Petition 4 new PFA’s update! I received a call from Mark Cousins yesterday. Mark is the Principal Compliance Officer for MBIE (the govt team responsible for making new public gold fossicking areas!) He congratulated me on starting my petition, said that a great deal of preliminary work had already been done to try and create new PFA’s previously but govt had been reluctant to commit resources to it.
He also said this petition would definitely help prove to govt that the NZ gold prospecting community were supporting this idea
and that around 2000 signatures would be a great number to achieve. He also suggested the need for at least 2 PFA’s in the north island! So let’s keep these signatures going aye!!
I was going to suggest a couple up North would be good. Another thought is there’s bound to be a few miners that don’t use social media. Maybe a bit of signage or advertising around the fossicking areas could help bring in some more signatures. Cheers
Trouble with the Coro is the very strong & staunch tree hugging & frog arse licking mob. So good luck getting access for gold fossicking areas there. But if you don’t try you don’t know. Hasn’t happened yet. Being stealth can pay off with quiet means of going about it.
The water flow here (north of Thames) was so little I had to tape polythene to the sluice flare & dam the creek to get every drop down the box to do its thing.
Hi Gavin. Yes it is quite different to gold down here. That is for sure. It is actually pretty shitty gold to be honest. Low purity, high silver content & fairly light weight due to its rough, prickly, hokey pokey reefy nature. Does have a character about it though which makes it attritive compared to boring old heavier smooth, solid, chunky, flat water worn alluvial gold of down here.
Thanks Pirate. It is there if you put in the effort, & keep a low profile. My little jaunt up Karaka Creek had some people come up & “bust” me. I was making the creek a little dirty with my digging & they were swimming lower down in a water hole below a waterfall. You may know the one if you are familiar with the area. They came up to investigate why it was dirty. They read me the riot act saying I couldn’t be doing that there. So that is something else be be aware of. Swimming water holes. I had that problem at three different creeks. One being where I ran the 4” dredge up Coromandel township way.
They dobbed me in to Environment Waikato, through my vehicle rego, who got in touch with me threatening legal action & setting up a meeting at my place, Whangamata back then, & to have a lawyer present. That put the shits up me. The day before the meeting, they coming from Hamilton, emailed me to say, take this as your one & only warning. You won’t get a 2nd one. That was a relief.
Thanks for your optimism gogold! .. I might as well scrap it then? .. so I’ll bring you up to speed.. I met with Mark Cousins last year, who is head of the compliance team at NZPAMs (MBIE) . He told me of all the work their team have already done trying to get new PFA;s off the ground but the ministry have been reluctant to dedicate any more resources to this until there is proof that the NZ prospecting community are behind it .. he is the one that set the 2000 signatures target and suggested that if we could reach this number this would send a clear message to MBIE that we were behind it . We can at least try! There is an election coming up and it’s issues like this that we can use as leverage to make change, there is a lot happening behind the scenes also so please keep signing! Cheers Mal
Cool write up Jw thanks for sharing that, some real character in those nuggets, think a detector and head phones would be a tad sneakier then a dredge haha bloody good effort though, especially in a public greenie zone, been finding a few species lately, nothing of any size though…keeping on at it!
dont scrap it, but certainly dont get excited about it.
im sure the threat of 0.04% of the countrys population revolting will have politicians quivering in fear over their electoral fate
the ministries runs everything, its pretty clear they do what they want and dont give a crap about the direction govt want to go. if theyve indicated they dont give a crap then that wont change
if you wanted to have a serious crack then crowdfund 10k and meet with shane jones to gift it as a donation to his or nzf election campaign. that will carry far more weight then any silly petition.
failing that you could go the temu route and get chat gpt to translate your request to te reo and some woke bureaucrat will take a shine to it and maybe give it a nudge.
as i said i hope im wrong, id love for you to be able to mock me for it but im just a realist mate. unless youre a bigwig donor or some one with clout in this country then you dont mean shit to govt of any political makeup.
I hear what your saying gogold.. and in some respects I agree.. but we have friends in these ministries .. first step create the mandate .. next step ride the pre election anti woke/environmental wave to make change … slowly but surely! Keep chipping away!
Take you negative crap and keep it in your little world. This is something an individual has taken with on with his own enthusiasm, for the benefit of all of us who are interested in the shinny stuff. Mals efforts are the the sort of efforts the the countries honors are recognized with.
We don’t need or want negative people chasing gold and complaining that it’s too hard.
