Whoops

NZPA at 8.14 am reported:

Wellington, Feb 26 NZPA – A report prepared for the Government proposes opening 500 million hectares of conservation land to mining, it was reported today.

Now the land area of all of New Zealand is 268,000 square kms. That is 26.8 million hectares.

Australia is around 760 million hectares so NZPA have exposed that Gerry Brownlee’s cunning plan is to invade and take over Australia, and turn the entire country, except for New South Wales, into New Zealand mines.

A further NZPA report at 8.52 am reports:

Radio New Zealand (RNZ) today reported that 7 percent of schedule four land was recommended to have protection removed to allow mining.

However it understood the Government thought that was too extreme and had scaled back the area, in a proposal to be considered by Cabinet on Monday, to 7000ha.

Mr Brownlee would not confirm the details when asked by RNZ.

I’m not sure what the correct figure is, but I guess it will be closer to 7,000 hectares than to 500 million!

Now 7,000 hectares is less than 1% of the additional land Labour put into Section 4 in 2008. So Labour reclassified around 800,000 (off memory) hectares of land as Section 4, and according to Radio NZ National is looking at reversing less than 1% of that.

The total conservation estate is 30% of all of NZ, which means it is around 8.04 million hectares.

That means that, if the Radio NZ report is correct, the proposal is for 0.087% of the conservation estate to be reclassified from Section 4 to non Section 4.