A new low

Gavin Evans writes:

Eugenie Sage’s use of the Overseas Investment Act to constrain gold mining at Waihi marks a new low in an increasingly bitter, oppose-at-all costs planning environment.
The Green Party minister – against the advice of officials and her coalition colleagues – rejected OceanaGold’s bid to buy farm land for a new tailings dam. She saw no economic benefit in extending the life of the mine – and the jobs of its 360 staff – by up to nine years.

Hey they’re just jobs that provide income for 3660 families.

He says there was no logical, evidence-based construct on which it could have been made. That makes it worse even than the government’s ill-conceived ban on new offshore gas exploration, which is expected to prolong industrial coal use in New Zealand.
“It looked like the reasoning of someone who had decided an outcome, and then put words around it to allow that outcome to still pop-out,” Baker said of Sage’s decision.
“It’s a gross abuse of power.”
Another disturbing aspect of Sage’s decision – also being displayed by protestors aiming to “stop” the New Zealand Minerals Forum in Dunedin this week – is a tendency to blanket her arguments against mining with the language of climate change.
Yes, more mining will mean more emissions, but only in the same way that trucking more rock, or more logs, or more milk, means more emissions.

Going to work means more emissions. Having a meal means more emissions.