As well as writing editorials, I’m lucky enough to review books for Gulf News’ sister publication, Waiheke Weekender. Just before Christmas, a hefty volume from Nelson-based publisher Potton & Burton thudded onto my doorstep. It was a revised edition of Shelter from the Storm, a gloriously obsessive history of 90 New Zealand tramper’s huts. I’m no tramper, and 90 sounded like a lot, but it turned out to be fewer than 10 percent of the 1000 or so public backcountry huts in the New Zealand network. Huts for the people! Few other countries can claim anything like it.
The huts are nearly all maintained by the Department of Conservation, which in effect manages a third of the country – 8.5 million hectares of land – on just 0.64 percent of the government’s core budget. The ministry has often left Waiheke kaitiaki feeling frustrated with its slow response times. But as it faces internal disruption, cutbacks and mounting costs (thanks to climate change and inflation), the ministry faces impossible choices.
Under the 1987 Conservation Act, DoC’s main job is the “conservation of New Zealand’s natural and historic resources”. Without DoC, species like the takahē, kākāpō, kiwi, black stilt, black robin and New Zealand fairy tern would be history. The ministry is New Zealand’s bulwark against invasive pests and disease, and what remains of its staff monitor the health of lakes and rivers, and the impacts of commercial fishing.
But the department is also, in effect, New Zealand’s largest tourist provider, responsible for the maintenance and safety of more than 2000 buildings and huts, 2015 toilet blocks, 300 campsites, 13,000 structures (like bridges) and 14,600km of track. DoC also maintains historic landmarks on Crown land like the tunnels at Stony Batter.
The ministry, famously and chronically, has been broke for most of its life, as successive governments treat its conservation role as an optional extra. Back in March 2012, North & South magazine published a feature story headlined Does the Department of Conservation Need Saving? (The title of this editorial is a 12-year-old quote from that story.) In the piece, a scientist warns its writer, Mike White: “The gamble we’re taking by reducing DoC’s funding [is] that we’ll end up managing national parks that are empty cathedrals, devoid of native wildlife.”
Stories of DoC’s insolvency date back to at least 1995, when a one-year-old viewing platform on Crown land collapsed over the Cave Creek chasm, killing 14. A commission of inquiry concluded that the accident arose from “systemic failure against the background of an underfunded and under-resourced department”.
In 2015, four tourists plunged 8m when a suspension bridge on a Great Walk collapsed. Incredibly, they escaped serious injury.
In 2022, DoC revealed that it was hopelessly behind in its maintenance schedule: 68 ‘high-risk structures’ were overdue for repair.
The coalition government has responded to DoC’s increasingly desperate financial woes by cutting its budget. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop is open to new mines on conservation land. Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has proposed selling ‘conservation stewardship land’ (land overseen by DoC but yet to be studied for conservation value). To raise money, the ministry has suggested attracting more tourism businesses to conservation areas, and charging visitors more for access.
The last option appears to be the lesser of all evils, although I can’t really imagine paying for a walk at the Stony Batter Historic Reserve (the land, not the defence installation). In Newsroom, a recreation planner and former president of the Federated Mountain Clubs of New Zealand, Peter Wilson, warned of fishhooks within the new proposals.
“DoC’s apparently sensible reforms have a deep flaw. At a time when the department relies ever more on community delivery (including iwi delivery) for conservation and recreation, it appears to be centralising power away from those very communities,” he writes. “DoC is proposing to remove its inbuilt system of checks and balances [regional conservation boards], “with all authority for plan-writing being centralised with the department and minister… In the absence of a plan, it is mates-based management.”
As this emaciated ministry is starved even further, Aotearoa is losing its native fauna and flora. Three quarters of native birds, reptiles, bats and freshwater fish are either at risk or threatened with extinction. While New Zealand’s hut network might be singular, so is our extinction rate – it’s the highest in the world, per capita.
And climate change is beginning to bite. Projections of pest populations are “pretty scary”, says DoC director-general Penny Nelson.
“There’ll be 50 percent more rats in some areas by 2090 under moderate climate change scenarios. There’ll be 40 percent more wasps’ nests lasting through the winter season and the tools that we have at the moment, that we use in conservation, just aren’t cutting it.”
We have never needed environmental researchers more, just as they lose their jobs at DoC, the Ministry for the Environment, the Ministry for Primary Industries and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
As Richard Capie of Forest & Bird told Newsroom: “We’re undermining the architecture that is in place to look after the environment.”
• Jenny Nicholls
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