SPANIARD: This is kaitiakitanga

There’s a place for everything. Customary matters should receive stewardship, empirical science should lead in technical arenas, and standover behaviour has no place in a modern democracy’s processes.

Ngai Tahu failed, catastrophically, as guardian/kaitiaki of Central Otago’s environment before other settlers arrived. It’s rich that, in response to the Santana Minerals Bendigo-Ophir Gold Project proposal for Central Otago, Ka Runaka, a local tribal sub-grouping, is now claiming a kaitiaki role.

Including the Waitaha and Ngati Mamoe peoples it colonised, Ngai Tahu not only extinguished many species through its environmental management; that (mis)management was so damaging, it altered Central Otago’s climate and landscape to the extent that even now, recovery is nowhere in sight.

The toll, excluding many small birds, invertebrates, and aquatic species also extinguished by the tribe in Central Otago but without leaving sub-fossil records, is:

Birds

·       Eastern moa

·       Finsch’s duck

·       Haast’s eagle

·       Heavy-footed moa

·       Hodgen’s waterhen

·       Long-billed wren

·       Lyall’s wren

·       New Zealand coot

·       New Zealand owlet-nightjar

·       New Zealand raven

·       South Island giant moa

·       South Island goose

·       South Island snipe

·       Upland moa

Frog

·       Markham’s frog

Bat

·       Greater short-tailed bat

Wider environment

·       The local climate, thanks to extensive burning of forest to flush out game birds, clear travel routes, and foster bracken fern growth. Central Otago became windier and drier, with more extreme temperatures.

·       The landscape, due to the burning and the severe soil erosion it caused.

This is kaitiakitanga, as practised then and now. It’s tribal: undemocratic, unscientific, opportunistic, and self-serving. It is whatever the tribal leadership says it is. It’s passed down through oral history, despite the omissions and embellishments of such record-keeping, and, ironically, treated as sacred. It refuses empirical interrogation and improvement.

Ngai Tahu has rights to consultation on the Santana mine proposal under the Fast-track Approvals Act and the Resource Management Act; its Treaty settlement legislation and other statutes give it a say also.

It has used those rights as basis for an incoherent smattering of significant claims against the project, which is being considered by an expert fast-track panel. The claims, based around kaitiakitanga, are woolly, self-aggrandising and gratuitous, and in certain contradiction with each other.

A Ka Runaka spokesperson cites the group’s “mana and role as kaitiaki – a responsibility we take very seriously”, and its focus on “robust mitigations and remediations”. However, in keeping with the customary nature of kaitiakitanga, the group doesn’t support its claim to the role with facts, including knowledge of, or lessons taken from, its earlier disastrous kaitiaki practice - practice which is no credit to its mana.

Extortion tactics are also part of Ka Runaka’s exercise of kaitiakitanga in this case. Peter Cook, chair of Santana Minerals, has stated Ngai Tahu has requested significant payment, upward of the reported $100 million Meridian Energy has agreed to pay it in relation to renewed Waitaki hydroelectric scheme consents. The tribe has even, he says, requested company shares. It’s perverse: Ka Runaka’s coercive behaviour depends on its unsupportable claim to solemn kaitiaki responsibilities while defying that claim through its venality.

Greater discipline is needed in systems dealing with permissions for activities. Whatever the Bendigo-Ophir project’s merits and demerits, which will be determined by the expert panel, claims to kaitiakitanga should not be able to disrupt an application process as this claim has.

There’s a place for everything. Customary matters should receive stewardship, empirical science should lead in technical arenas, and standover behaviour has no place in a modern democracy’s processes. New Zealand’s legislation needs to reflect this unequivocally.

The eagles, moa, and owlet-nightjars will never return to Central Otago; nor, any time soon, the podocarp and beech forests they lived in. Their demise is down to kaitiakitanga, which hasn’t changed, and which intrinsically won’t and can’t change.

Kaitiakitanga’s the stuff of another age, in which humans scratched out their livings using the most effective systems and technologies they knew. But it could be brutal then and, as the Bendigo-Ophir case shows, in the 21^st century is at best a grab-bag of inapposite ways to get by in society and the environment. It should be faithfully recorded for all the lessons it offers. However, with the benefit of those learnings, and many more, in 2026 we can do vastly better.

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