Beyond the DoC job cuts: ‘The worst is yet to come’

A 24-hour snapshot: April 10, 2024.

The Department of Conservation announces it will cut 130 roles – about 100 of them vacancies left unfilled because of a hiring freeze – in a bid to meet the Government’s direction to cuts its budget by 6.5 percent.

The potential casualties reportedly include chief science advisor Michael Bunce, and the five-person aquatic delivery team.

Environment and recreation groups mourn the immediate loss of skills and experience, and the blow to the department’s science and policy capacity, but also raise the spectre of poor management of threatened species, huts and tracks.

“If you are taking out this many jobs, you are hollowing out expertise at a time when we need that expertise more than ever, around biodiversity and climate loss,” says conservation group Forest & Bird’s advocacy manager Richard Capie.

Meanwhile, the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ release their three-yearly assessment of Aotearoa’s land.

(A change of language is interesting. The 2021 press statement was headed: ‘New report shows impact of demands on land in New Zealand.’ Three years later, there’s the more benign: ‘New report highlights importance of natural assets and infrastructure.’)

Land-use change – such as a massive increase in irrigation, and expansion of urban development – is highlighted as a key pressure, alongside pollution, climate change, and invasive species.

“This report is a call to action for investment and resourcing to address critical issues including pests (both animal and plant) and diseases, pollution, and land management practices that degrade our environment,” says Dr Nikki Harcourt (Ngāti Maniapoto), Kaihautū-strategic lead of Māori research for Manaaki Whenua-Landcare Research.

An hour after the report’s release, the Government announces it will “improve” (critics say weaken and potentially pause) freshwater farm plans, saying they’re too costly and complex.

Newsroom foreshadowed this weeks ago.

In our story, Marnie Prickett, a research fellow at the Department of Public Health, University of Otago, Wellington, said agricultural groups preferred the status quo, and self-regulation, not what was appropriate for each catchment.

Before all these announcements, the Government reveals its expert group of advisers for the controversial centrepiece of its pro-economic agenda: fast-track approvals for significant projects, which will hand three of its Ministers unprecedented power.

That’s not an exhaustive list of April 10’s announcements, but Gary Taylor, chief executive of the Environmental Defence Society, sounds exhausted by it all.

“It’s like a rolling maul,” he says. “There’s so much coming, so fast and so hard, that it’s actually hard to keep up.”

The same can be said about the blizzard of job cuts. So many are being announced, almost daily, analysis of the consequences can be difficult.

But let’s pause and focus on the cash-strapped Department of Conservation (DoC), which, as Newsroom has reported, is struggling to manage a sprawling network of ageing and neglected tracks, huts, and structures across a third of the country.

Maintaining the country’s beloved, and very visible, visitor network isn’t even the department’s main job, argues WWF-New Zealand’s chief executive Kayla Kingdon-Bebb.

She should know, having worked there for more than seven years, finishing as the director of DoC’s policy unit, and having advised former ministers Maggie Barry and Eugenie Sage.

“The department’s primary role is to manage and sustain New Zealand’s indigenous biodiversity and wild places, and natural heritage and cultural values, basically.”

Politicians might be flooded with emails when the local track’s closed, but the same can’t be said, Kingdon-Bebb says, if the department abandons crucial weed control, or isn’t adequately monitoring marine reserves.

“What’s tricky about that is ministers and ordinary people don’t realise the value of that, or the cost of maintaining it, until suddenly it’s not there.”

DoC’s November briefing to Conservation Minister and National Party MP Tama Potaka, said the department was “unaffordable on current baselines”. Strategic choices needed to be made to match its funding with the Government’s objectives.

Taylor, of EDS, says the department faces a triple whammy – losing staff (out of a total of about 2800), losing budget, and enduring a time of increasing costs. All this on top of 36 redundancies, costing more than $2.5 million, in the previous financial year.

“The worst is yet to come,” he predicts. “There’s going to be more, and more serious and far-reaching, disruption coming for DoC over the next little while.”

Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones, of New Zealand First, has talked about selling conservation stewardship land. (That classification refers to land transferred to DoC when it was established in 1987, which hasn’t been fully assessed for conservation values.)

How much stewardship land might go? “Probably all of it,” Taylor says.

Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop, of National, won’t rule out new mines being approved on conservation land.

Taylor: “I query whether they’d go as far as national parks, but possibly.”

Even before being elected Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon said his Government’s prime focus would be lifting the country’s economic performance.

About a month ago, Bishop, also the RMA Reform Minister, reassured the public its fast-track regime could lift the economy, while mitigating environmental impacts.

He added: “We are deliberately disrupting the system. The status quo is failing New Zealand.”

BusinessNZ chief executive Kirk Hope says his organisation, and others, have, for years, raised concerns about how the Resource Management Act balances environmental protection and economic development.

Some don’t believe the act provides enough protection, while many businesses “felt their ability to develop infrastructure and undertake business development was hindered by the slow, cumbersome regulation”, he says.

Trade-offs are needed on either side, he says, through robust and impartial checks and balances.

“Balance needs to be struck between ensuring the ability to develop our economy to its full potential to provide growth and jobs for New Zealanders, while considering overall environmental impacts.”

Talk of balance and trade-offs is head-scratching for Kingdon-Bebb.

“In the context of the arc of human history, we’re losing wildlife and species at a faster rate now than ever before. And Aotearoa has the highest percentage of threatened species per capita on the planet.

“When you look at the context of biodiversity loss alongside the effects of climate change that we’re already seeing, in New Zealand and throughout the Pacific, it is not an exaggeration to say that we’re at a tipping point.”

Newsroom asked a series of questions of the trio of Ministers: Potaka, Bishop and Jones.

We wanted to know:

• What does “disrupting the system” mean for DoC?
• How should DoC contribute to lifting economic productivity and development?
• Will the department be directed to pull back on conservation advocacy, and sell some or all conservation stewardship land?
• Also, does the Government believe mining should happen on conservation land, including national parks?

Potaka responds: “The Department of Conservation is stretched too thinly with its current responsibilities, including in places and on activities that are low conservation value.

“I expect a strong focus on what matters most for biodiversity, special places and iconic landscapes, as well as key visitor destinations and heritage assets.

“This will require clear prioritisation and focus, and will result in doing less in some areas.”

“At both MfE and DoC … the senior leadership is going to be tested by this Government as to whether they stick to providing free and frank advice.”

Russel Norman, Greenpeace

Under former director-general Al Morrison, DoC faced a series of deep and difficult restructures, after which it relied more on conservation volunteers, and turned to corporate donors, or “partnerships”.

“That is the direction that I think we can see things going,” Richard Capie, of Forest & Bird, says of the partnerships model.

Looking more broadly, however, DoC isn’t the only agency losing staff – plus their institutional knowledge, and scientific expertise. Job cuts are also coming at MfE, the Ministry for Primary Industries, and the Crown Research Institute National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

“We’re undermining the architecture that is in place to look after the environment,” Capie says.

Before the DoC job losses were announced, rumours swirled within the department the axe would fall hard on its RMA advocacy arm. It’s proposed to cut that team in half.

What’s the danger in that?

Fleur Fitzsimons, assistant secretary at the PSA union, says DoC staff are regularly the only environmental advocates in complex legal battles against large well-resourced corporates.

“The cuts could have a chilling effect on public servants who remain in departments like DoC, as they create an environment of fear and anxiety.

“We need public servants to be able to uphold their role to give the Government of the day free and frank advice and the cuts will make this harder.”

This is underlined by comments by a former DoC employee, who tells Newsroom, anonymously, the RMA team has been unsupported by DoC managers “who saw them as being mean to farmers and standing in the way of development”.

The ex-staffer worry about a “cloud of moral weakness” over the survivors of the cuts; that instead of advocating strongly for conservation they will be “bullied into inaction and crushing conservatism”.

That might leave other organisations to pick up the slack.

An organisation with a recent track-record of legal challenges is the Environmental Law Initiative which, last month, won a landmark High Court case over a huge Canterbury dairy consent.

Matt Hall, ELI’s director of research and legal, says: “Where we think existing environmental laws are being ignored, we’ll keep taking those cases to hold government to account.” 

As for the Fast-Track Approvals Bill (for which submissions close on April 19), he says if it passes in Parliament the law will need to be applied. “However, an ill-conceived and rushed law will likely increase litigation risk, and make any projects approved under that law less certain and predictable.” 

There’s a history of court challenges to protect the environment not taken by DoC.

In particular, in 2015, the department’s then director-general Lou Sanson approved a landswap which would have enabled the controversial Ruataniwha dam, in the Hawke’s Bay – had it not be quashed by the Supreme Court, in legal action pursued by Forest & Bird.

Interestingly, the department only made a two-paragraph, neutral submission to the Environmental Protection Agency’s board of inquiry, binning its original, 32-page draft which said the plan was “risky”, “untested” and “inappropriate”, after then minister Nick Smith raised concerns.

“DoC basically pulled all their punches,” Greenpeace Aotearoa’s executive director Russel Norman says, before returning to the present day.

“One of the things that’s going to happen at both MfE and DoC is the senior leadership is going to be tested by this Government as to whether they stick to providing free and frank advice, and honest advice, about the impacts of what the Government’s doing, or whether they start to pull their punches.”

A few weeks ago, when environmental groups met Prime Minister Luxon and key ministers, the leaders of the non-government organisations argued the environment doesn’t have to be sacrificed on the altar of economic growth – that in fact the two were compatible.

“It was quite a testy meeting,” Taylor, of EDS, recalls.

Now, he fears DoC will be told to prioritise economic development over almost everything else. “I think they’re [the Government] even prepared to see threatened species not adequately managed as part of that.”

In 2022, New Zealand signed the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with a goal of reversing the destruction of nature by 2030.

Kingdon-Bebb, of WWF, says the the department, in its financially strained and emaciated state, would have required more money for biodiversity programmes to meet the agreement’s targets.

“The cuts to DoC’s funding, alongside this Government’s policy agenda, which is decidedly anti-environment, means that we have nary a hope in Hades of those targets being reached.”

New Zealanders are going to have to reckon with the idea of threatened and endangered species becoming extinct, she says. If they’re not entirely wiped out, then in local populations. That could be orange-fronted parakeets, Kingdon-Bebb suggests, or particular populations of kiwi, or native skinks.

All because of the country’s failure to invest in their protection.

“A number of our species, in their little habitats, are hanging on by a thread, and without sustained predator control and monitoring they just don’t have a hope.”