High-quality Access: A Response to the Feedback Questions That Were Attached to the Report, Walking Access in the New Zealand Outdoors

McDonald, P.

2003

Pete McDonald

The author’s: website and publications.

Is it a privilege to be able to follow a foot-track across private rural land?

At the heart of New Zealand’s outdoor traditions, affecting two-thirds of the country, rests the ethos that access across private rural land is a privilege, not a right. That is, the access is a concession that the landholder can grant or withdraw. To argue otherwise is, at best, to not understand New Zealand’s social conventions, and is, at worst, outdoor heresy.

According to a press report (Nelson Mail, 27 September 2003), a survey commissioned by Federated Farmers has found that 92 per cent of farmers are willing to negotiate access with the public. Contradicting this, the report of the Land Access Ministerial Reference Group suggests that ‘many landowners feel under increasing pressure to deny access’. The Reference Group discerned a ‘decreased goodwill towards giving “general access” (i.e., to people not known to the landowner)’.

What do we make of these conflicting findings? We have a basic factual dispute. Who is fooling who?

The Reference Group met periodically over six months. It considered over 230 written submissions, as well as presentations by various groups. Much of the evidence presented to it described access problems. For example, a survey of the attitudes of farmers on the Otago Peninsula (Dirk Reiser, 2000) indicated that ‘landholders are not in favour [of using] private rural lands for public recreation’.

The irony – unless you believe the results of the Federated Farmers survey – is that to retain or regain the privilege, we may need to make linear access into a legal right, thus turning the New Zealand access traditions on their head.

Such a change would affect property rights. In New Zealand, an individual’s property rights prevail over the public’s recreational rights. Federated Farmers, representing 17,000 members, has the law on its side in maintaining that access across private land is a concession that can be granted or withdrawn. (Except for walkways created under the Walkways Act, which are rights of way. In some circumstances, though, the landholder may be able to close a walkway.)

‘High-quality Access’ argues that one-off, arranged access is inherently inflexible and restrictive and, furthermore, that it can be arbitrary and discriminating. It is poor-quality access. We cannot show it as public access on maps, for the benefit of everyone, New Zealanders and tourists alike. It does not allow spontaneity. It does not provide certainty. It is often more available to organised groups than to individuals. In my view, a failure to provide higher-quality linear access will hinder the spreading and diversifying of outdoor recreation and outdoor tourism and will stunt their sophistication and maturity.

Many of the arguments in favour of preserving the status quo arise from some farmers’ unease about – or even dread of – the behaviour of the New Zealand public. The irresponsibility or ignorance or stupidity or criminality of a small minority of the public seems to be restricting the recreational freedom of the majority. The lack of confidence shown by some farmers in the public, justified or not, forms a divisive social irritant.

The Federated Farmers submission to the Ministerial Reference Group talks of farmers’ ‘property rights [being] in danger of being overridden by a public “right” of access, which has the potential to put at risk individual farming enterprises, with flow-on effects to rural communities and the New Zealand economy.’

If greatly increased access caused farming difficulties and associated economic decline, the agriculture of some Western European countries would have been very adversely affected long ago. Yet it is debatable whether Europe’s many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of footpaths have inconvenienced the growing of crops or the grazing of animals to any measurable degree. Would increased linear access across New Zealand farms really jeopardise those farms?

I propose a less narrow-minded and more progressive approach to access, to increase the amount, security, and permanence of linear access across private rural land. Waymarked linear access is relatively unintrusive and can defuse the mutual suspicion and resentment that, in some places, seem to have replaced the traditional goodwill.

I do understand the New Zealand social conventions on access, but I consider that they result in inferior access. ‘High-quality Access’ offers the views of an access heretic.

Keywords:

Walk, Track, Trail, Walking Access

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Evaluation

National

Outdoor Recreation

Outdoors

Coast and beach, Mountains, National Parks, Parks - remote/backcountry, Rivers and lakes

Barriers, Benefits, Capability, Impacts - environmental, Impacts- social, Participation

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July 11, 2012