Today a massive protest march in Auckland delivered a strong message to the National Party-led government: NO mining on sensitive conservation land.
Easily 50,000 people marched up Queen Street today. Police said there were only 20,000, but when the first of the marchers arrived at Myers Park, the last were just entering the bottom of Queen Street. That takes more than 20,000 people.
The largest-ever demonstration in New Zealand history was a labour march and rally in 1938 (50-70,000 people). Police estimates would make today’s protest the fourth or fifth largest rally. Clearly the National Party would prefer this latter count.
Even so, National must be worried. They extended the public submission period by three weeks because they’ve already received 14,000 submissions (submissions now close at 5.00pm on Wednesday 26 May 2010). Public pressure on National on this issue is building, but that’s not yet being fully reflected in polls and National has seized on that as validation for its plans.
Even tonight, a typically smug Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee kept pushing the imaginary economic benefits that would come from mining conservation land, implying, as conservatives so often do, that There Is No Alternative. There’s always an alternative.
In the end, the National Party may choose to ignore the strong and growing opposition to mining sensitive conservation land. If they do, then the way for ordinary New Zealanders to be heard will be to change the government.
The next Parliamentary elections in New Zealand will be in around 18 months.
Update 2 May: The Sunday Star-Times reported (via Stuff) that the attendance was 40-50,000, ignoring the Police estimate entirely (apparently they don't believe it, either). They added that over 20,000 people have signed a petition against the proposal, which is in addition to the 14,000 submissions so far.
As an aside, while Stuff's reporting was pretty good (if brief), when I looked yesterday evening I saw that Stuff had published nothing at all about the protest march. That's not good enough.
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