Here’s how to hold the country over a pork barrel
Alliances, unholy or otherwise, form the foundation of political life, but pork-barrelling is its evil twin. Two announcements in the past 10 days have brought the difference between the two into focus: the Government’s fast-track consenting process, shifting power from the judicial system to Cabinet, and the consideration of a suggestion to compensate oil and gas companies should subsequent governments prevent them from bidding for new exploration permits.
Central to both policies lies the ObiWan Kenobi of political manipulation, Shane Jones, and his wingmen, RMA Minister Chris Bishop, Energy Minister Simeon Brown and Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, who is acting Attorney-General on the fast-track legislation.
The fast-tracking legislation takes the country’s long-standing problem of Aotearoa’s labyrinthine Resource Management Act and turns it on its head, giving Jones and his wingmen the first and final say on what will be developed.
The bill, which has already had its first reading and is now going through the select committee process, means these four horsemen of the apocalypse will have the final decision over resource consents, marine consents, aquaculture decisions, the Public Works Act, concessions under the Conservation Act as well as approvals under the Wildlife Act.
Consolidating their power base further, projects will be decided in two ways; either by referral by Jones, Bishop, or Brown, or by being listed in Schedule 2A of the bill. An expert panel will be given six-months to decide consent and permit conditions but if the ministers deem those too burdensome, they’ll be sent back to the panel for further consideration.
The only legal backstop you will have against this is the ability to take a minister’s decision to the High Court for judicial review.
Activity deemed prohibitive under the RMA, such as discharging of raw waste into waterways and burning hazardous substances, is allowed under the bill despite officials warning against it.
The cries of corruption were inevitable, which the four horsemen shrugged off by employing political manipulation’s handiest tools.
There was the naked exploiting of emotional triggers in laying out the ongoing frustration in getting infrastructure built in Aotearoa, and the urgency in getting big projects moving faster. The distortion of facts, with Bishop wrongly claiming that the new consenting regime is built on the existing fast track process put in place during Covid, when in fact under Labour it was a panel, not simply ministers, who made the decision on consenting.
Then there’s the lack of accountability and transparency during the legislative process, with the ministers’ list of approved 100 projects and the 2A schedule list not being published until they are introduced as an amendment after the bill becomes law. Potentially included on that list are Ngai Tahu’s salmon farm off Rakiura (Stewart Island), a Westport opencast coal mine, a gold mining operation in Otago, and a proposal to mine iron sand from the South Taranaki seabed, which was the subject of an Environmental Protection Agency hearing in Hāwera this week. All this means the Fast-track Consenting Bill is not an act of political alliance so much as pork-barrelling at its finest, providing a new golden age for National’s and NZ First’s backers; the land developers, the mining companies, marine aquaculture, fishing, transport, and energy industries.
For Jones, arguably this Government’s most regressive minister and accomplished pork barreller, the announcement was business as usual. After all, he’s been able to take the $3 billion largesse he handed out in the regions between 2017-2020 under the Labour government, $556 million of which was allocated to his home electorate of Northland, and turn it into another $1.2b Regional Infrastructure Fund under the present coalition agreement.
His enthusiasm for all forms of extractive industry is unbridled. So much so that this week he announced that he’d instructed officials to investigate if oil and gas companies could receive compensation if a subsequent government stops them from bidding for new exploration permits.
Opining that it would “help overcome perceptions of sovereign risk”, Jones neatly ignored the hypocrisy inherent in the move, not only because he was a minister in the Labour-led coalition that banned new offshore oil and gas exploration, but because six years later his party vowed to reverse that ban.
As a staunch defender of oil and gas, Jones’s interpretation of what constitutes corporate welfare differs from his National Party colleagues, who scrapped the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry (GIDI) Fund.
Inherent in both announcements is a swaggering “take-it-or-leave-it” arrogance. Jones’s contention that politicians were better suited than judges to decide what infrastructure projects would be greenlit, framing it up as “the blossoming of democracy”, was breath-taking, given that it’s exactly the opposite.
But he’s right when he says that in making whatever decisions they do make, they will face “the ultimate sanction” next election. The four horsemen and their cohort are hoping New Zealanders will want them to just do it.
What they won’t have accounted for is the rolling stream of protests up and down the country as projects become branded as frivolous and divert resources from more critical needs such as health and education.
Janet Wilson is a regular opinion contributor and a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party in 2020.