This past weekend, Green MPs Steve Abel, Lan Pham, Scott Willis
and I travelled to the West Coast of the South Island. Our trip was heralded in the local paper with a short article that correctly professed, “the party is strongly anti-coal mining”.
We were visiting to meet directly with those coal miners, the conservationists trying to protect our pristine, native biodiversity, the local council and community members.
Some might have imagined pitchforks. What we got was honest, deep conversations of hopes, dreams, fears and opportunities.
As much as I love facts, after seven years of politics, I know, sadly, that they’re not actually what changes our world. People aren’t just waiting around to hear the one tidbit of information or the peer-reviewed article citation that will change their mind and bring them to the fight for climate or economic justice. Human relationships, conversation and, ultimately, trust does that.
We heard that the people of the West Coast want decent-paying, secure jobs that they can be proud of and which allow them to support their whānau and stay within their community.
Fair enough.
In fact, I think we could say that’s an ambition almost all New Zealanders share.
West Coasters also told us that mining actually doesn’t offer much in the way of that security. In 2016, the Roa Coal Mine near Blackball closed, unexpectedly, at the whim of the international company that owned it because international prices for coal bottomed out. This left the community with a considerable clean-up and a string of job losses, contributing to the more than 600 mining jobs lost on the West Coast over the past five years.
That’s why it’s utterly disgraceful that members of this Government have the gall to stand up and say that they’re fighting for rural New Zealand while actively pursuing public policy that will ultimately make life harder in rural New Zealand. There’s no future in fossil fuels, or propping up offshore profits in volatile sunset industries. We will never get back the devastated natural environments and species standing in the way of the mining sector’s privatisation of profit and socialisation of cost.
That socialisation of cost looks like the millions of dollars the rest of us are left paying to manage and clean up acid mine drainage long after offshore companies pack up shop and wind down jobs. And that’s just the costs we know about. The West Coast Regional Council’s Hazardous Activities and Industries List outlines that 70% of an identified 533 sites across the region haven’t even been assessed for their levels of contamination and risk they pose to people and planet.
To do this kind of assessment requires not only resources but also responsibility.
Luxon’s Government is telling us they’re all power and no responsibility. Despite promising to make decisions “based on data and evidence”, every other day we’re confronted with new policy announcements that demonstrably go against the evidence. They’ve cut 400 science jobs across the public sector and have not filled the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser role, and are leaving similar roles vacant across the Department of Conservation, Education and Transport.
I guess it gets hard for anyone to point out that you’re not even following your own advice if you’re slashing the jobs of the people who’ve so far given you that very advice.
The Government’s own mining strategy also cherrypicks evidence from the International Energy Agency, which, crucially, has advised policymakers that there must be no new coal mines as of 2021. Yet, those mines are almost definitely what’s hiding in the list of fast-tracked projects the Government is keeping secret until the opportunity for public consideration and participation has lapsed at Select Committee. We wonder why.
New Zealanders deserve better than this, especially the communities who are being scapegoated to progress the Government’s anti-evidence agenda. And so the Greens have been invited back to the West Coast, where we will return, to work with current coal miners on the game plan to realise their ultimate aspirations: a local economy that works for people and planet, instead of exploiting both.
