FrackT Up
No matter how it’s written up these days, legislation just isn’t sexy. It doesn’t have an elegant and simple interface like Apple-sexy does, it doesn’t create an emotional connection but it should because it affects so many ordinary me and yous. Legislation is, in this country and in my opinion and for the most part, exclusive.
It gives me ‘brain freeze’ (sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia), that abrupt change in temperature in the tissue at the roof of my mouth that causes the blood vessels to quickly swell in an effort to warm the area back up.
It seems harmless enough and it happens. But in this context, it might just be long enough for a legislative decision to be made that will affect me without my input.
Legislation and policy writing “ought to connect to our lives, hopefully not in a fear-based way, yet one that we can understand.” When you access legislation here in NZ you’re confronted with a wall of the best laid out content management systems there are as if that might somehow justify the government-spending it takes to exclude ordinary me and you from understanding what a piece of legislation might mean to us.
You see to me, legislation isn’t just about hitting us in our heads, it’s about hitting us in our hearts too.
“There ought to be an emotional connection to information because it’s been devised from issues that affect us. That information then needs to be connected to choices, needs to be connected to a range of options, directions that we might go to trade-offs, benefits.
And in the end, we need to be presented with a clear point of action. We need to connect the information always with the action, and then that action feeds back into different information, and it creates, of course, a feedback loop.” – Thomas Goetz
It seems like there’s only one loop going on in the scenarios around New Zealand at the moment. The korereo (talk) between Government and the big end of town. Hardly transparent and to me, rightly or wrongly interpreted, has the ‘feel’ of an exclusive behaviour.
To have a broader understanding of what we’re looking at, I draw your attention to what I consider are two important back stories. They’re sort of like the lensometer aka a focimeter. It’s an eye instrument. In its field, they’re mainly used to verify the correct prescription in a pair of eye-glasses, in the lens.
The Petroleum Act 1937
“The understanding at 1937 was that the owners of the surface of the land also owned all to be found on or under it. There was no statutory assertion of Crown ownership of petroleum and mineral gases ‘wherever they might lie’. The Crown had property in petroleum found under Crown lands just as private landowners did in minerals, including petroleum, in the lands owned by them.
The Crown’s statutory powers with regard to oil were concerned with issues of management rather than ownership,and applied until 1919 only to land within its ownership. Even after 1919, statute prohibited only prospecting on private land without the appropriate licence issued by the Minister of Mines.”
The Crown Minerals Act 1991
The Crown owns the in-ground petroleum resource and any company wanting to prospect, explore or mine petroleum in New Zealand must obtain a permit from New Zealand Petroleum & Minerals under the Crown Minerals Act 1991. This includes petroleum on the New Zealand continental shelf and Coal Seam Gas. The Crown Minerals Act 1991 governs the allocation of rights to and the management of all petroleum in its natural state.”
In my next blog we’ll zero in, looking at the Permits. Specifically, those held by Tag Oil, here in my part of the world, Hawke’s Bay.
This is 2 of 2 blogs around this subject :: Previous Blogs: 1. A Frack’in Flash in the Pan
RELATED
1. Paper: NZ History Net: Te Tiritio o Waitangi: The Treaty of Waitangi by Prof. Hugh Kawharu
