We appear to be heading in the direction of a great delirium.
New Zealand is losing a value system which has elevated us all to the triumph of property rights for all. Now an amalgam of calamitous environmental predictions and centralised control dominate.
Add to that the big problem of the collective failure within rural communities to sell themselves to the wider urban population. We have a real problem.
As producers of the highest-quality food, and as people who also do their level best to look after their own back yard, it’s a bit soul destroying to meet constant criticism with optimism.
In rural New Zealand it is usually a case of head down, bum up as the next job really needed doing a few days ago. Time waits for no man or woman, especially if the forecast is for rain and permission to sow a crop is not through.
The demands to look out and up from one’s immediate task in favour of checking what is happening with the local political changes being proposed, should always take precedence over bending your back over a shed full of lambs needing a half belly and crutch — an agrarian term for a sore back — but they don’t.
Curiously, and despite the essential nature of food production, it is other people’s values (OPVs) that take precedence these days over your own, as a few rural folk have found to their cost.
The days of managing your property for you and your family’s benefit now appear to be completely lost to central and local government-inspired controls.
A district plan in many, if not all, areas states that no clearance of indigenous land is allowed. Indigenous land, by definition, is land that is still in its natural state despite 150 years of farming livestock, so the chances of the land in question still being in some even remotely pristine natural state is out of the question.
One question which is reasonable, however, is: why did those who value geckos — for example — not relocate them to a more suitable habitat, which exist all over Otago?
Skinks are not unique to any one area of land but frequent a number of areas in Otago. Now that another prosecution is to occur, a very clear message is sent to all landowners in Otago — don’t inform anyone of anything that may be rare and endangered. as your land will be inspected and if deemed necessary, OPVs will be imposed.
Strict rules of use will then apply, including any use of that land for income generation for your family’s benefit.
Many American farmers these days have adopted a policy of shoot, shovel and shut up as similar policies exist in "the land of the free", which is now not free as there is a huge cost if you have "foolishly" secured a future for endangered wildlife on your land.
Perhaps Forest & Bird could raise money to rent and preserve areas of land to better incentivise rural people to fully acknowledge the value of, say, skinks and geckos. It is noted that feral cats and hawks predate on skinks, which is why they are rare, or not rare — so survival is far from assured by remaining in situ.
If it were possible for landowners to leave profit making aside by receiving financial help for offering protection to the aforementioned OPVs, then we may well see a significant lift in protected land by agreement and a far better degree of social harmony as a consequence.
Actually, consequences matter despite the good intentions of environmental groups, which are yet to show how any of their hard-earned cash can find its way into a farmer’s bank account to compensate for a loss of income. Any prosecution of any landowner anywhere will simply drive co-operation and survival of the species into real failure as the locals actually know as much and more about the rare and endangered than many experts.
Consider the discovery of the chafer beetle in Cromwell many years ago. Upon discovery, the area was immediately sanitised of stock being driven to the saleyards as they went right through the beetle habitat. The farmers had to find another way to get their sheep to the saleyards — which was, well, inconvenient.
It was even more inconvenient for the chafer beetle as so many of them (the beetles) starved to death. It was later discovered what most locals knew. The sheep dung was the beetles’ preferred food source. Better still it was delivered for free.
As Mark Twain said: "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble — it’s what you know that ain’t so."
— Gerrard Eckhoff is a former Otago Regional councillor and was a two-term Act New Zealand list MP from 1999-2005.
