Hague Kevin: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 26 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5667. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 The Spring Creek Mine should remain open. It is going instead to be mothballed. It is going to be mothballed because of this Government’s asset sales agenda. As the documents between these Ministers and the Solid Energy board clearly demonstrate the board has been instructed to prepare the company for sale to maximise the share price. That is why Solid Energy is being denied the opportunity to exercise its normal functions of managing through price fluctuations. 
The asset sales agenda of this Government is going to leave the Government accounts over $100 million a year worse off. It is going to increase electricity prices it is going to lose strategic control of important New Zealand assets and it is going to lose sovereignty for New Zealanders. It is going to cost the jobs and the livelihoods of all of those people who will lose their jobs and their families and it is going to cause a terrific economic impact to my home community of Greymouth. For all those jobs that will be directly lost there will be a knock-on effect and probably there will be two jobs lost for every one directly lost. Those will be felt in ancillary industries by contractors by retailers and in schools. The impact will be profound. 
The profits from coalmining currently all leave the Coast. In Mr Joyce’s preferred option of Denniston and the Bathurst Resources mine they will not only leave the Coast they will leave the country. But the wages spent by those coalminers in our local economy are an important input into our local economy. The reality is that these miners the miners who will lose their jobs as a result of the Government’s actions will tomorrow or the day after instead be on a plane to Australia some of whom having come to the West Coast— 
Simon O’Connor 
: They could be at the mine down the road. 
KEVIN HAGUE 
: —from halfway round the world in order to take up jobs only recently offered to them by Solid Energy. It does not have to be that way—the Government is quite right. It could reverse its decision. It could reverse its agenda of asset sales. It could hold out the hand and assist the miners of Spring Creek and the local mine management who came up with a totally viable plan to in fact keep the mine open. But the Government has chosen not to do that. The Green Party’s policy is indeed for no new coalmines but our policy is to have existing mines continue to be open. That is because there needs to be time for transition—transition for industries to be able to move to new technologies that do not require coal and also transition in local economies so that there are jobs to replace these ones that will be lost. 
Minister Joyce has I believe interfered in proper judicial process by calling on those who have a legitimate case before the courts to withdraw it. I believe that is inappropriate. But Mr Joyce’s red herring is particularly objectionable because it is a bit galling to be lectured on job creation by someone who has presided over the loss of almost 40000 manufacturing jobs in this country. His suggestion of moving these jobs to Denniston actually misunderstands the nature of coalmining. These are specialist skills and most of the jobs are not readily transferable between one and the other. But also rather than being just up the Coast Denniston is not in our community at all; it is 150 kilometres away. So he is expecting that these miners will uproot their families again and move on to Westport. Then after that one is exhausted maybe it will mean moving on to the next one and that might be Canvastown. 
His expectation is that this labour force will follow the booms and the asset bubbles throughout the country. That reminds me of the 19th century economy of this country and of the West Coast. The really galling thing is this: we have a Minister for Economic Development whose entire vision for economic development appears to be more of old 19th century industries and who has no grasp whatsoever of the need to transition the West Coast economy and indeed the New Zealand economy to a new one that actually creates high value quality jobs.