National’s Coromandel pledge lands on top of its own fast-tracked gold mine

National is trying to sell two ideas at once. Its conservation manifesto promises the Coromandel will be “off limits” to mining, while the fast-track regime it built has already cleared OceanaGold’s Waihi North project, a gold mine tunnelling under the Coromandel Forest Park. Read literally, the pledge catches a significant fast-tracked gold mine inside the area it sets aside. When Newsroom asked National what the promise actually means, it did not clarify.

That silence is the problem. Mine supporters say a literal application would be catastrophic for ongoing operations at Waihi. Environmentalists say it would mark a massive shift in National’s own policy. Both sides are reading the same sentence and reaching opposite conclusions, which is exactly the kind of policy fog that stalls capital.

What sits under the forest park

This is not a marginal prospect. In 2025, MBIE told the fast-track process that Waihi accounts for roughly 25% of New Zealand’s annual gold production and 23% of Crown mineral royalties, excluding petroleum, since OceanaGold bought it in 2016. The Wharekirauponga resource stood at 3.69 million tonnes containing 1.77 million ounces of gold at the end of 2024.

In 2024, Newsroom put the value of the gold beneath Wharekirauponga at about $4 billion, reached via a 6.8km tunnel. The declines surface on private land at Willows Road, outside the park, a design MBIE described in 2025 as “pragmatic and environmentally responsible” because it keeps surface disturbance to a minimum. The Fast-track Approvals Panel went on to grant every approval sought for the project, alongside a biodiversity enhancement component.

So a promise that the Coromandel is off limits either quietly exempts a consented, decade-long underground extension, or it threatens to unwind one. Those are very different policies. Investors are entitled to know which one is on the ballot.

The fifth fumble in under a decade

What makes this worse is that it is a pattern, not an accident. In 2017, the then-Labour-led government promised to ban new mines on conservation land, then never resolved whether the ban covered stewardship land. It quietly died.

In 2024, Coromandel Watchdog warned that the Fast Track Approvals Bill could override Schedule 4 protections in the Crown Minerals Act. Later that year, MBIE’s own fast-track list described Waihi North as a new open pit in the forest park. OceanaGold called the wording “appalling”, and Shane Jones, then the responsible minister, said he was “genuinely puzzled” about how it happened.

Then in June this year, Forest & Bird found the Conservation Amendment Bill had dropped “Coromandel Crown land” from the list of land the Crown cannot sell or swap. Richard Capie, Forest & Bird’s chief advisor on conservation policy, said protections for the Coromandel “could have been overridden”. Conservation Minister Tama Potaka says the omission “was not a deliberate decision” and blames an unintended consequence of drafting.

Five episodes, two governments, one common cause: nobody checks how the words interact with the law already on the books.

The economics deserve an argument, not a shrug

There is a genuine debate to be had. In 2025, Josie Vidal, speaking for the Minerals Council, argued mining is “one of the most productive sectors in New Zealand”, translating into high wages. That same year, Massey University geographer Glenn Banks noted OceanaGold paid no corporate income tax in 2021 or 2023, and warned New Zealand risked being “doubly worse off” if it ignored the fiscal fine print.

That is a fair challenge, and a pro-growth party should be able to answer it head on. What it cannot do is dodge the question entirely by writing a slogan broad enough to please conservationists while hoping miners assume it doesn’t mean them.

Ambiguity is a cost, and it’s self-inflicted

New Zealand already struggles to convince offshore capital that resource consents stick. Mining projects run on ten-year horizons and nine-figure commitments. Every time a party’s headline promise contradicts its own approvals machinery, the risk premium on the next project goes up, not because anyone has decided mining at Waihi is wrong, but because nobody can tell what the rules are.

The fix is cheap. National needs to say, before polling day, whether Waihi North and existing permits sit inside or outside its mining-free Coromandel. If they are exempt, say so and own the trade-off. If they are not, tell OceanaGold, Waihi’s workforce and the Crown’s royalty ledger now. Leaving it to the post-election drafters has already failed four times.

Sources

• Newsroom: National’s promise of a mining-free Coromandel baffles industry (2026-11-05)
• Newsroom: No open-pit mines on Coromandel Forest Park, despite confusing fast-track listing (2024-10-09)
• Scoop: New Fast Track Bill Targets Coromandel (2024-03)
• RNZ: Forest & Bird calls on government to change bill that could open Coromandel up to mining (2026-06-18)
• Newsroom: Coromandel mining loophole an ‘unintended consequence’ (2026-06-18)
• The Guardian: Fast-track to where? The new law opening up New Zealand to a mining boom (2025-05-26)
• RNZ: Fast-track mining projects, the hard questions NZ must ask about the claimed economic benefits (2025-07-07)