The ongoing Rio Tinto madness  

ByMartyn Bradbury

Sweet Jesus this is embarrassing…

Treasury can’t rule out ‘lost’ aluminium smelter agreement

The Treasury says it can’t be sure the Government didn’t reach a deal in the 1960s with Rio Tinto over the clean-up of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter that has since been mislaid.

A rumour was circulating at an electricity industry function hosted by Energy Minister Megan Woods in Parliament last week that a historic document setting out the smelter’s responsibilities had been lost.

However, most signs appear to point to the speculation being another piece of Southland mythology – similar to the decades-old tale that the builders of the Manapouri hydro scheme mistakenly left a bulldozer in one of its tail race tunnels before they flooded it.

Officials were negotiating for months with the smelter’s majority owner Rio Tinto about the clean-up, for which the smelter has earmarked $300 million, before the Government suspended talks in March.

…can we please work out who is cleaning this toxic mess up?

Are we to expect a company that will shut down a smelter because of a $46m loss and who already has a deplorable reputation for lying and deceiving the clean up of toxins is actually going to spend quarter of a billion to clean up the entirety of Tiwai Point?

A clean up the Government barely has any direct answers over.

One of the real reasons we can’t shut down Tiwai Point is because the polluters have us over a toxic barrel. The second they walk out, they will leave this toxic legacy with us to deal with and they will laugh when we try to take them to court.

We need to seize some type of leverage here because they will leave us with this poisonous wound as soon as they need to.

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9 Comments

  1. The leverage surely consists of the power supply and level of discount the smelter gets?

    Turn off the juice, or slap them with retail power charges–they won’t like that up ’em!–and might start to seriously negotiate the closedown and clean up.

  2. Most people expect the business to clean up the site if they created the waste, that is, unless they are a big environmental abuser against weak and spineless government legal advisors. (They save their legal spite against beneficiaries and low income workers like carers). Sarc.

    Worth watching.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI_LjMsr8gU

  3. I think the CEO of NZ Rio Tinto has been trying to do the right thing, but ‘corporate Rio Tinto’ seems to think just leave the waste behind… profits before people.

  5. There are plenty of precedents of corporations doing the looting and polluting part, and then failing to do ANY clean-up.

    In the case of the Bhopal tragedy, the corporation was able to maim and kill thousands, and get away with the tiniest payout possible above zero. For a lot of the victims it was zero.

    That is what NZ has to look forward to.—take the money and run! And once it’s dispersed amongst shareholders there is zero chance of getting anything back.

    It’s called capitalism.

    It’s also called loot-and-pollute-and exploit.

  6. More on Rio – not the first time they are involved in this type of activity. You really wonder about the government when it is so easy to google their track record, and the government has been giving them millions for decades in discounted power while our own kids die when the parents are too scared to turn on their heat pumps due to the cost of NZ power.

    http://www.industriall-union.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/Rio_Tinto_Campaign/a4_rio_tinto_report_final2.pdf

    Rio Tinto: A Shameful History of Human and Labour Rights Abuses And Environmental Degradation Around the Globe
    https://londonminingnetwork.org/2010/04/rio-tinto-a-shameful-history-of-human-and-labour-rights-abuses-and-environmental-degradation-around-the-globe/

  7. If Rio Tinto have a NZ entity they will declare bankruptcy and walk away. This has already happened with Tamarind Taranaki leaving the tax payer to clean up an off shore oil well and local suppliers hundreds of millions out of pocket. Meanwhile Tamarind Malaysia laughs at us.

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