Bill a chance to protect NZ’s high country

With its expanses of golden tussocks, turquoise glacial lakes, wide braided rivers, and gleaming snow-capped peaks, New Zealand’s high country is the well-known jewel in the crown of our landscapes. It’s also being increasingly recognised how crucial these dryland landscapes and glacial outwash plains are for our unique plants and animals.

There’s the critically endangered grand skink, which lives among the rocky tors of Otago. The enormous robust grasshopper is known to live only in three catchments of the Mackenzie Basin. The basin’s kakı¯/black stilt are one of the world’s rarest birds.

Altogether, drylands are home to up to half of Aotearoa’s most threatened native plants. With nature as a priority, these amazing species could thrive. But decades of bad decisions, development, and dairy conversions have pushed the high country to breaking point, and led to some of the fastest biodiversity loss in 150 years.

Such development has transformed parts of the upper Rakaia, Hakatere Ashburton lakes area and Central Otago. It’s laid waste to the Mackenzie Basin, transforming its complex mosaic of tussock grasslands, herb fields, and shrublands into irrigated green circles of intensive agriculture. Developed land jumped from 3 per cent in 1990 to 33 per cent in 2016, and it continues today.

Much of this destruction has occurred on the publicly owned land known as crown pastoral leases. That’s why the Government is doing the right thing in implementing a new Crown Pastoral Land Reform Bill, which overhauls the regulatory system and ends tenure review – the controversial process that has split many leases into conservation land and freehold interests.

There is no doubt tenure review, as well as being a dreadful deal for taxpayers, has been very bad for nature. While some areas have become public conservation land, these have tended to be in already better-protected alpine areas. The rarest ecosystems have been the most likely to be privatised, further fragmented and intensified.

On land that has remained under pastoral lease, management has in many cases been appalling. Land Information NZ (Linz) has issued hundreds of ‘‘discretionary’’ consents for destruction and clearance of native ecosystems. In granting these, the commissioner of Crown lands has no obligation to protect natural values, ecological advice is minimal, and in some cases consents have been granted that breach local resource management planning rules. Linz needs a major overhaul, with more accountability and transparency.

The new legislation, currently before the environment select committee, gives us a once-in-a-generation chance to fix these problems and properly care for this public land held in trust for all. This is important, because there is a significant amount of land remaining. Pastoral leases still make up about 5 per cent of New Zealand’s land area. To halt biodiversity loss in these areas, we need clear and uncompromising statutory direction.

The proposed bill is a vast improvement over the old legislation, with tighter consent processes, monitoring, reporting, and new enforcement powers. In Forest & Bird’s view, it still may not be enough, ultimately pitting our endangered natural world against farm development. In that balancing act, bit by bit, the natural environment is always going to lose.

But it’s a good start, bringing us closer to a future where New Zealand’s endangered plants and animals survive, and our iconic high country landscapes are protected for generations to come.