Rangers running into gang danger
Conservation officials working in remote areas are increasingly reporting dangerous encounters with gangs involved in poaching, illegal fishing or timber theft, a new report says. The sometimes-violent encounters are a symptom of the underfunding of environmental compliance and enforcement in New Zealand, the report’s authors say.
“A lot of environmental law revolves around the last of the cash jobs — unlawful native timber harvesting, the poaching of crayfish and trout and whitebait,” said lead author and biodiversity expert Marie Brown.
“What it says is we’ve got to invest in our frontline officers and give them the tools and the support to do their job, so you don’t have a ranger that’s never done a course in compliance wandering around on their own in the middle of nowhere encountering the Mongrel Mob — which is the kind of stuff that a lot of officers are facing.”
The “Last Line of Defence” report by the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) and the Law Foundation of New Zealand concludes that environmental laws are inadequate in New Zealand and that the rules are rarely or haphazardly enforced because of lack of funding, poor records or political interference.
Environmental laws govern everything from keeping poisons out of waterways to preventing wildlife poaching, and the report said compliance appeared to be a relatively low priority for Government agencies.
“In our view environmental compliance is an important but overlooked stage of the policy cycle,” said EDS chief executive Gary Taylor. “This means environmental laws are often broken and the public is not able to trust regulators to do their job properly and follow that up.” The report identified four key problems: Laws governing compliance, monitoring and enforcement are not fit for purpose. Enforcement officers don’t have sufficient powers, agencies tools are limited, and penalties are relatively low.
Government agencies do not have the resources to crack down on law-breaking. Enforcement decisions are too politicised. There are often poor or no records on environmental compliance.
The report criticised the Ministry for the Environment for placing “relatively little priority” on enforcement and mostly leaving councils to “do the job alone”.
But many council officers said they had “no money for prosecutions”. There was often a reluctance to enforce the rules. And some had “a policy of not issuing fines” or looked the other way when laws were broken.
Many council officers said political interference was a barrier to them doing their job.
In 2011, half of regional councils needed elected representatives to approve prosecutions under the Resource Management Act. While that has changed, eight district councils still needed political sign-off for prosecutions.
Political influence was often more insidious, Brown said. “It’s more likely to be political decisions made to under-resource compliance or to alter the way compliance is carried out.
“For example, in the Waikato . . . the regional council said that staff could no longer do helicopter-based monitoring of dairy farms. They had to go to the ground. And they had to give three days’ notice.
“And the whole drive behind it was to limit the risk of finding non-compliance from an agriculturally biased council.”
The report said possible solutions included changing the law to allow enforcement officers in all areas to issue fines, improving resources through better cost recovery and reinforcing separation of governance and enforcement within Government agencies.
The whole drive behind it was to limit the risk of finding noncompliance from an agriculturally biased council. Dr Marie Brown, Environmental Defence Society