High Water co-founder Damon Keen says that High Water was largely born out of frustration at the New Zealand media's failure to get climate change on the political agenda. He says reporting on climate change was at an all-time low in 2013.
"If journalism is kind of failing, then we need to go to artists as the other great communicating group," Mr Keen says.
"Let's use these communication skills and try and get the message out there in a way that no one else is really doing. Scientists are talking, journalists are talking but it's not getting the cut-through so we've got to try some new stuff," he says.
Mr Keen says High Water's priority is to make climate change a 2014 election issue but he also wants to see it become common dinner table conversation.
"I'm surrounded by a lot of people who are good sorts but they won't, in a million years, discuss climate change. They don't consider it a priority. When they go to voting both they don't think about climate change," he says.
"I just want people to start talking about it. In the same way they might talk about house prices, or crime, or whatever the issue is. It needs to be an issue which is actually discussed," Mr Keen says.
He says that apathy from the Government and media towards climate change has rubbed off on New Zealanders.
"If I go to my Facebook page and I put up a climate change message, there is about four or five basic people who are going to like it or comment on it and the rest, the vast majority, are kind of disinterested," Mr Keen says.
Climate change activists outside Westpac Newmarket on Saturday afternoon agreed that the media doesn't seem to want to cover climate change. They said New Zealanders need to engage with the realities of the issue themselves for there to be any chance of curbing it off.
A protestor, Jill Whitmore of Auckland Coal Action, said: "I think the worst prospects of climate change are so scary that when scientists or anyone have begun to talk about them everybody wishes that it wasn't true."
She said that there were common sense solutions to curb climate change and New Zealanders could look to governments like British Columbia's to see the economic benefits of investing in renewable energy.
"Some people are giving excellent examples of what is possible. We are a bit behind the play in New Zealand," Ms Whitmore said.
Protests organised by 350 Aotearoa and Coal Action Network Aotearoa were held outside the bank across New Zealand over the weekend. Activists say Westpac is financing Bathurst Resources mining of the Denniston Plateau in spite of the bank's 2013 sustainability report declaring itself carbon neutral.
In February, low coal prices saw Bathurst put mining on hold that upset some West Coast locals. Activists say Bathurst is now dependant on Westpac to keep the future of the project alive.
At the weekend's protests, demonstrators cut up their Westpac cards and closed their accounts and an online petition has been set up for other Westpac members to do the same.
A spokesperson for Westpac told Radio New Zealand Bathurst Resources banked with them but they were not financing the Denniston Escarpment Mine Project.
Like what you see? For weekly Element news sign up to our newsletter. We're also on Facebook and Twitter.
