No Middle Ground
Book Review | BWB Texts
The Ground Between: Navigating the Oil and Mining Debate in New Zealand, by Sefton Darby (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)
Reviewed by Catherine Delahunty
Warning! This review is written by a person making no pretence of neutrality on the subject.
The series of small books published by Bridget Williams Books have been generally high quality and provocative reading. This book is not in that league.
In The Ground Between, Sefton Darby starts with the claim that he has worked for all “sides” of the mining debate. The elephants in the room and the side he has not worked for are the people whose community is either being mined or threatened with mining. I am reviewing this literary contribution as one of those people. Sefton’s thesis in this series of faux reasonable apologist rambles is that extractive industries are a huge base for our culture and the answer to the question to extract or not is “it depends”. He writes lucidly and clearly about how reasonable he is on this subject.
Sefton is correct about our current damaging dependency on oil, gas and minerals but his “it depends” misses some huge aspects of the debate. He makes nil structural references to vital, uncomfortable issues such as Te Tiriti o Waitangi rights, and the huge power imbalances between multinational corporations and local communities. The signature quote on the book jacket is “there is a deep dysfunction in the way we talk about oil and mining”. I agree, and I read this book to find an example of that dysfunction whereby the industry man presents himself as an advocate for a calm reasonable and evidence-based approach. When he worked for Newmont Gold in Waihi, the utterly unreasonable citizens whose houses were shaking from the open cast pit, the developing underground blasting, and their property values collapsing, made their feelings clear to him. These people do not rate a mention in this book about so-called reasoned discussion. I know what these people said to him because I was there, in the court rooms and public meetings.
Waihi, from space, with Martha mine pit at left and tailings dams at right. Image from Google Earth 2017.
This book, written by a young second-generation Chinese New Zealander, gives many examples of the racism that Asian New Zealanders experience. Ng defines racism as both prejudice (attitudes) and discrimination (acts). She points out she uses the terms “Asian” and “Chinese” more or less interchangeably but in fact most of her material is about Chinese. The statement on the cover conveys her hope that: “Perhaps at some point we will no longer be asked to justify our presence or prove our worth.”
This is a thought-provoking, timely collection of essays by a diverse range of New Zealanders, most of whom are academics here or abroad. Their varied perspectives, political, economic, social and cultural are all loosely connected to the theme of fairness.
When I saw Holly Walker, MP, speak at a meeting in Tauranga, I remember thinking how confident and together she was. That was a few years back, and she must have been barely 30 years old. “Whoa,” I thought, “I could never have done that at 30-something.” When she decided to step down as an MP, I confess to being a bit disappointed. Having read a fair bit over the years about the struggles facing women in Parliament, I had started to think that was then, this was now and things had finally changed for the better. I mean, look at Holly Walker. This book makes very clear that’s not the case.
This is an excellent and timely book, since apart from general statements about increasing or mostly reducing tax, there has been very little comment or debate as to whether we should pay tax at all and how much tax each of us should pay.
