Table of Contents
Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT party leader.
An iwi group allegedly demanded $180 million from Santana Minerals to approve the Bendigo Santana gold mine in Central Otago. This is not consultation. It is standover tactics enabled by our planning laws.
ACT Resources Spokesman Simon Court has called it exactly what it is. Documents and meetings show iwi representatives pointed to a previous seven-figure payout for a hydro project as the benchmark. Pay up or face opposition. The company calculated the lifetime “contribution” at around $180 million. Kā Rūnaka say $180 million has not been their “focus”, but they have not denied the report.
This is textbook rent-seeking. The Resource Management Act and its successors have given certain groups effective veto power over development. Cultural impact and partnership have become polite words for a toll gate. Developers pay for endless hui, reports and ‘benefits’ or watch their projects die in the queue. Environmental effects take second place to ancestry.
Thomas Sowell warned us about this in Affirmative Action Around the World. Race-based preferences do not deliver justice. They create corruption, mismatch and resentment. Politicians and bureaucrats hand out power in the name of equity. Insiders game the system. Merit collapses. New Zealand’s planning regime proves him right every single day.
I fail to see how this advances the environment or Treaty justice. It advances opportunism. Projects with the right ethnic branding move forward. Projects without stall. Costs are passed on in higher power bills, more expensive housing and infrastructure that never gets built. We all pay the price – Māori included – in lost jobs and forgone wealth.
Parliament has known this for years. Successive governments expanded race-based planning while pretending it was partnership. The Fast-track Approvals Bill and Spatial Planning reforms were supposed to cut red tape. Instead they kept the poison pills – Treaty principles, iwi partnerships and Māori-specific tracks. The result is predictable. Public infrastructure is delayed, investment flees and taxpayers foot the bill for the legal warfare.
This is not environmentalism. It is state-enabled graft wearing a Māori cloak. The abuse of power is remarkable.
The free-market solution is simple and overdue: strip every racial preference from planning law. One set of clear rules. One standard of consent. Property owners decide what happens on their land. Councils enforce objective environmental standards – nothing more. No vetoes by ancestry. No ‘pound of flesh’ for every sod turned.
New Zealand was built on secure property rights and equal treatment under law. Race-based planning has corrupted that foundation. Scrap it. Restore one law for all. Anything less is not justice – it is institutionalised corruption. Kiwis deserve better. Our economy and our future demand it.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
