New Zealand: Mining in Schedule 4 Conflict: Difference between revisions

Referring to historical efforts to protect the environment, Green Party co-leader and MP, Metiria Turei, told a crowed demonstrating against the Government’s proposal outside parliament buildings that “it was the people who created Schedule 4 and protected those places, and it will be the people who save Schedule 4 and those treasured places, and that’s you.”<ref>A montage of a mining protest that was held outside Wellington parliament on 30 March 2010, YouTube, 1m 49sec -1min 58sec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W57ZrtGfnL0 retrieved 3 May 2011</ref> Another speaker at the same event stated that the mining proposal “touches our identity as a country. This is not a country that mines its most treasured places, it is not a country that mines its national parks. It’s who we are, it’s what we believe in, it’s why we’re proud to be clean and green….The economy is not based on mining, it is based on looking after the land”<ref>A montage of a mining protest that was held outside Wellington parliament on 30 March 2010, YouTube, 2m 28sec -2min 36sec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W57ZrtGfnL0 retrieved 3 May 2011</ref>

The specific long-lasting environmental hazards of mining were focused on by Dennis Teag of the Coromandel Watchdog Group NGO. He said the mining industry liked to talk about the benefits of mining but rarely alluded to the drawbacks, including the very real environmental issue of tailings dams where millions of tons of toxic waste has to be stored in a containment facility forever.<ref name="Ryan" /> The cost of cleaning up if they go wrong was incredibly large, such as the $17.5m required to remediate the damage incurred at the Tui copper, lead and zinc mine on the western slopes of Mount Te Aroha in the Kaimai Range of New Zealand and considered to be the most contaminated site in the country. It was abandoned in the 1970s but Teag claimed the remedial work would probably not be effective anyway.