The controversial tenure review process is about to end – will a Crown pastoral lease in Otago sneak through? David Williams reports
It could be the last.
A preliminary proposal to end the Lowburn Valley Crown pastoral lease suggests the freeholding of 44 percent of the 5814-hectare property, located in remote and steep country in Central Otago, between Lake Dunstan and Cardrona Valley.
The deal is racing to reach the “substantive” stage before a Bill before Parliament is enacted, closing the door on tenure review – a controversial process which ends pastoral leases through rights-acknowledging payments and dividing land into protected and freeholded portions.
One obstacle to Lowburn Valley’s progress could be what conservation and recreation groups are suggesting has been a shoddy process.
Forest & Bird’s Otago and Southland manager Rick Zwaan says the property’s conservation advice was last updated 10 years ago and several specialist ecological reports haven’t been done.
The station’s expansive plateau along the southern end of the Pisa mountain range, with sweeping views of the surrounding ranges and valleys, features impressive rock tors protruding from gently undulating ridges.
“The large rock tors provide perfect habitat for those quite rare and endangered species,” Zwaan says. “So it’s things like that where it’s incredibly lacking.”
“It’s like a surgeon operating without patient notes.” – Jan Finlayson
Jan Finlayson, president of recreation lobby group Federated Mountain Clubs, agrees the Lowburn Valley proposal was drawn up without sufficient information about the values that should be protected.
“It’s like a surgeon operating without patient notes, or a builder constructing a house without plans.”
Such a deficiency leaves the review at risk of legal challenge, she says.
(FMC had similar criticisms of the Dunstan Downs tenure review proposal. Finlayson says Lowburn Valley is a case of “same old, same old”.)
Both non-government organisations (NGOs) make the case for protection of a wider area on Lowburn Valley – particularly because land freeholded through tenure review is exempt from land disturbance and vegetation clearance rules in the Central Otago district plan.
The lease might even be a candidate for full Crown ownership, excepting the farm homestead and certain developed areas, it’s argued.
The key official in tenure review decisions is Commissioner of Crown Lands, Craig Harris, a statutory officer who sits within Crown land manager Land Information New Zealand – Toitū Te Whenua.
“The Commissioner of Crown Lands was satisfied, based on the information and advice provided to him and after considering the views of the leaseholder and the DGC [director-general of conservation], that the proposed freehold areas were an appropriate outcome,” Toitū Te Whenua head of Crown property Sonya Wikitera said in an emailed statement.
“All new information received through the public submissions process will be considered in the development of a substantive proposal for the Lowburn lease.”
Philip Todhunter, who owns Canterbury’s Lake Heron Station, is chair of farming lobby group High Country Accord. Because significant values still exist at Lowburn Valley, he posits the lessee and previous managers have done a good job. “There’s no reason why they won’t continue to do that.”
(Federated Mountain Clubs’ submission says the lease is clean and healthy in places. “Other parts have been degraded through historic inappropriate management.”)
Lowburn Station lessee Dave McLean says: “We’ve had a torrid 10 years, but we think we’re finally through, and all parties seem to be reasonably happy.”
The politics of Crown pastoral leases is deeply divided, and drenched in rhetoric. It’s also nationally important – the leases cover some 1.2 million hectares, or 5 percent of the country.
A discussion document on the topic drew 3200 submissions, while the environment select committee received 161 submissions.
Last August, at the second reading of the Crown Pastoral Land Reform Bill, Land Information Minister Damien O’Connor noted increasing public concern about the loss of biodiversity and landscape values on current and former leases.
He pointed to a self-flagellating review by LINZ in 2018, which excoriated Crown management and tenure review for being opaque and unfair.
Management of leases would now be more transparent, accountable, and have more public involvement, O’Connor said. They will also include an enforcement regime for breaches.
“These spectacular South Island properties are special places for all New Zealanders,” O’Connor said. “This Bill recognises the place of pastoral farming as a legitimate use of the land while protecting the importance of the unique values of our high country to New Zealand and New Zealanders.”
Meanwhile, National’s Scott Simpson called the Bill unnecessary, unconvincing and insulting. It was a solution to a problem “that doesn’t exist”, he said – despite evidence, from within LINZ, that previous management was weighted toward farming, leading to intensification and an environmental cost.
Simpson’s colleague, Stuart Smith, said: “If central planning worked, the Soviet empire would not have had a massive drop in agricultural production when the communists took over, and that's exactly what happened.”
He added: “I’m not saying this is communist, but I’m drawing a parallel. It’s very close to it.”
Green MP Eugenie Sage, the former minister who introduced the Bill to Parliament, reminded her colleagues of degradation in the high country – including 22 percent of the Mackenzie Basin floor “completely changed, destroying the indigenous character”, between 1990 and 2017.
She referred to the submission of University of Canterbury’s Dr Ann Brower, who said that by 2017 the Crown had paid $57 million to leaseholders, even though more land (436,000 hectares) freeholded than become conservation land (371,842 hectares).
(“The challenge with that,” says High Country Accord’s Todhunter, “is it doesn’t understand the exchange of the bundle of rights that the Crown has negotiated.”)
Sage says: “Natural landscapes and nature are really the defining feature of the high country and how those lands are managed. So, with the changes in this Bill, I think it will significantly improve that.”
“The public have been major beneficiaries of considerable increase in access to the outdoors.” – Philip Todhunter
Once the Bill is enacted, all tenure reviews that haven’t reached the substantive proposal stage will be discontinued. It’s questionable whether Lowburn Valley will make it to that stage. Forest & Bird’s Zwaan puts the chance at 50-50.
Todhunter, of High Country Accord, says there’s a mix of feelings about the end of tenure review. “There are many that have been in the process for decades that would like to see a conclusion. And there are many that have never volunteered.”
Tenure review’s detractors have, he says, used “a very small number of reviews” to rubbish the whole process. Te Araroa, a 3000km trail stretching the length of the country, would not be what it is without tenure review, Todhunter says.
“When if you actually look at it, the public have been major beneficiaries of considerable increase in access to the outdoors.” (That might be true, but critics would argue there has also been a considerable cost – environmentally and financially.)
Farmers’ disappointment at the new management regime is, Todhunter says, at the “Wellington, top-down approach” – “rather than working alongside the people on the ground who’ve got a vested interest in looking after the land”.
“You’re going to achieve much greater outcomes by partnering with the landowner rather than shaking a regulatory stick at them.”
Zwaan, of Forest & Bird, a former ministerial press secretary for Sage, says time’s running out on tenure review for good reason.
“We’ve seen huge amounts of really valuable, potential conservation areas go into freehold land, and amongst all of that the public’s been wildly short-changed through this process as well, in terms of the enormous capital gains that people have managed to make off these really important bits of former public land.”
The line from farmers that the Department of Conservation isn’t doing a good job of managing high country land added through tenure review is one Zwaan has slight sympathy for.
“The Department of Conservation has been woefully underfunded for decades – well, since it was created, really.”
It’s responsible for about a third of New Zealand and it gets the same amount of funding as a university, he says. “We do really need to put more money towards looking after these really important parts of public conservation land.”
Potentially, that might mean areas of Lowburn Valley Station, if its tenure review proposal goes through.
Finlayson, of Federated Mountain Clubs, says the property is rich with back-country recreation opportunities.
Already, the proposal is being talked up as providing a permanent route between the Kawarau Gorge and Cardrona through the Roaring Meg track – a major route used by Māori to and from the West Coast.
Forest & Bird wants more of Lowburn Valley fully protected – as opposed to using conservation covenants – perhaps expanding the adjacent Pisa Conservation Area.
That is, if progress isn’t blocked by the well-flagged information deficiencies.
“It’s highly frustrating,” Finlayson says, “that after all this time, and after all the energy that NGOs, scientists and others have put into getting tenure review right, that the land is still being treated so cheaply by the public agencies that are meant to foster its wellbeing.”
