When noise drowns out democracy: The predictable playbook of environmental campaigns

A Santana Minerals information day.

In environmental battles, the winner isn't determined by facts—it's determined by who controls the noise. Create enough controversy, enough division, enough exhaustion, and people simply tune out. By the time Sustainable Tarras' legitimate questions get answers, no one's listening anymore. It's a strategy I've seen deployed countless times. And it always works.

  There’s a moment in the 2012 film Promised Land when Matt Damon’s character, a slick corporate salesman pushing fracking, realises that the grassroots opposition might not be quite what it seems. The revelation is jarring: what if the noise itself was the strategy?

  Watching the battle over Santana Minerals’ proposed gold mine near Tarras (known as the Bendigo-Ophir Gold Project) unfold, that same unsettling question keeps surfacing. After months covering this increasingly bitter dispute, the patterns are becoming depressingly familiar—and they’re patterns I’ve documented in New Zealand politics for over a decade.

  I know these patterns intimately. As a former campaign director who later became a hearings commissioner, I’ve seen both sides of how political machinery operates—and how it can be weaponised against those who challenge it. What makes the Santana campaign particularly troubling is how it follows the National Party playbook with such precision, right down to the personnel involved.

  The Santana Minerals campaign reads like a greatest hits compilation of New Zealand’s political dark arts. Take the company’s hiring of Polly Clague as “Senior Advisor - Communications and Government Relations” in April 2024, just months after National formed a government in November 2023. Between March 2020 and March 2024, Polly served as Parliamentary Team Leader to National Party MPs Joseph Mooney (Southland) and Miles Anderson (Waitaki). The revolving door between National Party operations and corporate advocacy spins so predictably you could set your watch by it.

  This isn’t an isolated case of convenient career transitions. It’s part of a well-worn playbook that includes staged “grassroots” support, astroturfed campaigns, and the strategic deployment of noise to exhaust public engagement. Remember Judith Collins’ infamous Ponsonby Road walkabout during the 2020 election campaign? Those seemingly random supporters who approached her turned out to be active National Party campaigners. The performance was so clumsy it became a case study in astroturfing gone wrong.

  But here’s what worries me more than the obvious PR manoeuvres: the effectiveness of creating so much division and noise that people simply tune out. In our fractured media landscape, where people gather information from trusted—but often biased—sources, this strategy works devastatingly well.

  Loyalty is everything in National Party operations. It’s the currency that determines who gets opportunities, who gets protected, and who gets destroyed. I learnt this the hard way when I began challenging questionable practices. The party’s response wasn’t debate or discussion—it was punishment.

  I was harassed and assaulted by people posing as environmentalists who turned out to have National Party links—the same individuals who sat prominently in the front rows of National Party rallies. A false allegation followed, one that was never designed to secure a conviction. Its purpose was simpler and more effective: to silence me for two and a half years while I awaited trial. By the time I was vindicated, the damage was done, my credibility questioned, and my ability to challenge the establishment severely compromised.

  This is how the system works when insiders become outsiders. False accusations occupy the media cycle and public attention. Mud sticks. And by the time the allegations are proven false, everyone has moved on—except the target, whose reputation and livelihood have been irreparably damaged. It’s a strategy refined over decades.

  Consider what’s happened in Tarras. Santana Minerals holds “well attended” information days. Scroll through their social media and you’ll recognise the same faces commenting, the same people attending. Meanwhile, Sustainable Tarras—a group of just eight members with broader public support—finds itself portrayed as obstructionist NIMBYs standing in the way of “generational employment and prosperity.”

  The reality is considerably more complex. Sustainable Tarras has raised legitimate questions about environmental impacts, water contamination risks, and the fast-track process itself. They’ve posed 55 questions to Santana Minerals about matters including water pollution risk—questions that remain largely unanswered. Yet somehow, in the public narrative being shaped, they’re the unreasonable ones.

  The media response? Predictable fatigue. Crux has stopped commenting on posts. The Otago Daily Times published an editorial titled “Let the panel do its work”—a polite way of saying they’re moving on. This is precisely what happens when the attention economy meets environmental controversy: people exhaust their capacity for engagement long before the substantive issues get resolved.

  And then there’s the fast-track panel itself.

  When I looked at the expert panel appointed to assess this $4.4 billion project, I nearly fell off my chair. Gina Sweetman’s name jumped out immediately. Back in 2009, when I was serving as a hearings commissioner, I filed a complaint about corruption in a council—complete with sworn affidavits and over 100 pages of evidence. The investigation was handled by Ministry for the Environment officials, where Sweetman was Manager of the RMA Practice team responsible for the 2009 RMA "Simplifying and Streamlining" amendment.

  That complaint was buried. The council in question had a National Party local government policy chair running its planning committee. National just formed a government. The pattern was unmistakable then, and it remains unmistakable now. I even wrote a column about it at the time, warning that the RMA appeared “rotten at the core.”

  Since then, Sweetman’s career trajectory has been carefully managed. Her LinkedIn profile shows a succession of safe, uncontroversial appointments. She’s built a reputation as a credible, independent commissioner. And now here she is, appointed to one of the most controversial fast-track decisions in recent memory.

  I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting Sweetman will make a predetermined decision. What concerns me is the broader pattern of how these panels are constituted, who gets appointed, and whether genuine independence is even possible in a system where the same networks of influence operate across government, local authorities, and private enterprise.

  The fast-track process itself exemplifies everything that’s wrong with how we handle contentious development decisions. Santana Minerals initially pushed for a 30-day decision timeframe—absurd for a project of this magnitude. After pushback from councils and iwi citing the proposal’s complexity, the panel convenor set a 140-working-day timeframe, the longest possible under the Act. Even this extended period barely scratches the surface of what proper consultation and assessment should look like.

  Meanwhile, Resources Minister Shane Jones celebrated a “golden era” for mining just one day after Santana lodged its application—comments Sustainable Tarras correctly identified as bordering on predetermination. When a minister signals the government’s preferred outcome before an ostensibly independent panel has even begun its work, what hope is there for a genuinely open process?

  From my experience, nothing in these campaigns is as it seems. Political operatives play both sides to engineer predetermined outcomes. False accusations fly because mud sticks, and by the time allegations are proven false, the media cycle has moved on and public attention is exhausted. It’s a strategy refined over decades of New Zealand political combat.

  The Tarras situation follows this script precisely. Create enough noise—consultation sessions, PR campaigns, attacks on opponents—until people lose interest in the substantive questions. Frame legitimate environmental concerns as NIMBYism. Deploy former political staffers in key communications roles. Secure fast-track approval before meaningful opposition can organise. Promise jobs and economic benefits while downplaying long-term environmental costs that will outlast any mine’s operational life.

  Otago’s economy and infrastructure was built off the back of the 1860s gold rush. Agriculture and other primary industries flourished since. More recently, however, tourism and lifestyle developments have occupied much attention. Of course there’s going to be resistance to a massive open-cast mine. But characterising Sustainable Tarras as simply opposed to development misses the point entirely. They’re asking for transparency, proper consultation, and genuine assessment of a project with “multi-generational impacts,” as they put it.

  Yet in our current system, asking those questions is somehow seen as obstruction rather than due diligence.

  I’ve watched too many of these campaigns play out to have much faith in happy endings. The astroturfing amplifies corporate messages. The political operatives ensure the right people are in the right positions. The media switches off when the story becomes too complex or contentious. And communities are left with the consequences of decisions made in processes that resembled democracy but functioned more like theatre.

  The question isn’t whether Santana Minerals will get approval—though that remains to be seen. The question is whether we’ve created a system so susceptible to manipulation that genuine democratic participation has become impossible. When the noise is the strategy, and exhaustion is the goal, the fix isn’t just in—it’s been institutionalised.