It could be. Not as good as my folk songs, according to you. That haka was said by Te Whānau-a-Apanui, the iwi greeting us, to be the biggest haka since James Cook had arrived in that part of the country—I’m hoping we were more worthy of it than he was.
We went into an amazing banquet in the wharekai, and there we marked the forming of an alliance between Greenpeace and Te Whānau-a-Apanui to resist the seismic surveying by the Brazilian driller Petrobras in the Raukūmara Basin. For 42 days, the boats harried that seismic surveying ship—and Kylie Matthews jumped in the water with a buoy saying “Stop deep sea oil”—and that seismic surveying ship left those waters never to return.
A couple of years later, they relinquished their permit for Raukūmara Basin, and one of the spokespeople for Petrobras said that in all the 27 nations that they had operated in, they had never encountered such resistance as they did in Aotearoa New Zealand. That was the beginning of a movement of communities, of iwi, of non-government environmental organisations across this nation that, one by one, kicked out the oil majors.
Then, finally, in 2018, the culmination of that seven-year movement was a very wise and progressive and advanced decision by the then three-party Government—New Zealand First, Labour, and the Greens—to get rid of oil and gas exploration in 2018.
As progressive a decision as that was, this decision today is a shamefully regressive position, because if we are to have a future, the oil and gas industry must have no future. That is for the simple scientific fact that fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—in their combustion produce carbon dioxide that heats the planet’s atmosphere in a way that causes a destabilised climate and extreme weather events and sea level rise and all sorts of catastrophes that are an existential threat to life on this planet—not just for us but for all species that live on this planet.
The Government’s misplaced assertion that somehow our pathway to energy security is to go searching for that oil and gas is so wrong-headed and archaic it is laughable. You would have to laugh if it wasn’t true that they’re actually doing it. It’s kind of extraordinary that here we are, this many years later, and they’re bringing back oil and gas exploration, after our nation was celebrated around the world for its vision.
What is more, it is so obvious now, as this Government also wants to spend $200 million investing and supporting the bringing back of that oil and gas—which is a resuscitation of a zombie that will not come back to life—that money would be much better spent on renewable energy, clean energy. Solar power and onshore wind are markedly lower cost than oil, gas, and coal, and they give us greater energy security. The fuel source is free. There are a trillion terabytes of energy that hit the Earth every instant from a giant hydrogen nuclear reactor in the sky, and, lo and behold, we have the means to capture that energy. Is this Government investing in that instead of putting $200 million into gas? No, they’re not. They like looking down into the hole in the ground for that unsustainable fuel.
Just to clarify, for the Government’s sake, the oil companies and corporations that quit New Zealand before the ban came into place—as I said, Petrobras quit on 5 December 2012. On 6 February 2010, Greenpeace began our Stop Deep Sea Oil campaign—“our”. I say “our”—my former “our”. On 1 November 2010, Exxon Mobil abandoned its Southern Ocean oil and gas hunt, and they said, “Exxon has spent three years acquiring state-of-the-art seismic data in the basin. But its interpretation of that data indicates the acreage has a high technical risk, increased by the remote location and harsh operating environment of the Great South Basin.”, and Exxon Mobil left. Petrobras left on 5 December. On 13 May 2014, Anadarko, the massive Texan oil driller who brought their ship off to the west coast of the North Island, quit their permit on 13 March 2014. On 14 October 2016, Statoil, the Norwegian company later to change their name to Equinor, quit their Northland permit. On 16 March 2018, Shell sold all its remaining assets to the only remaining oil major in this country, OMV.
On 11 April was the oil and gas ban put into place. It was the final nail in the coffin of an industry that was already declaring its own demise in this country, because they came, they prospected, and they found nothing. They found nothing but overwhelming public opposition from the people of this country, and they decided they are better to be not here.
That is why it is a futile effort on the part of this Government to try and bring this industry back, because this industry knows full well that when this side of the House is back on that side of the House in 18 months’ time, the ban on oil and gas is coming back into place. What industry would be foolish enough to spend millions of dollars on trying to dig up oil and gas that isn’t there when they know the ban’s going to be put back into place? What is more, the Green Party is committing to even revoking the permits issued by this Government.
On 18 June 2019, after the ban, Chevron and Equinor—formerly Statoil—quit their 15-year permits due to bad data. Bryn Klove from Equinor, New Zealand’s country manager, said that “people will likely speculate that the decision to exit was driven by the change in government policy towards exploration. But he said the choice was simply driven by the data to date. The firm has bigger opportunities in an international portfolio that covers 30 countries and now also includes solar and wind.”—even Statoil’s investing in solar and wind, but not this backward Government.
That is the way forward, and it’s very clear from the assertions recently in the United Nations that the opportunity in the clean energy sector is huge. It is for us as a nation to seize that opportunity. There is no future in oil, gas, and coal. There is a future in clean energy for all of us, and we will join and support any political progress towards community-owned, distributed, affordable, clean, renewable energy being developed. But oil, gas, and coal—no way, not any day. That is not getting our support, and we will make sure it doesn’t come back.
It was a real privilege to be part of that movement over those seven years, and it showed the weight of deep concern that the people of this nation have for our future, have for our environment, have for our oceans, our coastlines, for the stability of our climate. We want to be part of the solution to that existential challenge. We do not want to see offshore oil drilling brought back, the pollution caused by gas and oil drilling, and the risk of catastrophic oil spills, as we’ve seen all around the world and in the Gulf of Mexico where the Deepwater Horizon blew up. That is not the future we want for our country. We do not need this backward, retrograde, archaic attitude that the only way to make a living is to extract and destroy and exploit our nature and our planet.
That is why this Government will be a one-term Government and this issue that we are voting against today will be one of the issues on which New Zealanders go to the polling booth in 18 months’ time and choose to kick them out, because they want a future based on clean energy and sustainable treatment of this beautiful planet on which we live. Thank you, Mr Speaker.