Mr Platt, who was awarded a gold medal for plant raising from the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture last year, says he personally brought in plant material from Santo on April 23, 2006, declaring them Agathis macrophylla, a species which was in the country decades before the 1997 ban. Now, six years later, the biosecurity police, for reasons they refuse to declare, have raided the nursery, taking away DNA samples and banning Mr Platt from allowing any kauri or Norfolk pine plants to leave his property.
Simultaneous raids also took place at the home and work place of the universally respected curator of Auckland Botanic Gardens, Jack Hobbs.
Mr Hobbs has been muzzled by the Auckland Council from commenting, but presumably he and the gardens were targeted because the gardens are being developed into Kew-type gardens for the Southern Hemisphere, a living library, as it were, of the plant life of our part of the world. Naturally enough, material has come from Mr Platt's nursery.
MPI yesterday said it was "investigating the possible illegal importation of plant materials in Auckland", but refused to comment further.
Bridling at the claims of a "dawn raid", MPI denied this, saying "while the visit was carried out under a search warrant, officers gained entry by knocking on the door and the call was not at dawn, but at 7am". Sunrise last Thursday was at 6.42am.
The statement added: "The ministry times such investigative calls for pre-work hours to ensure that the people concerned are at home. This is both to ensure we can discuss the issue with them, as well as to avoid forcibly entering and potentially damaging properties."
In other words, they turned up prepared, it seems, to batter down doors, if Mr Hobbs and Mr Platt had not been at home. All over, if Mr Platt is to be believed, an academic argument over whether Pacific kauri is one species or more.
Have we really become such a brutal society that an esoteric scientific debate has to be argued with the threat of sledge hammers and simultaneous dawn raids?
Did the bureaucrats not consider a more civilised approach, like ringing up and suggesting a meeting. It's not as though the suspected illegal immigrants would have suddenly made a break for freedom and hot-footed it off to the Waitakeres to have their evil way with their New Zealand cuzzies. Indeed, Mr Platt says he's tried to hybridise kauri species for years without any success.
He does admit that during the search, the raiders discovered some banned noxious Kariba water weed, which he's had since 1974, and dreams of using as a fuel stock to feed into methane digesters to produce electricity.
He says he knows where there's plenty in the wild if they're interested.
So, if they want to, the MPI have something to hang on Mr Platt. But as their brief statement says, that wasn't the cause of the raid.
Of course the local plant world is in a furore. As one leading campaigner messaged, it might have been a better use of MPI's scarce funds if they'd spent the raid cash on backing Auckland Council's attempts to research the deadly disease now spreading through our kauri forests.
