Communication Breakdown.

Inadequately Equipped: Forget the loud-hailers Minister, what you need is TikTok. Shane Jones marches into Blackball preaching the gospel of “Mine, Baby, Mine!” the old-fashioned way.

IT ALMOST WORKED. “Matua Shane”, local supporters in tow, advanced down the main street of Blackball. Had the Minister for Resources, Shane Jones, been supplied with a full-sized loud-hailer to amplify his pro-mining slogans, then the photo-op would have been an unqualified success. Unfortunately, the Minister’s loud-hailer was not full-sized, truth-to-tell it was comically under-sized, and the “optics” of that were not great – not great at all.

What that tiny loud-hailer, that mini-megaphone, signalled to the world was that the Minister’s message was similarly under-sized. Worse, in a world grown accustomed to the demonisation of fossil-fuels, where young people, in particular, are encouraged to respond to “climate-change deniers” with undisguised contempt, Jones’s inadequate amplification equipment completed the picture of a politician deliberately placing himself in that most dangerous of places – the wrong side of history.

Worse still, the unintended symbolism of the mini-megaphone, had alerted viewers of the One News item to other tell-tale signs and omens. The greatest of these was the age-gap between Jones’s “Mine, Baby, Mine!” enthusiasts, and the Forest & Bird-led environmentalists lined-up behind their banner.

“How many of you are even from the West Coast?” A rheumy-eyed old-timer who appeared to have seen too many West Coast winters, demanded of the protesters.

It was an old trick, which worked well thirty years ago when those who came to “save” the West Coast’s rain forests were, indeed, the sort of people acutely vulnerable to the accusation of being “outside agitators”. In 2024, however, about half the crowd of young-to-middle-aged protesters raised their hands. The old-timer was momentarily non-plussed.

“Bugger all.”, he eventually muttered, inaccurately, before making his way into the community hall where upwards of two hundred miners, granted a day-off by their employers, were helping to swell the Resource Minister’s audience.

That so many of the protesters were residents of the West Coast indicated how dramatically attitudes have changed in 30 years. Back in the 1990s, angry – event violent – clashes between “Locals” and “Greenies” were not uncommon. Those were the bad old days when, in many parts of New Zealand (usually a long way from the cities) environmentalism was still, very much, a minority sport.

Certainly, some of the tales told of those times carried with them more than a hint of the American Deep South in the 60s. When, in the event of “trouble” with the locals, it could take more than an hour for the Police to arrive, it was very easy to feel paranoid. Not least because, if you were a long-haired Greenie from Christchurch or, even worse, the Coromandel, many of the locals really were out to get you – including the local cop!

Those “Easy Rider” vibes were recalled on Saturday (25/5/24) when, with the Minister safely installed in the hall, a Police officer barred Suzanne Hill, the West Coast convenor of Forest & Bird, from joining her fellow locals in the audience. Not even her official ticket to the Minister’s announcement of the Coalition Government’s Draft Minerals Strategy could get her past the constable. By the time the matter was sorted out, Newsroom’s Lois Williams later reported, “they’d locked the door from the inside”.

The symbolism, seemingly, was in no hurry to call it a day.

So, is Jones being Quixotic, or shrewd? Is the “Mine, Baby, Mine!” faction actually a great deal bigger than the environmentalists have led themselves to believe?

Part of the answer to that question will be provided on Saturday, 8 June, when Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, Communities Against Fast Track (CAFT), Coromandel Watchdog, WWF-New Zealand, and Kiwis Against Seabed Mining will lead a protest “March For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street. It may be confidently predicted that the Resources Minister, and a great many other people, will be watching extremely closely to see how many people follow them.

If similar environmental protests (against genetic engineering, against West Coast coal-mining) offer any guide, then well in excess of 30,000 marchers may be expected. By the time the large number of communities and interest-groups aggrieved by the Coalition Government’s policies are factored into the turn-out calculation, the number of demonstrators could quite easily rise to in excess of 50,000.

In addition to the banners and placards of the environmental groups, a forest of Tino Rangatiratanga and Palestinian flags are certain to be in evidence, along with trade union banners and the colours of the left-wing political parties. As the first potentially huge political protest to be organised since the Coalition Government took office, the “March For Nature” offers National’s, Act’s, and NZ First’s growing list of opponents a welcome opportunity to make themselves heard. What must not be forgotten, however, should the numbers turning-out to be truly spectacular, is that it is the environmental cause that provides these occasions with the critical mass of bodies on the street.

Which is not to say that the Minister of Resources does not have an argument when it comes to the mining of gold, coal, and rare earths on the Conservation Estate. What cash-strapped government in its right mind is going to refuse the royalties accruing from a precious metal that sells for in excess of $2,000 per ounce? Nor should it be forgotten that the coking-coal from New Zealand’s West Coast is highly prized by steel-makers around the world. Why? Because high-quality steel, like oil, is critical to the survival of industrial civilisation. Similarly, with the so-called “rare earths”. They are vital to humanity’s ‘green energy’ future – not to mention the world’s billions of smart-phones.

But, these arguments cannot be successfully sold to younger generations except as part of a future in which mineral resources are regarded as necessary evils, tolerable only for as long as they remain critical to humanity’s transition from a civilisation powered by fossil fuels to one powered by the sun, the wind and the rain, augmented by safe nuclear power-plants and, eventually, the clean and limitless power of cold fusion.

This is the story that “Matua Shane” must learn to tell to young New Zealanders. That any future predicated on a great leap backward into a technological context indistinguishable from the Middle Ages will only provide for an existence that is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”. Humanity’s modern rights and freedoms simply will not survive transplantation into a pre-modern setting.

New Zealand may offer superb locations for making movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastic tales, but any plans to transform the country into a Middle Earth of hand-looms and water-mills should be stoutly resisted. It is the technological magic of the Twenty-First Century science that offers the best hope of human survival.

Forget the loud-hailers Minister, what you need is TikTok.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 May 2024.

The Message From Messenger Park.

Coasters Turn Out In Droves: It’s precisely the widening gulf between those with actual experience of things like guns, chainsaws and drilling machines, and those who regulate their use, that accounts for the angry crowd at Greymouth’s Messenger Park on Sunday, 17 November 2019. In the rarefied atmosphere where decisions to shut down whole industries are made, hands-on experience is not only rare – it’s despised. What do workers know about anything?

THE NUMBERS WERE IMPRESSIVE. Indeed, it looked as is half the Coast had turned out to give this government a piece of its mind.

Many of those present wore their work-clothes. Lots of high-viz vests and brightly-coloured safety helmets – those universal signifiers of blue-collar labour – were on display. Hardly surprising. The West Coast has long celebrated its status as the birthplace of the New Zealand labour movement. Trade union historian, Bert Roth, dubbed its fiery founding fathers – Pat Hickey, Paddy Webb and Bob Semple – “Two-Gun Men from the West Coast”. Labour’s current MP, Damian O’Connor, has been called many things in his time, but a “Two-Gun Man” isn’t one of them!

About the only thing the modern Labour Party has to do with the region’s two-gun men is its grim determination to turn them all into One-Gun, or No-Gun, West Coasters.

It’s what makes law-abiding gun-owners so damned mad. Growing up with firearms invariably instils a strong ethic of care and responsibility in their users. Seeing up-close what a high-powered rifle can do to a deer or a pig makes sure of that. If the bureaucrats sipping coffee on Lambton Quay, most of whom have never fired a gun in their lives, understood that ethic, then they might be a little less fearful – and a lot less judgemental.

It’s precisely this widening gulf between those with actual experience of things like guns, chainsaws and drilling machines, and those who regulate their use, that accounts for the angry crowd at Greymouth’s Messenger Park. In the rarefied atmosphere where decisions to shut down whole industries are made, hands-on experience is not only rare – it’s despised. What do workers know about anything?

That’s the question isn’t it? What do workers know? The answer, of course, is “more than they think”.

For a start, they know that human-beings have been changing nature for millions of years. From the moment some brave ancestor pulled a burning branch from the edge of a blazing forest, our species ceased to be just another mammal. From chipping flint to smelting steel, humanity’s relentless drive to innovate and alter has granted it, in the solemn language of Genesis: “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

You don’t truly understand this truth until, using your own strength and skill, and the strength and skill of your workmates, you collectively transform your world. And that sort of truth: the knowledge you gain down in a mine or felling a tree: you won’t find in a book anywhere.

Workers know that all those people in the cities going on and on about “keeping the coal in the ground” don’t understand that without the high-quality coking-coal from places like the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, the world’s steel mills couldn’t function. Without steel there is no modern world. Without coking-coal we’re back in the Iron Age – cutting down whole forests to make the charcoal crucial to the smelting of iron and most other metals.

Workers know what civilisation is made of because they extract it every day.

Farmers are the same. They know what it takes to coax crops out of the ground. How much they are beholden to forces no human-being can ever truly tame or control. They also know what city dwellers pampering their pets in suburban bungalows do not. That the relationship between human-beings and animals has always been one of ruthless exploitation. As inescapable as it is irreducible: we consume them.

It’s a hard world – as hard as the callouses on the hands of those who work it. And there is precious little which the world is able to surrender to us without long and bitter struggle.

In the process of exploiting its plants, animals and minerals is humankind damaging this world? Are we ruining the atmosphere by wrenching from its bowels the fossil fuels that make our lives so much easier?  

The answer from the protesters of Messenger Park is “Yes.”, and “Yes.” And, unless we want to return to the day before that brave ancestor picked up that burning branch, they’re telling us to “get over it”. Nothing comes from nothing.

Nobody lives closer to Mother Nature than the people of the Coast.

It’s hard work.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2019.