Drop insulting plans for this beautiful basin

A $5.7m scheme to turn a pristine part of the West Coast into a tourism ‘‘icon’’ is riding roughshod over proper process, writes Jan Finlayson.

China-shop-fragile and serenely beautiful, the O¯ pa¯ rara Basin north of Karamea in Kahurangi National Park is poised to be turned into a volume-based tourism industry ‘‘product’’ in a $5.7 million Provincial Growth Fund project. It’s an incursion into the heart of public conservation law and values.

O¯ pa¯ rara’s tan waters flow through a forested karst landscape that has geo-preservation sites and many threatened native plants and animals. Decades of expert Department of Conservation visitor planning have kept damage minimal.

Practically, the project will mean deforestation for roading, construction, and ramped-up visitor capacity which will undo that protection and threaten the very qualities that make O¯ pa¯ rara special. Worse, because government economic development agencies have been able to muscle in on West Coast Department of Conservation management of O¯ pa¯ rara, it puts public faith in those organisations’ integrity at risk.

An insult-to-injury twist is that the mess that will be made through this strange co-option of DOC will, on its completion, be DOC’s to look after.

The project is characterised by broad disregard for conservation legislation, doubt over what the project actually is (public-private partnership; capital works job; something entirely new?), an ad hoc and inscrutable process that reflects that doubt, pay-for-OK assessment of environmental effects, dogmatic unwillingness to consider abundant and more doable alternatives, lack of detailed plans – and disturbing precedent.

It goes back to 2016, when the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment’s West Coast Visitor Strategy and Action Plan saw the glitter of tourism gold at O¯ pa¯ rara. A succession of proposals followed. A 2018 application by Tourism West Coast, Development West Coast, and a local guided tours organisation secured the PGF money.

There’s superficial local-economy appeal in the concept. But O¯ pa¯ rara is in a national park governed by the National Parks Act. Its purpose is clear: the parks are to be preserved forever for their intrinsic worth; public enjoyment is provided for, but only where conservation allows.

High-volume tourism is at odds with this delicate place’s preservation, so the legislation’s been cherry-picked. The act’s direction on preservation has been overlooked throughout, even in the environmental assessment’s legal section (blind spots also include certain threatened species and the karst that defines the area).

DOC should have said no when the economic agencies’ strong-arming began. Or, as the eventual development owner, it could even have applied for a concession from itself (this is not so odd; councils get consents for many of their activities). The mandated concession process, for getting permission for anything from filming to mines on public conservation land, would have allowed full public consultation, and ko¯ rero about alternatives.

But as far as Federated Mountain Clubs can tell, the procedure for getting the proposal over the line has been made up on the fly. It’s certainly murky. DOC managers have assumed role titles such as ‘‘Business Owner/Benefits Owner’’ and ‘‘Benefits Realisation Manager’’ as if their mandates were other than looking after nature.

They’ve been working in the official-sounding O¯ pa¯ rara Arches Project Governance Group, which also hosts the economic development agency’s representatives. Its existence and membership were revealed only last August, and records of its meetings are presently not publicly available.

Another mystery is why the PGF money is now being treated as untransferable. There are almost certainly other, more robust, Buller sites that could be considered in bona fide processes.

FMC has stated this repeatedly. For example, there are the Denniston Plateau, the Kawatiri Trail and the Heaphy Track’s Scotts Beach walk, potential Wangapeka Track restoration, and even promotion of a Wangapeka-Heaphy loop. There’s potential for creation of numerous bikepacking trails by linking existing routes.

Resolute about restyling O¯ pa¯ rara as a tourism ‘‘icon’’, the governance group has focused on circumventing obstacles such as inconvenient bits of law and planning. Mystifyingly, despite the years, money, and energy spent, it has not produced precise plans for the project. Prevaricating words ‘‘if’’, ‘‘proposed’’, and ‘‘would’’ prevail. One infrastructure component is simply a hand-drawn sketch; others even less.

The whole shebang is an insult: to New Zealand’s wild places, science, good process, and the common good. It endangers confidence in the law, its functions, and our public agencies.

What now? The project has too much wrong with it, in itself, and as a precedent, to go ahead. It should be dropped and the funding transferred to lawful proposals scoped through proper processes. Additionally a review is essential to flush out where things went wrong, establish accountability, and ensure the fiasco is never repeated.

Jan Finlayson is president of the Federated Mountain Clubs.

The whole shebang is an insult: to New Zealand’s wild places, science, good process, and the common good.