Same old problem at Pike River

Anew group of politicians is promising to reenter the Pike River Mine to retrieve the bodies of the miners. So once again the grieving families of the miners are hoping to find their loved ones.

But in the end the result might prove to be the same: that the mine cannot be safely entered, and the families will again be left high and dry. In which case the grief and the outrage will go on.

Andrew Little, the minister in charge of the reentry, says it won’t happen if it is too risky. ‘‘I am not going to put anybody at undue risk. I amsimply not going to,’’ Little said.

So how is that different from what the last lot of governing politicians said? Former National Prime Minister John Key said he would do everything possible to get the bodies out. Labour politicians promised to do something similar.

NZ First leader Winston Peters made the most dramatic pledge: he would go into the mine himself.

Perhaps the main political difference right now is that Little is working alongside the families and involving them in the project. He has the advantage that he is part of a new government that has not yet disillusioned the grieving relatives.

Perhaps that is why the families find it understandable that the new Government’s promises of re-entry contained caveats over safety. But they also think it ‘‘unlikely’’ that the risk assessment would uncover something they didn’t know.

The brute reality, however, is that no government could allow re-entry if it is unsafe. Here, however, it seems likely that the experts will disagree. And in that case the final decision will be made by politicians - Andrew Little and his Cabinet colleagues.

The scope for political trouble here is huge, partly because Peters has already decreed that it is safe to go into the mine. He cannot back down on that without damaging his own credibility and infuriating the families.

It is entirely possible that Peters might find himself offside with many of his Cabinet colleagues over this. Little, after all, has left himself an out-clause; Peters has not. Little is now forming a new body, the Pike River Re-entry Agency, which will consider the safety issue. That, however, cannot be a way of avoiding political responsibility for the final decision.

Because in the end the decision must be the government’s. If the re-entry results in more deaths in this terrible place, the government will be blamed, regardless of the recommendations its experts made.

And here the political issues are tangled. The families are grieving and clearly some of them feel that they can never stop grieving unless the bodies are recovered.

But outside this small group there is no large constituency with a passionate commitment to reentering the drift.

Nearly everyone agrees that more casualties in the mine would be a catastrophe compounding a previous catastrophe.

The families, understandably, are likely to have a different view of the safety risk from most other people. That is another reason why the final decision needs to be made by someone whose emotions are not as fiercely engaged.

Re-entry into the mine must be safe.