Mataura’s anger is no smalltown tantrum
Mataura is incandescent with anger about the continued presence of ouvea premix. It’s a small town, but woe betide any levels of government, or any conglomerate like Rio Tinto, that considers it impotent as a result.
Anger is an energy and Mataura, at last, has the ability to convert it into swift momentum.
The community has always had a strong case that it was sorely ill-treated by the willingness of the powers that be to tolerate, year after year, the storage of toxic-when-wet waste by its riverside.
But the evacuation of the town’s citizens during the recent flooding was so attentiongrabbing that their vulnerability become all the more compellingly clear.
After the emergency, an array of local politicians and professionals presented themselves on February 14 to a meeting of locals. It was an extraordinary event.
Those who tried to communicate a soothing calmdown, things-are-in-hand message quickly found the tactic was akin to walking into a Roman gladiatorial arena armed with a tube of ointment ready to ask ‘‘tell me where it hurts’’.
They left with fresh wounds of their own.
The up-in-arms locals don’t simply feel let down. They feel lied to. Betrayed.
And their target is not solely Rio, which richly deserves odium after its board pulled out of a postflood handshake deal its people on the ground struck with local authorities to speed up removal of the unwanted product.
(Not to state the obvious, but to renege on a handshake, in Southland anyway, is something that generates radioactive reputational damage).
The Gore District Council has emphatically lost the trust of its Mataura citizenry, who see it as an agency of negligence, impotence, or both.
After the company Rio contracted to remove the waste, Taha Asia Pacific, went belly-up the community was promised a stage removal of the waste under a deal reached between the Government, Rio Tinto and local government.
But as the years passed the rate of actual progress removing the ouvea premix proved to be – stop us if we’re getting too technical here – piddling.
Which makes Rio’s handshake pullout after the flood scare all the more galling.
What now? At New Zealand level, patience is emphatically at an end. Mataura residents are feeling it, the agents of government are feeling the reflected heat – and directing it squarely at Rio.
It markets its aluminium as ‘‘responsibly sourced’’ and manufactured ‘‘under the ‘‘highest environmental, social and governance standards’’.
A great deal of effort and money goes into underlining that message. All of which can be massively subverted by smalltown evacuations and ammonia scares and growing awareness of the palpable ill-treatment of a hardscrabble community.
Already the international media have been getting a whiff of the story. The Guardian described the townspeople as ‘‘understandably fearful’’ given that the floods revealed the potential for an ‘‘ecological and human tragedy’’.
Environment Minister David Parker has himself angrily contrasted some of the company’s claims to corporate responsibility with its disinclination to properly face up to the need to clean up ‘‘the mess that comes from their own smelter’’. Parker’s threatening a Government lawsuit. Now that’s an international story in itself.
The up-in-arms locals don’t simply feel let down. They feel lied to. Betrayed.