SPANIARD: Opportunity Party: what of our conservation estate?

At present, New Zealanders have equal stakes in our open-access public conservation estate … Those settings would be ended by the work Kingdon-Bebb fronted for the Options Development Group. Kiwis’ equality in the public conservation sphere, certainty of access, and the science-driven focus on nature’s good health would be over.

Opportunity Party leading candidate Kayla Kingdon-Bebb co-authored He Puapua, the framework for activating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Recent wide opposition to conservation land disposal will have made her later role in designing a He Puapua-type future for the conservation estate discomfiting for the party.

Opportunity should come clean: how, explicitly, should public conservation assets be governed and managed?

Recommendations of the independent Options Development Group, run by Kingdon-Bebb, who has a ‘professional interest in Indigenous rights’, were published by the Department of Conservation in 2022. The first is to “Undertake a fundamental reform of the conservation system as a whole.” It includes replacement of all the DOC-administered acts, including the National Parks Act, “to honour Te Tiriti and provide for the meaningful exercise of rangatiratanga and kaitiakitanga by tangata whenua…”

If implemented, it would be the most significant wholesale change to public land since the structural reforms of the late 1980s. The terrestrial conservation arena is one third of the country’s land.

At present, New Zealanders have equal stakes in our loved open-access public conservation estate. There, science-led protection of nature comes first, fostering a kaleidoscope of recreational endeavours that, among other things, help power our sense of nationhood.

Those settings would be ended by the work Kingdon-Bebb fronted for the ODG. People’s equality in the public conservation sphere, certainty of access, and the science-driven focus on nature’s good health would be over.

In recent polling prompted by a since-scuppered aspect of the Conservation Amendment Bill, 64% of voters opposed sale of public conservation land. This included 63% of ACT voters and 83% of Green voters. Just 25% of people polled supported disposal. The polling didn’t probe Opportunity Party voters.

Endorsing the ODG’s work would be Kryptonite for most political parties campaigning for votes in the 2026 election. Among the group’s other recommendations and sub-recommendations are:

* “Recast the legal status of conservation land and waters, resources, indigenous species, and other taonga.”

* “Reform the ownership model of public conservation lands and waters to reflect the enduring relationships tangata whenua have with these places and the resources and taonga within them.”

* “Centre kawa [fixed protocol], tikanga, and matauranga within the conservation system.”

* “Revoke Crown ownership of indigenous species.”

Swapping full public ownership and empirically led operations for the tribal caprice of rangatiratanga and kaitiakitanga (and related concepts) would be a stupendous leap backwards. The chiefly authority of rangatiratanga is, by definition, non-democratic, and kaitiakitanga by its very nature rejects robust science. Pre-European Maori’s landscape-scale burning, pollution of valleys and estuaries through sedimentation, and extensive extinction record is the reality of that ‘guardianship’ whose greatest impact is, admittedly, likely in the past, but whose science-abjuring nature ensures its future misguidedness at best.

Money flows would be insult to injury for the public. Stopping just shy of complete property ownership transfer to Maori would keep taxpayers funding the new system. And another ODG sub-recommendation, “Ensure tangata whenua access to and use of all land, waters, species, and resources managed within the conservation system, including within the context of permissions and concessions”, would give people claiming Maori ancestry the lion’s share of commercial opportunities on the conservation estate.

Opportunity Party public messaging on conservation and the Treaty of Waitangi is soothing, Nurse Ratched-style. Conservation land with high natural values “must be protected”, Kingdon-Bebb says in oblique election campaign monologues.

The party’s policies conspicuously skirt the relevant issues. On the Treaty of Waitangi, its policy says, “Opportunity takes the responsibility of the Crown as a Treaty partner seriously. That means taking protection of taonga and redress of historical wrongs seriously.” While it specifically proposes repeal of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) (Customary Marine Title) Amendment Act, it has nothing to say on the one-third of New Zealand that is currently public conservation land. Similarly, Opportunity’s ‘Healthy land’ policy decries that “we’re stuck in old economic models that ignore the health of the ecosystems we rely on” with no specific mention of the conservation estate that could justifiably be a centrepiece for policy on ‘healthy land’.

New Zealand’s potential withdrawal from UNDRIP, and therefore He Puapua, as some political parties promise, would be good for our country’s democracy. However, the ODG work Kingdon-Bebb fronted would not be written off at the same time; despite being a match for the He Puapua playbook, the ODG’s genesis is a 2018 Supreme Court judgment, Ngai Tai ki Tamaki Tribal Trust vs Minister of Conservation.

Unnoticed by most New Zealanders, the court decision has been used gymnastically. While it gave narrow, case-by-case, and evidence-dependent advantage to Maori groups in the conservation permissions system, its misrepresentation has gone barely challenged by numerous ministers of conservation, bureaucrats, and environmental groups. Among other things, it has allowed iwi to stymie conservation planning, Ngai Tahu to wrest command of changes to public land swathes on the West Coast, and the ODG’s work.

Greater Government interest in this issue is needed. At the least, new elastic interpretations of the Ngai Tai ki Tamaki case should be given no indulgence, and existing ones such as the Options Development Group’s work should be reviewed.

For now, in the lead-up to the election, it’s for the Opportunity Party and Kingdon-Bebb to tell voters exactly what they intend for our collective turangawaewae, New Zealand’s public conservation estate.

Spaniard has a background in conservation, farming, and recreation.