Outdated decisions are the foundation of New Zealand’s economy
Dr John Cossens says Otago was born of gold. It was born earlier than that, and of something smellier.
The Weller brothers landed at Otakou in 1831 with muskets, grog and whaling gear. My family came with the station. By 1843 it was in decay. The Wellers turned to buying land. Whaling is gone. Nobody proposes bringing it back.
Before gold, Otago was farms. Those farms sat on the 1844 Otago purchase: 400,000 acres for £2400. Ngai Tahu understood a tenth would be reserved for them. It never was. The Waitangi Tribunal found the Crown left them too little land.
The gold rush exported that model. In 1863 four militia regiments were recruited on the Otago goldfields and paid in Waikato acres confiscated under the New Zealand Settlements Act. Much of the Waikato and Taranaki economies still sit on raupatu land.
That is the pattern. Controversial decisions redistributed wealth. Each wave was improved on by the next.
Our heritage is the residue. Dunedin has nearly 800 listed buildings. By the 1980s its warehouse precinct was derelict. The council pays owners to find new uses for it. A block of Princes Street has stood empty since 2009. That is not prosperity. It is what a bust leaves behind.
Christchurch outgrew its university and moved it to Ilam in 1975. The old campus became the Arts Centre.
The railway bypassed Greytown in 1880, and the town never recovered. That is why Greytown has the country’s most complete Victorian main street. Arrowtown, Clyde and old Cromwell were the same until lifestyle found them.
Dr Cossens misses this. When a boom passes, what it leaves is adopted by something more sustainable. Gold gets no priority for arriving in 1862. Farming was there first. Wine, fruit and tourism came later. They depend on soil, air and water an open pit puts at risk. Bendigo alone grows about a quarter of Otago’s wine.
Gold is finite. That is why the Crown Minerals Act sits apart from the Resource Management Act. But our planning regime, and the bills replacing it, rests on nuisance: your use of land must not wreck your neighbour’s.
Mining is not locked out. Prospecting and exploration permits have covered more than 4000 square kilometres of Otago. Macraes has operated since 1990. It got there by showing its effects could be avoided, remedied or mitigated.
Santana Minerals took a different route. It asked for a decision in 30 working days. The panel chairman found it had “deferred significant bodies of work”, including groundwater assessments. It refused to release aquifer and seepage data unless consented first. It withheld its social impact report for months until ordered to produce it. It started roadworks before approval. It has never built a mine. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment says the application should be declined unless the panel can independently verify the risks for a century after closure.
That raises more questions than answers.
Nor does the arithmetic favour gold. Sapere’s work for MBIE puts tourism’s multiplier at 1.7 to 1.9. NZIER rates housing construction’s flow-on at double the economy-wide average. Santana’s own economist puts the mine’s flow-on at $84 million a year on $360 million direct, a multiplier of 1.2, just $25 million of it in Otago. He calls even that a “theoretical maximum”.
We know what a boom does. Queenstown’s housing rush delivered gridlock and a failed disposal field. From March 2025, 12,000 cubic metres of treated sewage a day went into the Shotover River under emergency powers. Wanaka’s plant overflowed onto a neighbour’s paddocks last year. Its sludge now goes to a Lauder farm, consented without notification. An open-cast mine and a tailings dam is a bigger footprint again.
Dr Cossens’ great-grandfather built farm gear, then mining gear. The firm followed the money. So did my family: whalers, then farmers, builders and lawyers. This country adapts.
A newcomer promising jobs does not jump the queue ahead of established, sustainable users of the same soil, air and water. It has to prove its case. So far, Santana has not.
