Extracting the truth on mining

than forthright, in fact quite vague and possibly even deliberately obtuse, on the future for coal. On that she has been very coy.

Pushed on the future for the industry, she says there are no plans and there have been no announcements, despite clear signals on fossil fuels, including Climate Change Minister James Shaw signing an international pact to phase out coal for power generation by 2030.

We believe there are 30 reasons for that lack of transparency. And that this runs counter to the ‘‘just transition’’ theGovernment has trumpeted as it plots a future without fossil fuels.

Twenty-nine of those reasons lie somewhere deep into the drift of the Pike River mine.

This Government has established an agency to work towards entering the mine, possibly retrieving some, if not all, of the bodies of the men within, and hopefully bringing some solace to the families whose lives were forever trapped with them, in the eternal dark, on November 19, 2010.

The impact of this great feat would be diminished considerably if the closure sought by the families became a metaphor for the Government’s plans for the industry.

Those plans, should they exist, would also mean a death in the wider Labour Party family. The black of hard-mined coal smeared the faces and coursed the veins of the ancestors of those who now bleed red and sit in providence over the regions.

The West Coast is considered the spiritual home of the party, and mining its foundations. But, however painful, it defies logic to focus on oil and gas exploration and ignore another industry considered even more of a threat to the climate.

Especially when you’ve made such a noise about capitalising on this generation’s ‘‘nuclear-free moment’’, and the supposed bravery of a government willing to look so far ahead, beyond the political cycle.

The industry knows the spigot is soon to be turned off; so do the regions.

They’re not entirely happy about it, but like the oil and gas industry, and the regions, businesses, workers and many others dependent on it, they want to know what the plan is. They want a ‘‘just transition’’, whatever that is. Not a ‘‘just say nothing’’.