This is very good news today with the Rio Tinto decision to close the aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point in Bluff.
This company has been using 14% of New Zealand’s total electricity production at ridiculously low prices for many decades.
A quick, back-of-an-envelope calculation shows that government electricity subsidies have been so high that the country would be better off with the smelter closed and the workers paid their full salaries for the rest of their lives. I wrote about this in a previous blog.
CAFCA (Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa) has described the Rio Tinto situation as “the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand.”
Rio Tinto won the 2011 Roger Award for the worst foreign multi-national company operating in New Zealand. At the time the company was using bullying threats to close the smelter if the Emissions Trading Scheme came into force. The judges’ report at the time concluded the company had a 50-year history of “suborning, blackmailing and conning successive New Zealand governments into paying massive subsidies on the smelter’s electricity; dodging tax, and running a brilliantly effective PR machine to present a friendly, socially responsible and thoroughly green-washed face to the media and the public.”
The government’s role now must be to pour those tens of millions in electricity subsidies into sustainable, environmentally friendly job creation opportunities in Southland rather than pour them into the pockets of a bloated, polluting, climate-denying multinational.
We shouldn’t hold our breath though. What we will now see is a public relations campaign by the smelter to pressure the government to lower electricity prices further for this corporate bludger. Already Tim Shadbolt and the local business organisations are whinging on behalf of Rio Tinto rather than on behalf of the New Zealand taxpayer.
Expect to hear plenty of self-serving drivel from the deep south in the year to come.
Would this be a different outcome if this plant was located in a marginal or Labour electorate – methinks yes
Your replies have consistently shown an inability to think so at least you stay the course.
If Key ,English or Muller were still in charge, then yes the result would have been different. Millions more down the proverbial gutter. But National has always been supportive of corporate beneficiaries. You thinks lopsided!
Absolutely. Rio Tinto would never have gotten a $30 million taxpayer-funded subsidy if the smelter wasn’t in the heart of “Double Dipton” Bill English’s electorate.
Right on John! Fork tongue seemore has tweeted it’s all Labour’s fault. He obviously can’t see the irony in an Act full time trough gobler calling for subsidies for big business.
Exactly and given seemores all of 10 years old he has no clue on the smelters history.
So the question is what will Muller and Seemore actually do to support Southland? Anything anything at all? Or will we get the constant sound of barking. Tell me again what has Seymour actually achieved in his time in parliament?
It’s not as if this came as a surprised. Rio do this on a regular basis.
If your calcs are correct John, I agree with your better ideas over mine that I’ve previously expressed.
They are not the only corporate bludgers with their hands out and they won’t be the last there are still many at the trough. In the meantime our addiction services get a measly 35 million. Where is the money from crime proceeds going. If it is from the sales and profiting of drugs a big chunk of it it should be going towards addictions.
They are not the only corporate bludgers with their hands out and they won’t be the last there are still many at the trough. In the meantime our addiction services get a measly 35 million. Where is the money from crime proceeds going. If it is from the sales and profiting of drugs a big chunk of it it should be going towards addictions.
About time, it’s a blow for the people Southland but it should be feasible to use some of the 14% of the countries power to be used in the Southland area. National when in power made vague statements about the smelter and Labour inherited the mess. Time to diversify into projects for today and not yesterday.
Spot on John!
The smelter has no part in the future of NZ, despite the whining and whinging of the likes of Tim Shadbolt.
It’s not as though we have been processing a local material in an added value process.
As I wrote on the other thread dedicated to this topic:
‘The reason the smelter was built in NZ was because Australia lacked (and still lacks, of course) the hydro systems that supposedly generate cheap electricity…if you don’t count the emissions commensurate with construction, the loss of land and the slow filling up behind the dam, which increases methane emissions and eventually renders the dam unless the sediment is dredged out.
So many false assumptions.’
(Plus the seven other reasons I listed as to why aluminium smelting in NZ is extemely environmentally damaging and unsustainable. =not that it is sustainable ANYWHERE in the long term)
You put it so well, John -‘Expect to hear plenty of self-serving drivel from the deep south in the year to come.’
The sooner we get free of that toxic mega Zombie-Corp Rio Tinto the better!!
Bet they don’t clean up after themselves……
Bet you’re right, Russell, and even if they do, it is SO toxic, and there is SO MUCH of it that it will be a cancerous problem for a long, long time:
Mataura Locals Unnerved on Waste Removal
If the land that the smelter is sited on is not 100% NZ owned, then that needs to be rectified. Either we bite the bullet and purchase it, or we enact a law to ensure that at the point of such sales, the land returns to NZ. Any company wishing to buy it in the future needs to be 100% NZ owned. O/S entities might lease, only, and for clear and reasonable lengths of time.
The land is the body of Aotearoa. We, the transient humans who are here now, have no right to sell off pieces of this body of land, this tiny survival raft that we inhabit. We have a responsibility towards the land, a duty of care. Yet so often this has been abused. Now is a time when we have the possibility of changing course to a better way of being.
The trick now is to introduce a bill to force Rio Tinto to leave the land as if the factory had never been there. Then when they complain offer to buy the plant off them for $1 and reopen it as a nationalised plant. Some BS about national security could also be used as cover. After all we’d be totally ****ed without aluminum.
John Souker
Cool head idea and possibly best rational solution.
“Expect to hear plenty of self-serving drivel from the deep south in the year to come”.. So it’s business as usual then… What does surprise me is how transparent the commentary from the tory mossbank has become.. They’ve become the “rolling Stones” of political politics, as in they are now reduced to parodying themselves, as they have nothing more than the same tired out rubbish they’ve been peddling through their pet news media for decades.. The single reason there is to justify supporting this idiocy. is greedy self interest.. There simply aren’t any other valid excuses..
They got 30 million from the National government and Bill said ‘no more money’ We can’t keep giving them money something else needs to be done. National might be able to come up with a PLAN most of the people of Southland vote for National no matter what. Lets see what they can come up with.
Yeah Michelle the Natz will offer bigger bribes and subsidies for more dairy farms.
Apparently an article I read today they went back again to see bill english before the last election and he told them to fuck off out of his office. That was after being told in 2013 no more subsidies.
Well said John.
Let’s get rid of the film industry vultures next.
So John, you’re perfectly ok that 2600 people will lose their livelihood? Good to know. By the way, you’ve just provided justification for the actions of the Labour government in the 1980s for shutting down all those car assembly plants and other subsidised industries.
Elsewhere, another poster suggested: “We should buy the site back, then tear most of it down, and then repurpose it to recycle plastic. Keeping it running as a smelter would be a waste of money.”
I wrote, “That would not only “work”, it would solve one of NZ’s all-time worst problems – the one that successive govts keep avoiding, sending it off shore, pretending it doesn’t exist.
We have mountains, literally, of toxic waste of all kinds that our govts wash their hands of – Time for them to take responsibility for this and deal with it!
And here, waiting for them, is the solution. If they don’t take this opportunity now, they’ll have to build something similar to do so in the future.” Original comments here
Again, we have a humungous toxic waste crisis in NZ that we’re pretending does not exist. Let’s re-purpose the smelter to finally deal with it. (Such a project would continue to provide many jobs.)
what ever happened to government support to develop and establish the infrastructure that would be needed for workers cooperatives could step in to take over businesses abandoned by international corporates. e.g legal infrastructure, financial lending infrastructure,…. the workers cooperative would have to show that they had a market for the products and hey presto. could certainly make a profit if not chanelling money into exhorbitant executive salaries and overseas profit.
oh thats right it would be seen as being tooooo left wing for this country..
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