Headline: What’s The Kiwi Bid?
TRANSCRIPT
METIRIA TUREI
Kia ora, I’m Metiria Turei, I’m the Co-leader of the Greens and I’m here in beautiful Piha where the Green Party along with Mischa Davis and Rob Hamill have just launched Kiwi Bid, where all New Zealanders can sign up and bid to protect our oceans from deep sea oil drilling. I hope that you’ll join us. Kia ora.
MISCHA DAVIS
The natural environment, the ocean and Piha are my inspirations. New Zealand is now witnessing the largest oil exploration program ever undertaken here. At present, permits are being issued over an area larger than the whole of the North Island. It’s a pretty serious issue, when you consider the environmental consequences if something were to go wrong.
Even the measure that they use to explore for oil is of concern, especially for our critically endangered Maui’s dolphins. It’s called seismic surveying and involves sonar explosions under the water. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that sonar explosions are going to have some sort of effect on a marine mammal that uses sonar to see and hunt for food. To me, oil drilling is unacceptable especially when I know that green alternatives do exist.
GARETH HUGHES
Three weeks ago we saw the Government open up nearly 190,000 square kilometers of our waters to deep sea drilling, and I’ve just come back from Parliament where yesterday, under urgency the Government has changed the rules to apply for a permit, now allowing companies without the technical or financial capability to do the work they want to do, which is to drill a well, to successfully apply for a permit.
Because what we are talking about is something absolutely at the frontiers of technology. When you look at drilling at say 1500 meters down, you’re looking at a pitch black environment, it’s almost freezing cold, yet the oil is gushing out at close to boiling point – the pressure would crush a person in an instant, and the cables would have to be specifically hardened so they don’t burst. These are metal cables specifically hardened so they don’t burst under the fantastic pressure. No human could survive down there, you can only operate with advanced submersibles and robotics. Every extra meter you’re drilling down magnifies the risks and makes fixing a problem even harder.
Over in the states they had 40,200 people working and responding on the spill. New Zealand only has only 400 trained responders all across the country, and only 60 in the National Response Team trained to a higher standard. In the Gulf they had more than 1000 vessels working on the spill and cleanup. In New Zealand, Maritime New Zealand has 3 boats they call skimmers, which are more akin to dinghies.
Maritime New Zealand, despite the Gulf of Mexico spill being 600,000 tons of oil gushing in, only has nominated 5,500 tons as their response capability they’re planning to do. So we know a deep sea spill can cause 600,000 tons of oil, and Maritime New Zealand has only picked 5,500 tons. And I mean lets me frank; they struggled with only 300 tons from the Rena.
ROB HAMILL
Well allow me a moment, I’ll just talk a little bit about, briefly about, adventures past that kind of helped shape my thinking today, and it began at the Atlanta Olympics when I heard about this first ever rowing race across an ocean, the Atlantic rowing race which was to take place starting from the Canary Islands – Tenerife just off the north west coast of Africa, across to Barbados in the West Indies about 3,000 miles of open ocean, about 4 and a half kilometers of open ocean, and I thought MATE – gotta have a crack at this!
And you know the amount of plastic I saw mid-Atlantic if you could imagine people seated here, and we were rowing, and our heads were about the same height above the water, ah, as we were rowing.
So a visual sort of – you couldn’t really see that far outside the boat. And on the calm – on the rough days you couldn’t see anything – wild and woolly – but on the calm days, every day, I saw plastic.
And if you can imagine re were trying to raw as I said 24/7, doing a 2 hour shift, and you’re focused on the compass which is on the cabinet of the boat, and if you went off a couple of degrees, you’d steer it straight again, and you’re sleep deprived, particularly exhausted, training yourself on the course, and occasionally, you’d look out. So I must have missed a lot of stuff that would have gone past the boat, within sight.
One of the things I discovered mid-Atlantic though was what I already knew, but it was sort of a stark reality: how well we are trashing this place.
METIRIA TUREI
We’ve said no to nuclear, we’ve said no to mining in our National Parks. And we we have – some communities have – already chased off mining companies from their waters. We think about Ngāti Porou and Whānau-ā-Apanui and the work that Greenpeace did down there. We can say no to risky deep sea oil drilling, and we will.
GARETH HUGHES
We’re giving the Government a choice: Will they accept a bid from offshore oil companies that risk our environment and our economy from risky deep sea oil drilling, or are they going to listen to the people? I hope you can join the Kiwi Bid – Kia ora!
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