Crown Land carve up

Forest and Bird, Volume 18, Issue 3, 1 August 1987, Page 17

Crown Land carve up

It has been described as the biggest conservation story of the decade; certainly Forest and Bird's head office has never seen members respond in quite the same way as they did to the Crown land allocation issue. The land carve up was proof that ordinary people are a vital part of decision making in this country. When head office first alerted our 53 branches to what was happening, the response was overwhelming. At nights, weekends, even sometimes by taking time off work, members looked up maps and searched out the areas involved to assess their conservation and recreation value. This information was relayed back to head office where Bruce Mason, Mark Bellingham, Alison Davis, Kevin Smith and Liz McMillan compared it to the notes they

had. The final document they assembled ran to 200 pages and contained approximately 3000 misallocations covering 600,000 ha. The Government's response to this was to ask officials from the Conservation Department and the corporations to work out between them the misallocations which were against Government policy and the mistakes (draughting errors etc). A third category involved lands which could not be agreed on. To guide the officials, a Technical Advisory Committee which included Conservation Director Gerry McSweeney, devised criteria for which land should go where. At the time of writing (late June) officials were dividing up the land once again. The Public Lands Coalition comprising the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, Federated Mountain Clubs and the acclimatisation societies — will be consulted on all the recommendations of the inter-agency committee, and any it does not agree with will be the subject of a more detailed investigation. It is to be hoped that by the time the officials have had another crack at the problem that there should not be too many disputed areas left. Past experience, however, does not inspire confidence. The following is part of a Dominion editorial from June 17, 1987: