Realpolitik has real cost to New Zealand

They never let us forget, do they? I was a guest at a wedding in Te Puna, south of Auckland, over Easter, where the master of ceremonies used his overhead projector to give those from “across the ditch” a good drubbing. His series of jokey slides culminated in an image of Trevor Chappell delivering that infamous bowl to Kiwi Brian McKechnie.

It may have been 29 years since we Aussies unleashed our underhanded, underarm tactic in that one-day match, but the incident still rings loudly in the New Zealand psyche, as do our claims to its sons and daughters, Russell Crowe and Crowded House et al, whose faces also flashed up in the slideshow.

The comparative economic reality means the smaller country has often lost its fairest and brightest to its neighbour, but you didn’t need to look past the bridal table to get the point: the Kiwi-born bride had married an Aussie. Our presence was being felt in real time.
 
Yet New Zealanders quietly know what they’ve got. They rightly take pride in the natural beauty of their homeland, its lush green hills and wilderness. Take a trip around the gorgeous South Island in particular and you’re spoiled for scenery. The country’s tourist industry has, until the recent world economic downturn, boomed, centered around its environmental credentials; “100 per cent pure”, according to the marketing.
 
Now, in pursuit of trying to dig its way out of the economic ditch, new Prime Minister John Key, leading a minority government with his Centre-Right National Party, shakily formed with its unlikely political bedfellow the Maori Party, is threatening to destroy that carefully massaged international notion of New Zealand.
 
First up, with profit as his priority, Key proposes removing 7,058 hectares of protected land from the Crown Minerals Act, allowing mining in sensitive areas such as Great Barrier Island and Paparoa National Park.
 
Second, Key has flagged that, when the International Whaling Commission meets in Morocco in June, he might support a compromise position that would allow Japan, Norway and Iceland to openly hunt whales, with the aim of reducing the total catch over the next decade.
 
When he’s done, Key will surely have differentiated his lush country from its big dry continent neighbour, and tourism – based on what makes New Zealand so special and different – will be the worse for his efforts, making for a much bigger debacle than any dodgy failed bloody tourist slogan the Aussies could ever dream up.
 
Take Kaikoura, a beautiful little coastal town east on New Zealand’s south island, where tourism is the ballast. The town’s main attraction is Whale Watch, a nature tourism company owned by the indigenous Kati Kuri people, which each day charters large boats of sightseers out to spot whales, using sonar equipment, along the way taking in pods of dolphins, seals and their pups on rocks and magnificent albatrosses flying by.
 
(Kai, in case you’re curious, means “eat” and koura means “crayfish”, but locals here advise you to add a soft “d” sound after the “r”, otherwise you’ll be saying “eat bird feathers”. White people or pakeha often fall for this linguistic trap.)
 
Already, the drop in tourist numbers thanks to the global economic downturn has forced the Kaikoura bed and breakfast where we stay onto the market – and if New Zealand’s liberalised mining and whaling policies further harm its tourism industry, wine won’t pick up the slack: many growers are selling up due to overproduction; the number of wineries and vineyards for sale in the Marlborough region, for instance, has risen from about 30 last Christmas to about 150.
 
On the day we arrive in Kaikoura, the sea swells are so fierce that the whale watching trips are cancelled, with refunds or new bookings made. It’s a precarious business at the best of times.
 
When we do go out the next day, the swells are seasick-rough, but we are more than rewarded when we spend 10 minutes watching a sperm whale, called Waiki, spouting water then flipping its tail into the air as it dives.
 
On board, the anger at Key is palpable.
 
The young woman with the microphone urges us to sign a petition asking the Government not to legitimise commercial whaling and turn New Zealand into a pro-whaling nation when we get back to shore. Next to her on the wall is a brass plaque, informing passengers the Prime Minister had launched this boat only last November.
 
Key’s whaling and mining Realpolitik should knock a few percentage points off the 100 per cent pure manifesto. Or, to put it another way, if he doesn’t give his environmental policies a rethink, Key is about to deliver his countrymen his own version of the underarm bowl. Economically, it could be a grubber.