There's much ado about asset sales at the moment, but the sale of power companies is just the tip of the iceberg.? Quite frankly, for those of us interested in recreation and access to public lands, the sale of other public assets are of much more concern.
In 1989 the Crown Forest Act began the process of privatising large tracts of public land. The act made little provision for public recreation, allowing access on foot, but frequently not making any provision for the multitude of other recreatonal activities that the NZ Forest service had fostered. Over the last 15 years, the Crown has utterly failed to ensure any sort of compliance by licensees to the access conditions included in their license.? These forests are now being used as part of treaty claim settlements, without any ongoing provision of public access, and without continuing easements across the land.?
Meanwhile, High Country Tenure Review has also been eating away at crown land and at public access.? High country stations owned by the crown were under lease (with enduring right of renewal).? Under what appears to be an entirely one sided process, the leasees now get to purchase the profitable bits outright, and divest themselves of the bits that aren't suitable to farm. DOC gets these bits for 'conservation'.? However,? looking at many of these deals the loser is the public. Easements across the newly privatised land are often impractical,? or completely at the mercy of the private landowner ( even DOC having to ask permission for access).? Meanwhile the landowner is free to subdivide and make a killing off formerly publicly owned land.? DOC (and the taxpaying public) gains little apart from some additional costs to maintain hard to access, non profitable land.
Not to be left out Territorial Authorities (Councils) are busily, and often secretly, flogging off public land in their care.? Unformed legal roads are New Zealands nearest equivalent to rights of way. They are public land, with the same legal status as formed roads, but in most cases they are guarded by whichever of the adjoining landowners uses the road as his/her property.? Rather than upholding the law, and ensuring public access, many Councils are quitly flogging off this land.? Often at the same time as they bemoan the cost of having to provide more recreation, and retrofitting walking and cycling paths into poorly planned roads and subdivisions.?
And speaking of roads, we're each losing out on those too. A road in NZ is 20m wide, yet frequently we get shortchanged.? The 6m in the middle is formed into a carriageway, but then the other 14m is lost. Some of it to poorly formed road edges, unuseable and even dangerous for cyclists.? Some of it to ditches and gutters, which quickly fill with rubbish and often take 2-3 metres of road margin from walkers, cyclists and horse riders, and then adjoining land owners begin to take the rest.?? Simply by mowing the grass they begin to assert proprietery ownership, then trees and gardens appear, and slowly more public road disappears.? The safe place for walkers and horse riders to take refuge from road traffic is removed.?
Much is made of New Zealand having 10 or 20% (depending on who you talk to) public land.? However, while its very nice that giant chunks of the South Island are National Parks, this is of little use to the 1/3 of the population living in Auckland, or the significant number of people living in our other major cities, for their daily and weekly recreational needs. The limitations placed on use of our National Parks also means that they have limited real use for many of us.? Nice postcard, maybe a holiday once every few years, but we want places to walk our dogs,? ride our horses, take families with a wide range of physical abilities, and even enjoy some motorsports.?
If we keep reducing public land, and have little progress on the ability 'roam' (whatever form that may take) this implies that our local authorities are going to be under more and more pressure to buy land for public recreation.? If only they, and we would spend more time protecting what we already have!
Source: http://nzhorserec.blogspot.com/2013/02/asset-sales-more-than-just-power.html
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