O'Connor Damien: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
O'Connor Damien: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 26 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5676. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman) 
: 
 I hope you have a life jacket Mr Speaker because we are drowning in crocodile tears in this House today. The only thing the National Government has ever done for mining is stir up a hornets’ nest against the mining industry when it proposed like idiots to go and mine on schedule 4 land in national parks. John Key has said that the economy is not failing. Mr Joyce says that in the real world the economy is growing. Well tell that to the Inland Revenue Department workers who have been made redundant. Tell that to the Department of Conservation workers in the regions up and down the country. Tell that to the roading industry contractors who are starved for funding because the Government is putting money into its “Holiday Highway” and little pet projects. Tell that to the over 350 people who have lost their jobs because the Government has refused to intervene and support Spring Creek Mine. 
Let us get a few things straight. In this document I am holding a document called  
Design Pack 
 from the Solid Energy chief executive officer dated 29 August we see the proposed new structure for Solid Energy. On page 8 it states quite clearly the drivers of the structure and that the three main priorities include to “maximise medium-term cash generation and value uplift consistent with our potential listing objectives from our shareholder—referred to as the ‘mixed ownership model’.” It goes on to say that it is also a priority to prepare “Solid Energy for a potential listing at some stage in one to three years”. That is what is driving the job lay-offs at Spring Creek and at Solid Energy. This Government is determined to push ahead with the asset sales programme. 
In 2 short days a group of miners from Spring Creek sat down with local management and senior management using information supplied by Solid Energy itself and cut $60 million off the projected capital requirements for Spring Creek—$60 million. The chief executive officer said that those were aspirational figures. They were figures supplied by his company to those workers. That plan deserved proper consideration. They had an indication that in the middle of this week there would be some report on that plan. No the National Government decided to intervene and on Monday announced that the jobs had gone. Well Ministers—the same Ministers who say the economy is growing who say that the economy is not failing—tell that to the families tell that to the wives and the children of the 350 people who are going to be directly affected because they have lost their jobs. 
John Key made a promise—he has made a few of them you know—that he would lift the wages of New Zealanders to match those of Australia. What he failed to say is that he would do it by sending everyone to Australia. He has done it quite consistently—50000 per year—and he now expects the people from Spring Creek to go to Australia or as we have heard in crocodile tears to go up the road 140 kilometres to Westport to a mine there. Well there is a proposal for a new mine and the reason why there are objectors is that the National Government stirred up everyone who objected to mining to object to this one and delay the process. I do not think it is good. But the National Government was in large part responsible for that. There are objections and there are proposals. I could stand in this House until I was blue in the face and say to withdraw your objections but it is not going to happen. They are in there now in big part because the National Government stirred up that hornets’ nest. If it goes ahead the planning for that mine will require hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment. That money has been spent at Spring Creek. The coal they get will be sold into the same market place as the coal from Spring Creek. Yet we hear from Ministers that it is unviable when we have had the capital invested but it is viable up the road when the capital has yet to be spent. It is simply incomprehensible that those Ministers can say without twisting the truth that one is fine but that they will accept that Spring Creek can be closed down just because the price of coal has gone down. Well this document says otherwise.