Shane Jones, finally gets his wish: to get a gold mine going, and removing a frog that may not be in the way.
There’s $4b of gold in the hills behind Waihi. Problem is, it’s on conservation land and it’s home to an endangered frog. Can it be mined without affecting flora and fauna? And will it skirt around protections if it’s given fast track approval?
Waihi is synonymous with gold. People have been digging it out of the town and its surrounds for 154 years. There’s a gold museum, a gold education centre, a gold discovery centre, gold bus tours, gold bike tours, and dozens of walking tracks around long-abandoned gold extraction infrastructure.
When I was growing up, my primary school class visited Waihi. We toured Martha Mine (the open pit), got up close with massive dump trucks, saw the 3km-long conveyor belt in action, and saw century-old chopped-off miners’ fingers preserved in jars at the museum.
The murals and aesthetics of Waihi are mostly gold-industry inspired (the roundabouts are decorated with hundreds of steel ball bearings left over from the crushing drums). It’s no wonder the town’s motto is: ‘Waihi: New Zealand’s Heart of Gold’.
But that heart could be about to have some serious surgery. Mining company OceanaGold wants to dig deep under the conservation land behind Waihi and extract $4b worth of gold and silver using the Government’s controversial Fast Track Bill.
It would allow consent to be given quicker with fewer bureaucratic hurdles. However, it’s created a backlash with environmental groups who are concerned about the impact on the native Archey’s Frog, the forest’s ecosystem, and the use of cyanide in tailing ponds.
Others are concerned Waihi won’t benefit and the profits will be sent offshore. Then there’s the allegations against OceanaGold in the Philippines: human rights abuses, forced land grabs, and a local getting shot in the arm by a security guard. (More on this further down).
Stuff
We all know the solution. Shane Jones has been very clear about this.
Resources Minister Shane Jones said if a frog stood in the way of a mine, it was “goodbye, Freddy”.
He promised common sense, slammed “dreamy”, “fairy-tale” climate goals and said power cuts would not be happening under his government’s watch.
He also indicated they would take a blowtorch to the review of stewardship land.
The coalition was going to bring “rigour and common sense to the hysteria surrounding climate change”.
“Mining is coming back as well. We most certainly need those rare earth minerals,” Mr Jones said.
“In those areas called the Department of Conservation estate, where it’s stewardship land, stewardship land is not Doc land, and if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy,” he said, in reference to Oceana’s Gold bid to mine at Coromandel, where the Archey’s frog lives.
Otago Daily Times
Goodbye, Freddy.
There is an estimated $4 billion of gold and silver that can be extracted versus a frog almost no one has seen or cares about. Seems rather simple arithmetic.
But the fuss seems to be about nothing, actually. Unless Archey’s frog lives 400m underground.
The $4b worth of gold and silver is called the ‘Wharekirauponga orebody’ and it’s around 400m underneath Department of Conservation forest north of Waihi township. OceanaGold’s plan is not an open pit mine but a network of underground tunnels similar to the current operation underneath Waihi.
They would drill two parallel tunnels to the orebody from a new processing site they plan to build on a farm they’ve purchased at the end of Willows Road. Each tunnel would be around 6.8km long and the reason for two of them is for ventilation and preventing congestion.
Those tunnels would be linked to the surface with three or four ventilation shafts (which also act as an emergency egress) that would require around a single garage-sized area of forest to be cut down for each of them.
Another tunnel nearly 5km in length would link the new farm processing site with the current processing site. This means the existing crushing, extraction, and tailings infrastructure doesn’t have to be moved.
I can’t quite see how this affects Archey’s Frog...the surface above the gold isn’t being touched. The conservation forest also isn’t being touched.
Fast track this process now. Worry about the frogs...umm...never.
Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. Cam blogs regularly on the GoodOil - where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
If Freddy Archer has survived all these years with Maori ,( hhhmmm, what would he taste like ? ), and then 170 years of industrial open pit and underground mining, then let's assume that he should feel pretty safe from harm, as we dig for the vital metals that keep our society progressing.
Que Maori mafia.
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