The Fast Track Bill is now law, allowing companies including OceanaGold to avoid public scrutiny.
We took an Open Letter with over 1000 names (gathered in just a week) to Waihi recently and attempted to deliver it to their office. There were 15 of us, a small group representing many parts of Hauraki from Kapanga/Coromandel to Whangamatā and some Waihi locals supported us.
The main Oceana Gold office in Moresby Ave was locked and there was a sign saying: “this office is closed today”, the Oceana Gold project information office in the main street was also ‘closed’ with a similar sign on the door.
We were having a few speeches outside the Oceana Gold office when an “external relations” staff member arrived to take the letter; We had not finished our speeches so I told him to wait, he walked away and came back a bit later but we were still speaking to his office via the megaphone. We invited him to stay, to hear what we had to say, but he stamped off.
So we took the letter and pushed it under the door of the project office.
We also took a few photos of vehicles in the mining company car park because it’s hard to identify mining activity in our communities as vehicles dont have logos. Shortly after this a policeman arrived alerted by Oceana because we took some photos!
We did a couple of short site visits – to show our people the growth in the massive tailings dams from below and the site at Willows Rd where the Wharekirauponga project will start building tunnels into the forest soon.
As usual I looked around Waihi for gold plated community facilities after all the wealth thats been extracted, but its not remotely apparent.
We went up to the edge of the Martha pit where miners gouged the heart out of Pukewa maunga – its still slipping away on a large area of the north face. This was the pit that was supposed to be an ornamental lake but its no ornament in any sense.
After most of us left town some Watchdog crew, on walking back to their cars, past the project office and were surprised to find it was no longer “closed for the day”, but open and staffed.
PR man for Oceana Gold Kit Wilson complained in this week’s Stuff story that we won’t talk to him. I wonder why?
Even without this weird behaviour Watchdog is pretty busy defending the environment and any dialogue we have had with Kit (and many others that industry) over our 40 years has been incredibly unproductive, and is frankly, somewhat repetitive.
It’s not personal to Kit but this powerful multinational who has chosen to drop normal resource consent applications, (applications that would have enabled at least some scrutiny of this toxic proposal) and take the Fast Track have unhealthy power.
Dialogue with abusers of the environment only feeds their machine – our role is to organise to protect these places and with your help, we will keep prioritising that!