and don’t believe in capitalism”).

In 2024 he came clean: “I’m 64, a Māori from Kaitaia, and there’s no way that for a paltry donation of $5,000 I’m going to trash the environment – but I’m a politician, I’m a rhetorician. You have to find devices that trigger responses, approaches that will rouse people. The suggestion that Freddie represents the epitome of killing off species is both foolish and, quite frankly, offensive”

(“Shane Jones ‘Weary Of Shrill Voices’ On Climate Change”, Press, 12/6/24).

So, Jones (like Muldoon before him) is happy to act the pantomime villain, drawing all the attention to himself and away from the very serious issues that he and his mates are ramming through. Make no mistake – fast track represents an existential threat to NZ’s environment and to the flora and fauna that inhabit it.

Fast track will open the floodgates (some of them possibly literal ones) to “developers” who are keen to “get things done”. And who are these developers likely to be? They won’t be the “mums and dads” that John Key was fond of patronisingly talking about. No, these will be the big boys. And the biggest of them are the transnational corporations (TNCs), which means that fast track is very much a CAFCA issue.

Fast track is only one part of a sweeping regime of backwards-facing policies, such as lifting the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration (ironically, that ban was imposed by the 2017-20 Labour government, with whom New Zealand First i.e. Winston Peters, Shane Jones, et al, was in coalition). Such as exempting farmers from the Emissions Trading Scheme, as part of a whole raft of measures undoing what little had been done about climate change. Such as the full-on assault on Māori and the Treaty. Such as bashing workers, unions and beneficiaries and deliberately creating mass unemployment. Such as handing over huge sums of taxpayers’ money to landlords and charter schools, and corporate welfare for transnational corporations. Not to mention reversing NZ’s world leading tobacco control regime.

Not to mention the whole omnishambles of foreign policy.

Only Part Of A Bigger Picture

So, fast track is part of a bigger picture, but a very important part. And some of the details of the china shop don’t get noticed while all the attention is focussed on the bull. One that is of great interest to CAFCA is the foreign investment approval and “oversight” regime.

Act got this in its Coalition Agreement with National:

“Amend the Overseas Investment Act 2005 to limit ministerial decision making to national security concerns and make such decision making more-timely”, in other words, remove the need for Ministerial approval of foreign takeover in all except a tiny minority of cases.

This has since been further “liberalised”. The Overseas Investment Office (OIO) put out a special issue of its online newsletter Pānui (6/6/24) to explain the new Ministerial Directive Letter from David Seymour, the Associate Minister of Finance. To quote: (The OIO is) “to place a greater focus on realising the benefits of overseas investment and to streamline the assessment process for lower-risk applications. It is expected that the changes will result in 80% of consent applications being processed within half of the regulatory timeframes for decision, while retaining the full regulatory timeframe to process the remaining 20% of consent applications that are more complex and higher risk”.

“For assessments going forward we will generally require less supporting evidence and will limit consultation with other Government agencies to specific situations, such as where there are national interest considerations, or where a central risk or benefit in the application requires consultation with relevant agencies”.

“We will also direct our focus to assessing the major benefits in an application as opposed to assessing every benefit identified, even minor ones. If a risk is managed under another regulatory regime, for example resource management consent processes, it is unlikely to also be managed as part of the overseas investment consent process. Higher-risk applications, for example those involving first-time applicants, sensitive assets, unreliable claims or poor compliance histories, will continue to be subject to high levels of scrutiny and the full regulatory timeframe for assessment”.

Why Does Mining Warrant Special Treatment?

Some of the industries scheduled to be covered by the fast-track approval law don’t actually warrant it. Like mining (this Government not only wants to “drill, baby, drill”, but also “dig, baby, dig”). The Post had a very informative article by Tom Pullar-Strecker (30/4/24)

“… the iron sands sitting off the coast of Taranaki and the thin smatterings of gold still lying undisturbed in Central Otago are finite resources that aren’t going anywhere and the gold, at least, hasn’t been getting any less valuable over time”.

“So, what’s the rush to decide whether to mine them?

Would it matter, economically, if the Government took the time to allow those developments to go through the normal consenting process and the usual environmental checks and balances?” Nor does the argument about royalties stack up or justify the unseemly haste. “The Government received just $16.5m from royalties on minerals in the year to June (2023), including $7.5m from royalties from coal mining”.

“Gold miners must normally pay the Government a 2% share of their revenues or 10% of their profits — which- ever is higher — as a royalty, on top of any company tax. That and a 2013 Cabinet paper would suggest the Government might expect to earn a couple of hundred million dollars each, at best, in royalties from Santana’s mooted gold mine in Central Otago and Trans-Tasman Resources’ (TTR’s) proposed Taranaki irons sands project, for example. To be clear, that is in total over their lifetimes – not annually…. The extra benefit of kicking off those revenues streams a few years earlier than otherwise isn’t going to move the needle on the deficit perceptibly”.

And who reaps the benefit from mining. As Infometrics economist Brad Olsen said in the article: “Anyone can use the roads. Everyone will benefit from having more renewables added to the grid. A mine – that is going to be good for the mining company. Yes, there will be jobs that come through and you can see that in our own analysis of the West Coast economy where mining is a big contributor to economic activity and jobs. But it is much more a ‘private benefit’ that comes through here”.

Existential Threat To Environment & To Democracy Itself

Anne Salmond says it best in her Newsroom article (9/6/24, “Undermining Democracy”) https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/06/09/anne-salmond-undermining-democracy/

“In New Zealand, some Cabinet Ministers need to remember that they have been elected to serve the public interest, rather than those of industries involved in mining, quarrying or drilling for fossil fuels; fishing; selling tobacco or carbon farming; or former Cabinet colleagues, for that matter…. “.

“The ‘Fast-track’ bill, with its history of wining and dining, campaign donations and letters of invitation, and its exclusion of community interests, is a case in point.

Although New Zealand has long enjoyed an enviable reputation for governance that is relatively free of corruption, this is in danger of being lost, as well as our ‘clean green’ reputation….”

“In New Zealand, it’s the Prime Minister’s job to discipline errant colleagues, and to set high standards for integrity. Instead, we are seeing in this Bill a concerted effort to roll back ministerial accountability to the electorate.

This is evident on a range of fronts – the attempt to grant unfettered powers to a small group of Ministers to advance particular projects through the ‘Fast-track’ bill, even those that contravene existing environmental legislation, for instance; to legally remove the rights of communities to have any say about these decisions; and cancelling the funding that in the past has allowed community groups to mount legal challenges to such proposals”.

“These moves are disreputable, removing vital checks and balances from Government decision-making, including counters to corrupt practice, and should not be tolerated. Previous generations of New Zealanders fought for democracy; we should do the same.

Otherwise, we may find, as Aesop warned, that ‘we hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office’.

Once this kind of corruption takes hold, democracies falter and fail”.

“While the sponsors of the Fast Track bill persistently claim a democratic mandate for its provisions, that is not correct. In their 2023 manifesto Blueprint for a Better Environment the National Party told the electorate:

‘National is passionate about safeguarding New Zealand’s unique natural environment, abundant native biodiversity, pristine waters and spectacular landscapes for future generations. These are the cornerstones of our Kiwi way of life’”.

“The Fast-track Bill, which overrides more than 40 years of environmental legislation, has been condemned by many authorities including the Parliamentary

Commissioner for the Environment, a former National Cabinet Minister, as a radical breach of these commitments. Since National is by far the majority party in the coalition Government, with 38% of the votes, while the party sponsoring this bill won just 6%, it is squarely on the shoulders of the Prime Minister and National Party MPs to deliver on their promises to the electorate. To do otherwise is yet another assault on the democratic process in New Zealand”.

 

Murray Horton is a New Zealand Journalist with a focus on US Military Intelligence and the Waihopai spy base.