Taking Stock 6 November 2025

BECAUSE it is so relevant to the country’s plan to reignite growth, wealth and employment, Taking Stock has frequently discussed the new Fast-track approval system for ambitious projects.

We are about to witness how the Fast-track process can be competently administered within the context of our government’s aspirations, responding to the fine-tuning that was signalled this week.

Now that the “poster boy” for the process, the Santana Minerals gold mine plan, has submitted its consent application, two important steps will be taken, the first being a 15-working-day decision on whether the application is “complete”.

It then goes to the Fast-track panel for a decision within six months, the legal amendments proposed this week designed to eliminate spurious or time-wasting games from those not relevant to the process. In particular, it will curtail silly use of judicial reviews, limiting that process to matters of law, not opinion.

So we will see how the process itself avoids being misused by meaningless activists, perhaps seeking attention, career advancement, or simply displaying anti-growth opinion.

Conversely we shall also see the opinion of competent people displaying their suggestions on how to include their research in mitigation of any environmental issues. These people will not be spouting nonsense, with fear-inducing speeches about poisoning Central Otago or reshaping “pristine” (barren) valleys on private land.

Secondly we shall learn about the scale and economic benefits of a project, and read the science, produced at a cost of multiple millions, published by independent environmental consultants with obvious relevant credentials, in Santana’s epic application.

All of this will soon be visible, publicised by Fast-track on its website. This should happen this month. Already granted, this week, is a 30-year mining permit, a useful affirmation of the project’s potential value to the country.

But for one minute, put aside the weighing of environmental reshaping and the dollars that would flow.

Reading the 9400-page report would require a longer period of concentration than most people would allocate to any report. However, there is sure to be carefully legally crafted summaries of the issues and the intended solutions, covering a range of subjects that might arise. Those summaries deserve to be read, when the application is published.

The worst of the silly billies will have been making idiotic claims, suggesting noise, dust, traffic movement, visibility, incompetent engineering, inexperience, and disruptions to birds, skinks, snails, moths, gorse and heather will create a disaster for Central Otago. There will always be those attention-seekers who believe the first step to Hollywood is streaking at a rugby test.

Amongst other things, they claim the tourism sector will be sabotaged and that vineyards within the Central Otago area will be poisoned by arsenic or cyanide. They should read the science.

When the consent is published, all bar the nuttiest will see that the distant valley being mined will be taking the scientific action to avoid any real, or unlikely, potential consequences.

Frankly, I am unsure why any publicly-funded organisation would employ activists so willing to fire their shots without first identifying a real target. Worse, some such activism comes under the cloak of academic doctrine, disguising their opinions with fake science or faux knowledge.

Of course internet platforms, inadequately monitored, allow such activists to fire off their volleys - anonymity permitted - resulting in many people, including the author of this newsletter, to be defamed by those anonymous litterers, dumpers of their rubbish in public spaces.

The media, television and some daily papers being the worst examples, have sought audiences by publishing wild views. One paper, the Otago Daily Times, allowed a sad reporter to impose her uninformed opinion. Whatever happened to the days when newspapers filtered out the often childish and uninformed opinions of reporters? Bylines do not solve this. They may even encourage it, as I have previously noticed. One suspects such reporters seek out the most colourful people to be a part of the reporter’s campaign.

In 2024, preparing for an address in Cromwell on the history of gold mining there, I read the newspapers that survived there in the 1860s. There were no bylines, no opinion other than in the editorial, and useful information was provided in detail, right down to the daily highlights of those who were panning for gold. I wish those old standards still prevailed. Newspapers were filled with news, not opinion.

Recently the fine actor Sam Neill allowed himself to be quoted on a subject on which he either had no apparent knowledge, or he was having a senior moment.

Neill is a good bloke. I am personally aware, through my extended family, of how he has befriended and helped young NZ actors who are knocking on the door of the best funded movies and TV series, internationally.

Neill is clearly a nice man and a good actor.

He is also a vineyard owner and property developer, on an industrial scale.

He is not a scientist.

He permitted a reporter to quote him, recording his fear that dust containing arsenic from the Dunstan Ranges might poison Central Otago’s waterways, dust airborne for many kilometres.

He should first have consulted those with knowledge.

The tens of thousands of hectares of the Dunstan Ranges that surround the proposed Santana mine for centuries have been covered in arsenic-rich soil. Some of that arsenic - very tiny, irrelevant portions - filters from the hundreds of square kilometres of soil, into waterways. It always has and it always will. The levels that reach water are relevant to nobody. The water remains potable and is regularly tested.

If you have rock amidst earthquake-prone ranges, the rock may be gold-bearing. Mineralised rock is covered by soil that contains arsenic, throughout the whole of the Dunstan Ranges.

Indeed geologists, such as the two wonderful veterans who created the Santana Project, Kim Bunting and Warren Batt, measure arsenic anomalies in the soil, especially in the areas where old tailings indicate that the miners in the 1860s had discovered gold. Tailings plus higher arsenic levels in the soil lead to digging and maybe drilling rigs, hopefully leading to discovery and later wealth creation.

Neill claimed that the dust from Santana’s mine would fly away and “poison” rivers, the nearest some six kilometres away.

Here’s another fact: dust does not transport arsenic or any other natural element six kilometres to any river.

Extremely high winds, picking up dust in extremely dry conditions, might enable dust to fly for a few hundred metres. Gravity then prevails.

When high winds are mixed with dry conditions, every regulated mine in a developed country engages with its sprinkling system, making potential dust revert to wet soil. That may be an unnecessary precaution, but micro-regulations are what make mines take extreme precautions.

Neill needs to spend more time reading the scientific research.

Just two other anecdotes remind me about the power of high winds.

In 1961, aged 11, I attended the All Blacks vs France rugby test at Athletic Park. The game was played in a hurricane southerly. The greatest All Blacks kicker of a ball was Don Clarke - a legend.

In that game, into the wind, he resorted to place kicking when kicking for the touchline from penalties, a sight I have never seen since in the adult game. It was the only way to avoid the ball being blown backwards. The wind that day was of biblical ferocity.

At one stage, the wind stripped off the scarves and hats of hundreds of spectators, including mine. The clothing disappeared north, carried by the southerly hurricane. The game commentator, Winston McCarthy, told the crowd to look for their garments in Wellington Harbour, some five kilometres away.

In truth, they were found in various gardens a few hundred yards away and probably ended up in a school fair, on sale for a shilling a piece.

The second anecdote is of the sand on the beach opposite our family house. In occasional howling gales, sand is blown along the beach and sometimes over the road, giving me window-cleaning opportunities. My proficiency provides a possible option for my next life.

Four kilometres further inland is Coastlands Shopping Town. It has never received sand from the beach in its nearly 60-year life.

Sand and dust are lifted and transported by strong winds, but not six kilometres.

The published Santana consent application will reveal just how intensely the output of the production plant is cleansed, with the by-products stored, and how fastidiously the tailings are processed in a tailings lake, heavily fortified.

For example, the tailings lake has to be engineered to withstand a one-in-ten-thousand years event. It is easy to imagine the steel and concrete expense of such engineering.

The rupture of the Southern Alps is characterised as a one-in-two-thousand-year event.

Much of the activist nonsense barely merits comment but what does deserve rebuke is the utterly false (published anonymously) claims that the Santana team has no mining experience. That statement was simply a malicious lie. The team collectively has mined for hundreds of years.

Furthermore, activists knew of that vast experience when the claim was made. Yet still they repeated this nonsense.

Equally as idiotic is the claim repeated recently in the Otago Daily Times, that the “real” money from the project will go to Australia. That is simply a lie.

I suppose if you exclude corporate tax (roughly $150m-200m per year), PAYE tax from 340 (plus) employees, and GST generated, and ignored the dividends paid to around 20,000 NZ shareholders, then the moronic comment might not define the commentator as either ignorant or malicious. The “real money” stays in NZ at a ratio of about 4:1.

As a matter of passing relevance, the share trading platform Sharesies has more than 15,000 mostly young Santana investors in its nominee account. If the project succeeds that investment would inspire them.

If this NZ mine is sending the “real money” to Australia, there must be a wicked fairy down there producing university professors with mystical powers that enable the claim that the “real money” is not helping New Zealand.

The Santana press release on the progress of the consent application has not been published by those media companies whose editors allow their reporters to prioritise uninformed opinion over undeniable science.

I urge people wanting the facts to read the independent research of science before forming an opinion on the merit of the project.

For clarity I disclose my family owns a small share of the project, less than 2%.

I see the project for its potential successes as follows:

- Creating 340 sustainable jobs, indirectly probably 1,000 jobs, in an area not blessed with high-earning jobs. Average pay will exceed $100,000. If industry norms are achieved, around half the jobs will go to iwi.

- Creating around $2 billion of revenue for the government over 10-13 years, with potential to far exceed this; more discovery, higher grades, gold price rises are possible.

- Generate wealth for the NZ shareholders who exceed 15,000 people.

- Create growth in and around Cromwell, Wanaka, Arrowtown, Clyde and Alexandra, affecting housing, schools, retail, engineering and council revenue.

- Create a long-term tourism asset. Mines interest far more people than the anti-mining group understands. What was once the world’s biggest copper mine, long closed (1970s), near Vancouver, is an immensely profitable tourism site, one that I visited with pleasure, along with hundreds of others. It attracts hundreds of tourists every day.

- Improve, not degrade, the eventual landscape as the company makes good on its promise to create new and better facilities – cycle tracks, roads etc.

In my view NZ cannot ignore the closing down of major companies, in areas like forestry, hospitality and retail. It needs new companies, like Santana, in which NZ and international investors have put up north of $100 million of risk capital to seek economic growth and profits (after paying tax).

Redistributing existing wealth never can meet the growing costs of matching social service with demand, nor can redistribution provide wealth for infrastructural repair and creation, let alone offset the losses to our potential able workers through modern ailments like toxic drug usage, depriving our country of tens of thousands of previously useful contributors.

The Santana Minerals project is one, I hope of many, that would produce growth in jobs, wages and tax revenues.  If gold remains at its current value, the project will generate annual pre-tax profits of around half a billion dollars, making it comfortably within the top 20, maybe top 10, businesses in New Zealand.  For Cromwell it will be a drawcard.

The Government clearly shares my logic.

Hopefully the opponents will read the science in the consent application and be intellectually honest enough to switch camps.  Should I hold my breath while awaiting such a switch?

I greatly admire the Santana CEO Damian Spring for his polite response to unruly dissidents. As you might expect from an engineer he simply sticks to the facts.

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THE Financial Markets Authority deserves a high mark, but not an A+ rating, for its condemnation of various accountants and lawyers who have falsely certified that novice investors can be described as “wholesale”, “experienced” or “eligible” when clearly those investors are not.

This is a highly relevant and commendable regulator’s response to understand how those investors unwisely invested in unregulated financial projects, based on projections that were not overseen and, usually, not credible. Investments in such ventures is legally limited to wholesale, experienced or eligible investors.

For example, a couple who had just sold a grocery shop for a million found it easy to find an accountant or lawyer who would certify that the grocer was “experienced” in investing, even if the grocer had never previously invested in anything other than the shop’s stock.

This dishonest certification has led to utterly inappropriate investing, resulting in horrid losses.

The combination of no knowledge, no advice and no regulatory protection produces risk and plays into the hands of high-risk-taking entrepreneurs, usually seeking other people’s money to take on improbable property ventures.  Some of the entrepreneurs are simply inept, others are crooks, relics of court cases.

The FMA has identified about 30 accountants and lawyers who have behaved poorly, signing off certificates without adequate questioning of the investor.

I expect most, if not all, would have had a relationship with the entrepreneur and were helping him/her to raise money. I doubt that fees would have been irrelevant.

Many will have charged a “certificator’s fee” paid by the entrepreneur.  I am not sure how that certification avoids the definition of “fraud”.

The South Island has a history of quite rotten entrepreneurs linking with such “professionals” to avoid the disclosure requirements of a full, regulator-approved investment document.

So, too, does Auckland where hundreds of millions have been written off at the cost of the unprotected investors.

The FMA would receive an A+ rating if it named those careless or greedy accountants and lawyers.  They deserve to be named.

One dreadful fund attracted more than 100 naïve investors with virtually every one certified as “eligible” by the same so-called professional.

If I had the names, you would read them here.  Sadly, I do not.

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Travel

12 November – Levin – David Colman

13 November – Whanganui – David Colman

14 November – New Plymouth – David Colman

Chris Lee & Partners Ltd