The Conservation Amendment Bill is grounded in an ideology that assumes everything of public value must ultimately be monetised, traded, or sacrificed to stimulate economic growth. That ideology is directly responsible for the ecological disaster that New Zealand has had, and continues to have – that made conservation law necessary in the first place.
The core problems of New Zealand’s biodiversity, climate – and likely even lifestyle/health crises, are rampant Development. We had a horrific history of deforestation, removal of wetlands, and introduction of predators leading to an abysmal record of extinction. New Zealand’s network of conservation estate exists precisely because the rest of the landscape has already been annihilated by development (cleared, fragmented, farmed, urbanised, or otherwise economically exploited. Conservation land represents what remains after development, it’s not land waiting to be developed next. It’s not just land for ‘Conservation’ – but more fundamentally, it’s land deliberately kept outside of Development.
The Conservation Act 1987 was deliberately designed to place Public Conservation Land outside ordinary market logic. It is not land held as a financial asset to be leveraged, traded, or “made productive” in an economic sense. It is held in trust, for conservation – precisely because market forces have historically failed to protect biodiversity. An ideology that treats all public land as potential capital—able to be sold, exchanged, or developed to stimulate economic activity—is fundamentally incompatible with the statutory and ethical foundations of Conservation Land.
The Conservation Act is intentionally anti-ideological – it is not pinned to ‘efficiency’, ‘growth’, or ‘the market’. Instead, ‘Conservation’ is the controlling purpose, while development is exceptional, constrained, and subordinate.
This Bill must be read in context. This Government has already moved to weaken the Resource Management Act, removing long-standing environmental constraints in the name of economic acceleration. The Conservation Act Amendment Bill represents the next step in the same ideological project: extending development logic into the last areas of land that were deliberately placed beyond it.
It is part of a systematic erosion of environmental limits. Having weakened controls on development on private or otherwise productive land, the Government now turns to Conservation Land. This is the final step in the ideological shift: from protection as principle, to protection only as something conditional, negotiable, and therefore potentially temporary. Once that shift is made, ‘Conservation’ ceases to exist in any meaningful legal sense.
Within this Bill is an attempt to reframe New Zealand’s protected areas as ‘Land of ‘high’ or ‘low’ conservation value’. This is a blatant attempt to shave off even more land for Development. It signals that no land is ultimately protected from economic claims – and nothing is ‘sacred’.
We now have a Minister of Conservation, complaining that our current Conservation Act is “loosy goosey”, and wants it amended – to loosen the controls about developing conservation land. This is incompatible with his position, and he should resign from that position, or get voted out.
Our ‘bits and bobs’ of Conservation Land are all priceless. A patch may not be covered in forest, and have some of our endangered birds – but it might help connect other isolated patches that are. Perhaps it is a buffer zone separating development from the wild, perhaps it is in an area that can be re-wilded and be of enormous value as climate and sea level changes disrupt conservation land elsewhere.
The very last thing this country needs, is to now, not just weaken the safeguards on those conservation lands, but to even consider releasing them to be sites of even more development. The attempt to do this by amending the Conservation Act, reflects a mindset in which even the bottom of the barrel can be scraped.
Greed can be kept outside of our Public Conservation Land. The public expectation is clear: conservation land is not for sale.
I reject the Conservation Amendment Bill. Furthermore, I reject this governments entire philosophy of developing this country to death – and will vote accordingly.
