by Michael King
None of these changes in farming was occurring in isolation from the rest of the country, however. Traditional uses of land and water were coming under intensive scrutiny in the second half of the twentieth century as the result of a convergence of factors. None was more important than New Zealand’s first national conservation campaign, which heightened awareness of the need for conservation of natural resources in general and turned the country away from its pioneer phase of simply ‘quarrying’ those resources into extinction. That campaign was the battle to save Lake Manapouri in the South Island, which grew out of a political decision made in the late 1950s.
Hugh Watt, Minister of Works and Electricity in the Nash Labour Government, was keen to establish more local industry and more hydro-electric power generation. He regarded the two great achievements of his term of office as signing off in 1958 the Tongariro power project, which would divert part of the headwaters of the Whanganui River through a tunnel and out into Lake Taupo via the Tongariro Power Station, and securing the following year an agreement with an Australian company, Consolidated Zinc Proprietary, to develop Lake Manapouri’s hydro-electric potential to fuel an enormous aluminium smelter in the South Island. The latter agreement collapsed, however, when the company decided in 1960 that it could not after all afford to build the power station. That part of the project was taken over by the incoming National Government, which oversaw the construction of a massive power project that took water from the West Arm of Lake Manapouri, drove it vertically down through underground turbines and out a long tailrace tunnel into Deep Water Cove at Doubtful Sound – all this supposedly to provide cheap electricity for the Comalco aluminium smelter being built on Bluff Harbour.
In 1969, when the West Arm turbines went into operation, it was revealed that empowering legislation passed in 1960 allowed for the level of Lake Manapouri to be raised by up to eleven metres, to permit the generation of an additional 200 megawatts of electricity, and that, because of the connecting waterway, such an action would also raise the level of Lake Te Anau. Only at this point did scientists and recreational users of the lake start to make environmental impact assessments, and what came to light appalled them. Lifting the lake level to the maximum provided for in legislation would inundate 160 km of lake shoreline and drown 800 hectares of shoreline forest; it would cause almost continuous landslides on steep slopes around the lake from the combination of wave action and a rise in the ground water level; it would introduce tree trunks and branches into the lake which would become a hazard for boaties, fishermen and swimmers; it would drown all of Manapouri’s beaches and 26 of its 35 islands. All these changes and the addition of rotting plant material would destroy the ecology of the lake, as that of Lake Monowai had been destroyed when it was raised for electricity generation by only two metres. Finally, it was estimated that the severe reduction in the flow of the Waiau River into Lake Manapouri would cause silting of the riverbed and flooding of adjacent farm lands.
The revelation of these likely consequences of raising the lake sent shock waves through the Te Anau district, through Otago and Southland, and eventually through the country as a whole. What scientists and lay people had difficulty coming to terms with was that the effect of millions of years of evolution which had shaped the lake’s character and ecology could be wiped out so comprehensively for such a small gain in electric power. It seemed disproportionate. Further, the aesthetic despoliation was likely to reduce the district’s income from tourism by as much as $10 million a year. And the lives and livelihood of farmers in the Waiau Valley would be under threat.
Concern about all these factors lay behind the Save Manapouri Campaign, launched in Invercargill in October 1969. Very soon a well-known farming advocate and community leader named Ron McLean was its leader, and he took to the road to establish branches – eventually a total of nineteen regional committees – all over the country. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the campaign was that, because it raised the fundamental question of how the nation should use its natural resources, it drew people from every possible political and ideological background: ‘left-wingers’ such as Sir Jack Harris and Dr Ian Prior, conservative former National supporters such as McLean, scientists such as Alan Mark, members of the Forest and Bird Protection Society, the country’s longest-established conservation group. Farmers and Chamber of Commerce stalwarts found themselves rubbing shoulders with trade unionists and students.
The National Government of the day – and the Opposition, whose ranks still included Hugh Watt, who had been so proud of the project – were taken wholly by surprise. The then Minister of Works and Electricity, Percy Allen, blustered that any change in the project would require renegotiation of the contract with Comalco, and he was not sure whether the company would agree to that. The campaign was waged over the next three years through public meetings, newspaper advertisements and features, remits to the conferences of all political parties, and a substantial petition to Parliament asking the Government to decline to raise the lake.
The issue eventually became a party political one when Labour, over Hugh Watt’s objections, undertook not to raise the lake if it won the 1972 election. The promise was honoured, and Hugh Watt became Prime Minister Norman Kirk’s deputy and Minister of Works and Development (but not, this time, of Electricity). It transpired that the additional electricity sought by raising the lake was to boost the national grid and was not essential for Comalco’s operation. The integrity of the lake was guaranteed, and in 1973 Joe Walding, Minister for the new portfolio of Environment, appointed Ron McLean and five others to be foundation Guardians of Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau. There were no further proposals to raise the levels of those or other natural lakes. A valuable precedent had been set.
The greatest benefit arising from the Save Manapouri Campaign, however, may have been that it started a national debate on environmental issues, involving national and local body politicians, scientists, professional planners and members of the public. And that debate, fed by literature and television reports of similar issues arising in other countries throughout the developed world, especially the United States, persisted long after the campaign itself had been won. Early national spin-offs included the overhaul of water management in the Water and Soil Conservation Act, the attempted elimination of air pollution in the Clean Air Act, and the protection of marine life in the Marine Reserves Act, which eventually resulted in the establishment of reserves in half a dozen locations on the New Zealand coast and around the Kermadec and Poor Knights islands.
The fundamental problem which had underlain the Manapouri campaign remained, however. Some state agencies were committed to developmental policies that took no heed of environmental considerations. This became the basis for another set of disputes that broke out in the early 1970s over the use of native forests. The protagonists were senior executives of the New Zealand Forest Service, who wanted to continue to log mature native trees for timber, and environmental groups such as Forest and Bird who argued that the natural and ecological values of such forests outweighed the commercial gains from harvesting – and in the process destroying – them. The last remaining unprotected giant kauri on the Coromandel Peninsula (in the Manaia block) and in Northland (in the Warawara Forest) were saved after appeals to the Government, which involved a repetition of arguments put forward to preserve the Waipoua Forest in the 1940s and early 1950s. Forests of giant podocarps at Pureora and Whirinaki were also protected after public protests, which involved some activists tying themselves to the upper branches of trees. These protests and those against plans for the large-scale harvesting of beech forests in the South Island produced two new and eventually powerful lobby groups, Friends of the Earth and the Native Forest Action Council. The beech forests too eventually gained protection and an emphasis on ‘natural, intrinsic and scientific values’ was written into reserves and national parks legislation. Further, over a period of three decades, the amount of land held in such parks and reserves was doubled.
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br /> The Clyde Dam proposal, to raise the level of the Clutha River in Central Otago to generate more hydro-electricity and contribute to irrigation, was yet another public works project driven by government departments that aroused controversy. It involved flooding the Cromwell Gorge and inundating historic and scenic sites and orchard land. The Muldoon Government was eventually able to pass the empowering legislation in 1982, but only by enlisting the support of Parliament’s two Social Credit members[2] – which turned out to spell electoral doom for them and to contribute to National’s loss of office two years later. In the wake of this battle a wary public sought, and eventually achieved more than a decade later, stricter environmental controls for such projects and far more transparency in the processes that governed them.
The cause of marine conservation and the movement to ban nuclear weapons from the South Pacific were boosted in July 1985 when agents of the French secret service (the DGSE) bombed and sank the Greenpeace organisation’s flagship vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. The ship had been about to sail to Moruroa in French Polynesia to protest against continuing nuclear testing by the French on that isolated atoll. The effect of the DGSE’s intervention, however – the first act of state-sponsored terrorism in New Zealand – was to increase substantially Greenpeace’s local membership and enlarge support for the anti-nuclear movement, already galvanised by Labour Prime Minister David Lange’s proclamation that New Zealand would prohibit the passage of nuclear-armed or -propelled vessels through its territorial waters. The French Government subsequently paid New Zealand compensation for the bombing.
Another watershed in the development of environmentally sound policies was the effect of Cyclone Bola on the East Coast of the North Island in March 1988. This event caused $112 million worth of damage on unstable hill-country farms – the kind of country whose suitability for farming Oakley Sargeson had questioned exactly 40 years earlier. As a result of the storm and its disastrous aftermath – further eroding hillsides, washing tons of soil out to sea via some rivers and blocking others and flooding surrounding land – large areas on the East Coast and elsewhere were taken out of pasture farming and planted in exotic forests.
It was the fourth Labour Government, however, which was in office at the time of the Rainbow Warrior bombing and of Cyclone Bola, that subjected the country’s environmental policies and practices to the closest possible scrutiny, while Geoffrey Palmer was Minister for the Environment. State development agencies, such as the Forest Service, the Department of Lands and Survey and the Ministry of Works and Development were disestablished. Commercial functions of those departments were transferred to state-owned enterprises, charged with operating commercially and making a profit. Subsidies for forest clearance and land development were abolished. A Department of Conservation, to advocate for conservation and administer land with high conservation values, was created out of parts of the old Forest Service, Lands and Survey and the Wildlife Service. A new Ministry for the Environment was established with a policy role and a Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment to play a monitoring role. At the same time government and local government planning and environmental procedures were completely overhauled in the Resource Management Act, initiated by Palmer but not endorsed by Parliament until 1991, when the Bolger National Government was in office and a new minister, Simon Upton, was responsible for its passage and implementation.
The Resource Management Act was gigantic: it replaced almost 60 other laws, including the Town and Country Planning Act and the Water and Soil Conservation Act. When it was introduced into Parliament in 1989, Environment Ministry staff noted that the country’s planning laws had ‘evolved in a piecemeal fashion, resulting in a set of complex, overlapping and sometimes conflicting rules. As a result, outcomes for the environment are often inadequate … In a world where concern for the environment grows stronger every day, New Zealand has recognised that the clean-up must begin at home.’
The Act as eventually passed covered the ‘use, development and protection’ of air, land and water. It put in place a three-tiered (national, regional, local) management system and a scheme for allocating rights to use land, air and water. Before any such proposed use, its potential effects on the environment had to be assessed and a wide range of other interests, including intrinsic values and the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, had to be addressed. Maori who held ‘mana whenua’ or authority over specific rohe had to be consulted. Above all else, however, the Act aimed to promote sustainable management of resources. That core principle subsequently found its way into other legislation, including that governing the use of forests and fisheries (the latter being now subject to a transferable quota system).
Another important step towards environmental responsibility New Zealand took at about the same time was signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. This committed the country to work actively to reduce carbon monoxide emissions contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect’, and thus to global warming. Since that time, however, successive governments have shown a preference for using carbon sinks to absorb greenhouse gases rather than reduce emissions, and one environmental lawyer has put this behaviour into the category of ‘well-meaning but empty policy statements’. A proposal to levy New Zealand farmers for research into the effects of animal gas emissions proved massively unpopular.
Inevitably too there was criticism aplenty of the Resource Management Act after its first decade of operation: that its processes were too costly and time-consuming; that developments needed rapidly for the healthy functioning of communities were unreasonably delayed; that tangata whenua and objectors to development had too much influence; that some environmentally damaging projects came to fruition anyway, despite the safeguards; that regulatory bodies are only as competent as the individuals who sit on them. Given that the Act was always going to be a referee among competing interests, however, it was inevitable that few parties would be entirely satisfied by its operation. On balance, it does subject the country’s use of finite resources to more rigorous, more fair and more transparent monitoring than was possible previously. And, while developers and those who profit most from development would prefer a return to the manipulable circumstances of the less regulated era, most organisations and individuals concerned with environmental protection and sustainability value the Act and its operation highly.
[1] One wonders whether A.H. Cockayne’s father, the great botanist Leonard Cockayne, would have agreed. Cockayne senior wrote, with a very different emphasis: ‘The innate patriotism which compels us to feel that our country stands high above all other lands, must also make us love its natural characteristics, so that … of all the trees or shrubs or herbs which we cherish, none can ever rank so high as those which slowly took their shape on New Zealand soil …’
[2] Social Credit, a rare ‘third party’ in New Zealand politics, absorbed much of the country’s protest vote from the 1960s to the 1980s. The organisation, based on the economic doctrines of Major C. H. Douglas, succeeded in putting four members into Parliament – but never more than two at any one time.
Chapter 27
A Revolution Begun
Although the legislation that would eventually ignite the Save Manapouri Campaign was drafted in 1960, its full significance would not be recognised for another nine years. Consequently the decade began quietly enough and the first events to engage public attention seemed to promise continuity in New Zealand life rather than social change on an unprecedented scale.
Among those events of 1960 were victories on the same day of Peter Snell (800 metres) and Murray Halberg (5000 metres) at the Rome Olympics and their breaking of world records for these and equivalent distances soon after. It seemed that the afterglow of Hillary’s conquest of Everest in 1953 was to be complemented by a New Zealand global pre-eminence in middle-distance running (as it was, for a short period). Even though there were protests against the racially selected All Black team to tour South Africa
that year – ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ – the Nash Labour Government declined to intervene and it was business as usual for the New Zealand Rugby Football Union and most of the rugby-loving public.
Even a political shift did not seem like change. Walter Nash led Labour into the 1960 general election in his 79th year. After more than three decades in Parliament, Nash basked in public adulation as the ‘grand old man’ of New Zealand politics and as the country’s ‘elder statesman’. He was liked, even loved by some, for a cluster of qualities that could be seen as both admirable and exasperating. The British High Commissioner during his prime ministership, Sir George Mallaby, recalled Nash affectionately in his memoirs.
Squat and foursquare he stumped boldly through life, indefatigable, talkative to the point of tedium, but always saved by a touch of humour or a visitation of grace … The annual dinner of the local rugby team was to him as interesting and as exciting as a state banquet for the Queen Mother [in 1958], and he gave himself equally and tirelessly to both, talking on, reminiscing, holding the floor, while men half his age prayed in silence for their beds.