NZ's Ban on Oil Exploration Has Thawed My Cynical Heart

Barring the occasional ferry ride, I have never been on the water for any extended period of time. So when I was interviewed to become a crew member on Sea Shepherd's flagship, the M/Y Steve Irwin, I could not in good faith answer the question about whether I got sea sick—it turns out the answer is yes.

I joined the oceangoing conservation activists for the second of their Jeedera campaigns. The first campaign, which took place in 2016, showcased the beauty and biodiversity of The Great Australian Bight in order to demonstrate the foolishness of allowing BP to commence oil exploration in the area, with a view towards setting up deep sea drilling operations in the future. Sea Shepherd were successful in preventing exploration on the part of BP but other oil companies, namely Statoil and Santos, have recently shown interest in the area, prompting the need for the second campaign.

The timing of the campaign was strategic. The Steve Irwin docked in Adelaide days before the extremely close state election. Whilst Sea Shepherd did not officially endorse any of the parties, their preference for the Greens was understandable. The reigning Labour party and Nick Xenophon's newly formed 'SA Best' party were unwilling to greenlight oil exploration and drilling in the Bight to varying degrees. It was very disheartening then to find that the Liberal Party had won the election and would be moving to roll back much of the state's marine park legislation, which has been a stumbling block to oil exploration in the Bight.

I was, as they say in both Australia and New Zealand, gutted. I had joined Sea Shepherd for this campaign in particular because of my increasing frustration with political dawdling and inaction on climate change. I had gone on marches and written letters to politicians who sent only form letters in return. I had watched the Kyoto Protocol be neglected and watched in horror as Trump pulled America out of the Paris Agreement. At a time when intervention might still mitigate—note: mitigate, not prevent or avoid—the effects of climate change, it was crushing to see that instead of moving towards renewable energy sources, politicians seemed hell bent on exploiting an iconic Australian resource for short term gains.

This is business as usual in Australia. The ongoing reliance on fossil fuels is apparent in the federal government's pressure to end state moratoriums on fracking and the ongoing debate on the Adani coal mine. This is not to mention that one of Australia's most recent prime ministers is a climate change sceptic.

We do not talk enough about the personal experience of politics, that private but all important encounter between the individual and their political environment. We do not wonder about the ongoing effects of some political climates over others. What does repeated disappointment do? Does it make a cowardly graduate student run off to sea with a controversial—albeit, increasingly less so—conservation group? What role does hope play?

There is much ink spilled on growing up with the civil rights movement or the Vietnam war as one's political backdrop. Less so with more contemporary events, possibly because those accounts are still being written and mulled over. My first formative encounter with politics was as a teenager living in Melbourne watching the anti-war protests against involvement in Iraq. We were told that these were the largest protests since Vietnam but this did not prevent Australia, not to mention a host of other countries with similar levels public outrage, from joining the invasion of Iraq.

My first encounter with politics was defeat and powerlessness.

Recently, at a talk on the experiences and expectations of those growing up before the neo-liberal reforms of the fourth Labour government in New Zealand, I came to the conclusion that over the years this initial sense of defeat had only grown more pervasive. Realising that I had never experienced a time before neoliberalism, I asked the speaker what his personal expectations for the future had been. He described feeling excited and hopeful about the future. He had believed a time was coming when the problems of the world—poverty, war, pollution—would be solved, in part due to technology but also because the world seemed to be on an upward trajectory. As he spoke, I realised to my great sadness that I could not at all relate to what he was describing.

My own feelings about the future have always been markedly more negative. I do not take it for granted that the future will be better than the past. Instead, I have always felt a kind of resentment, a feeling of being cheated; that this was not the world I had been promised.

It's true that humans now live longer and on average have a much higher standard of living than at any other point in human history, yet I cannot help but feel that instead of the pristine, lush earth I had been expecting, I received a dying one. Instead of a world where opportunities were freely and fairly available, I received a fundamentally unequal one. My pessimism about climate change then is a small part about my general pessimism about politics and the future.

I was utterly surprised then to find that politicians can sometimes behave well. Like many New Zealanders, I now live in Australia but watching Jacinda Ardern announce an end to oil exploration in New Zealand, I feel thoroughly homesick and thoroughly proud.

I do not wish to be so reckless or naive as to say that I suddenly have hope about the future. I do not know whether this will stick. The backlash is likely to be formidable and it has only just begun. But this is a welcome departure from the complete idiocy and reckless negligence that is Australia's approach to climate change. It is also a welcome departure from the usual limp attempts to address climate change with vague promises to invest in 'green' technology or public transport. It is a genuine acknowledgement that for the future to be different, it has to stop resembling the past. It requires a substantial departure from the status quo.

Fearing that she was somewhat of Trudeau-esque figure, all photo-ops, no action—or worse, regressive action—I have in past been cynical about Jacinda and the Labour Coalition. I am not ready to let go of that cynicism entirely, nor has New Zealand miraculously gained environmental credentials by virtue of doing better than its backwards neighbour. It is also worth remembering that the ban does not apply to the existing 22 oil exploration licenses currently active in New Zealand. To put the dangers of this in perspective: if Australia were introduce an identical ban, the Bight would still be in danger as Statoil currently holds a license for that area.

However, I must confess that I have rarely been this moved. I do not know quite what to say in order to do justice to what feels like a small but significant turning point, except perhaps this: Kia ora, Jacinda.