By Lois Williams - Local Democracy Reporter
West Coast Tasman MP Maureen Pugh has weighed into the campaign to improve waiting times for miners needing resource consents and other permits.
Maureen has suggested a local "mini-version" of the Government's fast-track system to speed up consent processing times.
Resources Minister Shane Jones gave the West Coast Regional Council a strong serve last week, after it closed down a gold mine site that had waited 17-months for a consent.
The council also faced criticism from councillor Brett Cummings, a gold miner himself, whose company had been left waiting six months for consent.
Maureen says the Minister is justifiably frustrated at the holdups.
“This has been going on for far too long. There are guys that have their mining permits and they’re paying up to $20,000 a year to NZ Petroleum and Minerals for the right to mine but they can’t even get onto the land because the council hasn’t sorted their resource consent or DOC hasn’t processed their concession.”
By comparison, a large-scale miner she knew was able to gain approval to mine in New South Wales in Australia within six weeks, she said.
“He’s got another one in New Guinea – that took twelve weeks," she said. "[He has] one application active in New Zealand and he’s been waiting for two years and he still doesn’t know how it’s going to go.
“The delays are not new but they’ve just got worse and worse, at a time when we desperately need to grow the economy. It’s not how to do business well.”
In her former career as Westland mayor, Maureen said she had tried to speed up the bureaucracy by delegating district council land-use consents to the Regional Council to process.
“I believe that what we need now is a local fast-track system. A mini-version of the Government’s one-stop-shop, with one office in the region where every agency involved in a mining application is co-located, and has a staffer. All of these permits should be happening concurrently.”
Maureen said she had proposed her idea to the Minister (Shane Jones) and he was interested in progressing it.
“We’ve simply got to find a new way of doing this and we can’t go on having consultants in the North Island dealing with alluvial goldmining consents down here.
“They know nothing about the West Coast so of course they’re risk averse about everything and their reports reflect that, and there’s the constant for further information and they keep sending applications back and asking for more information, and every time their meters are ticking.”
The miners’ continual outgoings were simply paying the wages of bureaucrats and not generating revenue, Mrs Pugh.
“It should all be happening concurrently – as it is you’re paying to hold your mining license just in case you can overcome all the other. It’s enough to make you tear your hair out."
The Regional Council is looking at taking on more consents staff and this week began work on new resource consent templates which it says will simplify and speed up the process for alluvial gold miners.
