Wednesday 5 July 2006

Still a chance to protest at people walking all over your land

If you haven't yet made a submission on the Government's proposals to let people walk all over your land, Julian has spotted that the deadline for submissions has been extended to 28 July. You can find details here, and Julian's own arguments here (which the Northern Advocate picked up and published). I'm sure he'd be only too happy for you to plagiarise. He concludes:
From the documents and the meetings, you can see that they have already decided that there should be a national "access agency" with suspiciously wide capabilities. I am afraid that it will either become another huge, ineffectual, bureaucratic money-waster (which in some respects would be the best outcome for it) or worse, like DOC it may become a powerful lobby group that will use your tax money against you and threaten your hard-won property rights.

I urge you to send in a submission. The more noise you make about this issue, the clearer the following message will be sent to the government: "Hands-off our property rights!"
LINKS: Have your say about walking over other people's property walking access in the outdoors - Walking Access Consultation Panel
Public Access: Have your say - it's your property you're after - Not PC

TAGS: Property_Rights, Politics-NZ

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

PC,

You should know that I'd be the last person to attack private property rights, and I unreservedly support farmers rights to exclude tresspassers when they clearly have no right to be there. But there are some issues with regard to access that do need sorting out in NZ. For instance rivers/waterways are legal rights of passage. What happens, as happens frequently in the South Island, when rivers shift their course, leaving the 'legal' river in a different location to the actual river. Or what about the myriad of paper roads that exist in rural NZ, the exact boundaries of which are often unknown and unseparated from the rest of a farmers activities. It's 'grey' issues like this that can cause conflict, even when there's no dispute over property rights. Whether this task force is the best way to address those issues is another matter.