Walter Peak seeks means to continue tenure review process

The owners of one of New Zealand’s oldest high country farms, Walter Peak Farm, says mistakes by the Department of Conservation (Doc) have delayed its tenure review.

They want a "grandparenting" clause added to the Crown Pastoral Land Reform Bill to prevent its tenure review being ended by the legislation.

The 25,000ha sheep and cattle station near Queenstown started the process in 2014.

But farm representative Hanan Miron told Parliament’s environment committee on Thursday it was "very unlikely" it would reach the substantive proposal stage by the time the Bill was passed because of the "unfair delay" caused by Doc’s errors.

By early 2019, after more than a year’s delay caused by a change in conservation minister and bureaucratic hold-ups, Doc had changed its position on the station’s preliminary proposal from one of general support to opposition, Mr Miron said.

It was then declined by Eugenie Sage — now the environment committee’s chairwoman — while she was conservation minister in mid-2019.

Doc’s briefing to Ms Sage contained "significant legal errors and mistakes of fact", he said.

"From the first request for provisional consent for the preliminary proposal in February 2018 until today, there has been a delay of three years."

Doc accepted last July it made errors in its briefing, and agreed to provide a revised briefing to new minister Kiri Allan.

However, even if Ms Allan decided in the station’s favour, the steps required to reach the substantive proposal stage meant it was "highly unlikely" to do so before the Bill’s passage.

"That would be a totally unfair and unjust outcome."

The station’s legal counsel, Mai Chen, told the committee it was hoping for a positive decision from Ms Allan next week, but going from approval for a preliminary proposal to receiving a financial offer from the Crown generally took two to four years.

"We will never make it."

Farm manager James Clouston told the committee a successful tenure review would create benefits for the public while still allowing a viable farming operation.

Those benefits included increased public access for recreation, the turning over of 5851ha to the Crown for public conservation areas, and a Queen Elizabeth II National Trust covenant that would remove five sensitive areas of land from grazing, Mr Clouston said.

The majority of the land retained for grazing would be subject to conservation covenants that would place restrictions on certain farming practices, and impose stock limits and ecological monitoring.

Tenure review is a 23-year-old process by which the Government has bought out all or part of the leases of large high country farms in the South Island.

The Bill’s passage will end the process, except for tenure reviews that have reached the substantive proposal stage and have either been put to or accepted by the leaseholder.

guy.williams@odt.co.nz