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9:19 am, February 8th, 2026 - 18 comments
Categories: act, corruption, Environment, national, nz first, Politics, same old national, Shane Jones -
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This was a pleasant surprise.
Mountain Tui has already covered the subject well but I thought it deserved some technical commentary. And I suspect that this is not finished yet and I wonder what the Government will do in response and if we will see yet another law change smashed through under urgency.
The Expert Panel entrusted in deciding if a large part of the continential shelf off the coast of Taranaki should be smashed up has concluded that the idea is daft.
I must admit that I previously thought the application would sail through.
It was listed in schedule 2 of the Fast Track Approvals Act which gave it a big hand up.
The system is designed so that according to the relevant Cabinet Paper there is a “high bar needing to be reached for a panel to decline a project”.
As I noted earlier the bid for approval of the project has been rejected repeatedly in the past. As Advantage points out the project has probably destroyed an alternative proposal for windmills which would have provided the North Island with cheap power, as opposed to providing an Australian corporation with cheap rare earth minerals.
In 2020 this application went all the way to the Supreme Court where the Court decided that section 10 of the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act 2012 meant exactly what it seemed to say.
Subsection one states that the purpose of the Act is “to protect the environment from pollution by regulating or prohibiting the discharge of harmful substances and the dumping or incineration of waste or other matter”. Subsection two states that sustainable management means managing the use, development, and protection of natural resources in a way, or at a rate, that enables people to provide for their economic well-being while sustaining the potential of natural resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of the environment, and avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment.
There was also the not minor issue with the country’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This contains strong language obliging states to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from any source.
The Fast Track Act provides however that when a panel is considering an application that affects the continental shelf section 10 of the EEZ Act has to be considered but that the more permissive provisions of the Fast Track Approvals Act must be given the greatest weight. Take that UNCLOS.
Despite all this the application failed.
There were a couple of reasons.
The Panel held that “the information available on key matters including sediment plume, noise generation, benthic habitat impact and recovery, and associated effects is uncertain or inadequate”. The panel also held that any any suite of consent conditions would be insufficient to achieve the purpose of the EEZ Act.
The second reason will cause some angst in the Government but existing treaty settlements stood in the way of the wholesale desecration of the Taranaki seabed. I am sure this will have Shane Jones and others scratching their heads about how to get around this.
The draft judgment states:
Having reached the findings set out above, the Panel records that s 7 of the FTAA operates as a substantive barrier to approval. It is open to the Panel to set conditions to recognise or protect a relevant Treaty settlement. However, the proposed conditions framework and post-consent processes presented by the applicant would not preserve the practical operation and integrity of the affected settlement instruments and the Panel has not identified alternative conditions that would achieve Treaty settlement consistency.
The Treaty settlement obligations engaged in this case depend on the preservation of enduring, practical benefits and instruments, including Māori fisheries settlement interests intended to operate in perpetuity. As the High Court confirmed in Te Ohu Kaimoana Trustee Ltd v Attorney-General, where settlement-derived fisheries interests are impaired or lost, the Crown’s obligation is to provide redress that preserves the value of those settlement benefits, including through compensation where necessary.
No evidence has been provided that any such compensatory or restorative mechanism would be available or implemented in this case. Conditions imposed on the applicant could not address that deficiency, nor could they substitute for the Crown’s settlement obligations. The Panel therefore concludes that conditions would not, in any realistic or lawful sense, cure the inconsistency identified under s 7.
Accordingly, the Panel is required under s 85(1)(b) to decline the approvals sought.
So where does the Government go to from here?
Readers will be pleased that the Ministerial power to rewrite panel recommendations contained in the original bill was removed. And just as well. If that power was still there I suspect we would be seeing a whole lot of rewriting going on.
To everyone who submitted against this particular power can I thank you and applaud you.
When the original bill was reported back the majority report said:
Many submitters opposed [ministerial power to approve projects], saying that Ministers could be susceptible to bias, corruption, or potential lobbying. We agree that it would be more appropriate for an expert panel to be the final substantive decision-maker on all approvals, rather than the joint Ministers. We consider that this amendment would give greater confidence that decision-making is independent, objective, and well informed.
But I suspect this is not the end of the matter. The decision is a draft decision only. Under section 69 of the Fast Track Projects Act the applicant can propose conditions on or modifications to any of the approvals sought although given the reasoning behind the decision it is hard to understand how the application could be fixed up.
Environmental groups including KASM, Greenpeace, and the Green Party have celebrated the decision. As they should.
Meanwhile the Minerals Council head Josie Vidal thinks that science will save the application.
From Radio New Zealand:
While the fast-track approvals panel turned down Trans-Tasman Resources’ (TTR) bid to mine 50 million tonnes a year, for 30 years, in the South Taranaki Bight, Minerals Council chief executive Josie Vidal said that was only the draft decision.
“We have to trust the process,” she told RNZ. “We have to hope that facts, evidence and science prevail.”
…
Vidal said it was embarrassing that the decision had come out while New Zealand officials had been sent to Washington to discuss how the country could be part of a global supply chain of critical minerals.
Trans-Tasman Resources said it had identified a world-class vanadium resource that could contribute a billion dollars annually to the New Zealand economy.
“Vanadium is a very sought-after critical mineral around the world,” Vidal said. “If we want to be part of a global supply chain and we have critical minerals, we should be mining them.”
The Minerals Council is an interesting entity. It does not put its annual reports on its website but I managed to source a copy. About seabed mining it says “[w]e support seabed mining where the environmental impact is managed and is minimal.”
Given these comments it is hard to understand how they could support the current project.
And in an interesting aside three of the seven members of the Minerals Council Board took part in that infamous dinner with Shane Jones.
It was initially reported that Jones had an undeclared dinner with Barry Bragg, the deputy chair of the coal mining company Stevenson Group who subsequently wrote asking that the Te Kuha coal project be included in the list of projects seeking listing in the fast track legislation.
Jones claimed that the dinner was not included in his ministerial diary because it was very much a last-minute thing.
But it then transpired that there were two other attendees, Bathurst Resources chief executive Richard Tacon and Federation Mining vice president Simon Delander. Bathurst is New Zealand’s biggest coal miner, and Federation Mining is developing the Snowy River gold mine near Ikamatua, on the West Coast. Bathurst funded an independent candidate for the West Coast at the last election and his presence appears to have caused Damian O’Connor to lose the seat.
The three of them are members of the Minerals Council executive.
Jones forgets to mention that he is having dinner with a Coal mining executive and it turns out that he actually forgot to mention that he was having dinner with nearly half of the Minerals Council Board.
What an amazing coincidence.
What is the bet that Jones’ phone has been busy this Waitangi weekend.
As I said earlier Jones claimed that failing to disclose the dinner was a cock up. He would have been more correct in saying that it involved multiple cock ups and a failure to disclose that there were three attendees when he was first rumbled. This presumes that there was no element of deception involved which on the face of it appears to be unlikely.
And to remind people that a shareholder in the company advancing the Taranaki proposal, motivated I am sure by the purest of motives, had made a $10,000 donation to the local National MP’s 2023 campaign, a donation that the local MP forgot to declare. He also forgot to declare a further $168,000 in donations which was rather forgetful of him.
And we should treat statements by the applicant with some suspicion. As pointed out by KASM the claims that we will all be rich from the application and it was worth a billion dollars a year were bogus and have been withdrawn.
It will be interesting to see how the Government responds to the Panel’s decision. I am sure this decision was unexpected and they thought that inclusion of the project in the preferred list would make this an easy process. I predict that NZ First will be really gungho and National will not know what to do until the focus group results are in.
And as for the donor who contributed to McLeod’s campaign I wonder if he will want his money back.
Well-reasoned, with plenty of good points. Risk management seems to be coming to the fore in the minds of opinion-leaders, even if slowly. Private enterprise traditionally uses the principle of socialising costs as a key component of operating strategy. Govts conform to this antiquated prescription due to neolib ideology (market forces deism).
So it gets down to whether the masses will tolerate having to wallow perpetually in shit produced by neolib adherence. A panel of experts has decided that the scheme was a trad shit-producer design. Rare to see experts getting anything right, eh? I share your interest in whether the gung-ho mining ministers will be up to the challenge of over-ruling!
Surely we've got to the point where NZSuperFund says Shane Jones is putting our energy price and security at risk.
The Associate Minister of Energy needs to be ringfenced off by Luxon as PM and Willis from causing more serious damage to major investment in our energy future.
Also as Minister of Fisheries he was fully aware of Treaty and Quota obligations.
Yes, TTR does have the right to propose changes and modifications to the panel decision, but this 436 page monster of a decision is extremely well-argued and we at KASM very much doubt that TTR has the ability to turn that around in its comments due on 19 February.
After this, TTR can either appeal on points of law (quite narrow), or it could attempt a reapplication under the watered-down Fast Track Approvals Amendment Act. But this decision would still set a very strong precedent for that. So maybe we end up back in the Supreme Court?
All this winning against TTR (our sixth win against the company) is heartening – but exhausting – especially having to raise all the money for experts and legals.
KASM is community based and volunteer-led. We're a very small group of volunteers just managing to keep our heads above water. It would be great if TTR just gave up at this point to let us focus on getting a full ban on seabed mining in Aotearoa.
The NZ Minerals Council's Josie Vidal had a series of meetings with Jones ahead of the Fast Track legislation being announced, and she still meets with him on a regular basis: around one meeting a month. Check out their briefing to incoming ministers, which bears a remarkable resemblence to the strategy Jones has adopted, including the push on vanadium from ironsands and critical minerals, etc.
TTR keeps keep banging on about vanadium but they still don't have a process to extract the stuff fom the ironsands. Experiments have been performed, and there's promises they'd build a pilot plant to roll this all out, but the high temps required would likely make it an expensive proces. This is all to keep up the veneer of hope to spruik to shareholders b/c vanadium brings high prices. But in reality TTR would more than likely to just bung the vanadium-rich ironsands to the Chinese to strengthen steel.
It was to be expected that the word vanadium would come up.
https://thestandard.nz/open-mike-05-02-2026/#comment-2055556
Jones showed some restraint in having his partner, the Minerals Council, act for him (being groomed as their land based industry party donor).
Sort of. The Chinese are the experts at extracting rare earth minerals. TTR would not want to say they might export a rare earth mineral to China, not while their Minister had a chance to use the US minerals agreement relationship to force the project through.
I was wondering what the “V” in “Taranaki VTM” stands for. Hint: it’s not for Victory.
https://www.fasttrack.govt.nz/projects/taranaki-vtm
yeah but they already said it in their application.
it's an unfortunate fact for the Minerals Council, but they have already been pretty clear!
"Expert panel," who are these experts? Not that I disagree with their findings.
https://www.fasttrack.govt.nz/projects/taranaki-vtm/expert-panel
yup, pretty good panel headed by a KC and former High Court judge.
The EPA's put a similarly strong panel onto the Bendigo mine case as well, which is a good thing.
If only the mining application affecting the Denniston Plateau can be given the same careful, considered and far-sighted treatment.
See https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/thedetail/580113/the-fierce-battle-over-mining-on-denniston-plateau
Hey Cindy B how does one donate to your group?
Here you go – https://www.kasm.org.nz/memberships-and-donations
go here: sign up to mailing list, become a member, or just donate! Thank you!
https://www.kasm.org.nz/memberships-and-donations
Thank goodness ministers right of final decision was removed. Decisions made by experts, not some grumpy old woke man chasing the tin foil hat vote. Maybe the idea of a wind farm can be resurrected. This decision seems like it would be a prime example of ministers being "susceptible to bias, corruption or lobbying" were the final decision still vested in them
Good news all round.
I would have thought this was the fast track process working, not failing.
The other issue I have is the idea "alternative proposal for windmills which would have provided the North Island with cheap power,".
Nope. We've had many wind turbines here in the 'TU for more than 20 years and it hasn't slowed the increase in power prices.
What will lower the bills is a shake-up of the electricity sector where it's aim is to provide homes with one of the essentials of modern life, affordably. Not a corporate model that;
"From 2014 to 2021 these firms have collectively paid out $3.7 billion more in dividends to their shareholders than they have earned in profits"
This habit continues until 2023 where $1.1 billion was distributed from a net profit of only $521 million.
All well and good if you are in the rentier class, not so flash for the rest of us.
https://union.org.nz/generating-scarcity/#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20co%2Dauthored,excess%20dividends%20must%20now%20end.
Hopefully Ms Woods is listening.
The whole point of fast-track is to avoid public scrutiny.
Hence, no public notification and no right to appeal to the Environment Court.
It sucks.
ĤSo today we hear Winston First will have an election policy to reinstate final ministerial decision making in the fast track law. Shane jones quoted as saying he cannot see that an expert panel has more "moral authority" than a minister to make a decision. Seems jones is being deliberately obtuse here to raise a straw man argument. No one is talking about morality. We ARE pointing out that an expert panel is better placed to make a decision than a non expert minister. Additionally a neutral expert panel who makes decisions based on information presented to them rather than a minister who may be persuaded by lobbying or financial incentives