WELLINGTON (CU)_Over the past year, Peter Morrison, an owner of farmland in Canterbury and on the West Coast of New Zealand, has invested about $2 million in a venture looking for gold. He was operating under an exploration permit and has employed three skilled operators and contractors in order to evaluate the potential for a full-scale alluvial mine on the 1ha site. The venture, which has been injecting $500,000 per annum into the local economy, has extracted about 100 ounces of gold over the past year.
Now, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has decided to shut down the venture, claiming that Morrison was breaching his exploration permit. “This has been going on for months … I’ve had my lawyer look at it and he can’t see what this alleged breach is – all they say is that the hole’s too big,” he noted. However, according to Morrison, the exploration permit does not specify any limits on the size of volume of operations.
The ministry has not yet explained how exactly Morrison breached the licence but said permits only allowed the gathering of data over a small area for the purpose of analysing ig the resource was commercially viable. “Exploration activities can include aerial or seismic surveys, intensive surface-sampling and drilling core samples, trenching, bulk sampling and economic and mining feasibility studies could be undertaken,” the MBIE said.
A spokesperson for the ministry has confirmed that Morrison’s permit did not impose any limit on the size of the operation, but noted that officials were concerned that mining, rather than exploration, was taking place. Meanwhile, Morrison claimed that if the Ministry wants him to have a mining permit, they’ve had sufficient time, an entire year, to process his application.
The spokesperson noted that while Morrison’s application is being evaluated, delays are expected, owing to a backlog of applications which had grown rapidly in the last few months of 2020. “There was a sizeable increase in the number of applications for all permit types last year, especially in the wake of the lifting of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions. Applications for gold-related permits really took off, largely driven by a high gold price.”
