New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals is a brand name used by the Energy and Resource Markets branch of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE). MBIE administers the Crown Minerals Act 1991 (and its predecessors) on behalf of the New Zealand Government.

Welcome to the first issue of The Regulator’s Update. This is a new initiative to give you information about our priorities and any obligations that are coming up for permit holders. We plan to send you this update on a quarterly basis. It’s part of our new regulatory approach to make it easier for permit holders to understand what they need to do to comply with the Crown Minerals Act, regulations and programmes.

• Information about our regulatory approach
• Our compliance team
• Annual summary reports due 31 March for all permit holders who had an active permit during 2018.

There have been lots of changes across the branch over the last year as we grow our regulatory capability. We’ve developed a Regulatory Operating Model, which sets our vision:

A mineral and petroleum industry that responsibly delivers value to New Zealand.

This vision is underpinned by our core principles that we are:

• transparent and consistent
• targeted
• fair, reasonable and proportionate
• collaborative and responsive.

Our operating model involves the use of the VADE model to facilitate compliance. The VADE model is commonly used by regulatory agencies.

We’re working to roll out this operating model and have a number of work programmes on the go to develop tools and information that will help to simplify the framework for permit holders, particularly minerals permit holders. This means that you will more clearly understand what you can expect from us, and what we expect from you in return.

We’ll let you know more information about these changes in future issues of this update.

Last year we informed people that we had established a standalone compliance unit within the branch, headed up by Jackie Adams as National Manager Compliance. The new compliance team is now fully staffed and will be working to improve our regulatory capability across the branch.

We want to improve the knowledge among those in the industry about our role and achieve more consistent compliance. That will include education, assisting where there is uncertainty or lack of understanding and, where appropriate, enforcement.

Key to this work is reminding permit holders that the rights to Crown minerals granted by your permit are given in return for permit holders doing certain things, including:

• paying fees and royalties
• providing technical reports and annual summary reports
• following good industry practice
• carrying out the work programme stated on your permit, and
• complying with the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.

By 31 March every permit holder who had an active permit during 2018 needs to have sent to us an annual summary report for the 2018 calendar year’s activities under each permit.

An annual summary report gives us information about how the permit is being used and helps show whether you are complying with your work programme. These reports also give us valuable information about New Zealand’s minerals.

Our forms and online permitting system are set up to ask for the information we need from you for you to comply with this requirement. We’ve also recently updated some of our Tier 2 minerals guidance to help make it easier for you to know what you must do to comply:

• Annual summary reports for Tier 2 mining permits [PDF 349KB]
• Annual summary reports for exploration and prospecting permits [PDF 315KB]
• Submitting an annual summary report online - video tutorial

See our website for more information, or if you need help, please email us or give us a call on:
0508 263 782 (in NZ) or +64 3 962 6179 (from overseas).