Those people who have sought to deify our wilderness … those days are over. We are not going to sit around and read poetry to rare lizards, whilst our current account deficit goes down the gurgler,” Jones said.
Lol :)
As an aethiest, if you must be into the whole deity thing, deifying nature is no bad thing, it literally underpins everything.
It will, especially since a lot of the proposed fast-track mines seem to be in high-value tourism areas such as the Coromandel (there’s a proposed mine right near Cathedral Cove FFS).
For a nation to go along with this feels like self harm. Mining revenue is way more likely to all wind up offshore. Also tourism is theoretically infinite if it’s managed properly whereas mining is finite.
Another factor is some of these proposed mines treat infrastructure load as an externality so there are a bunch of hidden costs to ratepayers/taxpayers.
External costs to the general populace while all the benefits are internalised? Almost like all the dairy farming coops reaming us on butter while shitting & pissing in our rivers so much you can’t swim without getting a rash.