The mining and farming region is tired of being the country’s ‘environmental conscience’ and wants its voice heard

“I love coal.”

It’s not a phrase you might expect to hear from the mouth of an official in New Zealand, where last week both sides of parliament committed to reducing the nation’s carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

While the country may have an international reputation as clean and green,thousands of people living and working on the west coast of the South Island are so angry at the new climate change laws and raft of other environmental measures that they have taken to the streets in protest.

“I love coal”, says Westland district mayor Bruce Smith.

Smith, described once as “New Zealand’s Donald Trump”, says his constituents do not buy into the “current nonsense” coming from Wellington, including a proposed ban on any new mining on conservation land.

Smith was one of several mayors to speak at a protest rally held in the west coast town of Greymouth recently that was also attended by New Zealand’s opposition leader, Simon Bridges, and several opposition party MPs.

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Along with wanting to mine for coal in conservation land, the protestors want to stop more land being set aside as a “significant natural area” and want an end to the ban on harvesting windblown timber in environmentally protected old-growth forests.

A popular tourism spot, the region is famed for its natural wilderness of rivers, national parks, seal colonies and the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers that sit alongside towns that have traditionally relied on resource extraction industries for jobs.

“We’ve been relatively isolated, very self-sufficient and our people are very capable of looking after themselves,” Smith said.

“They certainly don’t need a latte-drinking environmentalist from Auckland sitting in a cafe in Ponsonby telling us what to do.”

Roger Devlin was one of the 4,000 locals who turned out for the protest, standing alongside former and current coal miners, tradespeople, retirees and schoolchildren from the region.

The owner of RB Devlin auto electricians in Greymouth, he said there needed to be a balance between mining, farming and tourism on the coast and that current government policies were holding back the region from an economic boom.

“They say that tourism is the golden egg for everyone but just remember that when those tourists come through in their campervans, we got to have the ability to have trained people to work on those campervans,” he said.

Tania Gibson, mayor of Grey district, says the west coast is sick of being the “environmental conscience for the rest of the country”.

Gibson, who describes herself as an environmentalist – “at least our rivers you can swim in unlike Auckland’s” – says activists from Wellington would do well to remember what the things they use are made from.

“They say they are making energy with wind turbines but they are made out of steel that is produced by coal,” she said.

“(And) what’s your electric car made out of? Even if you are having soy milk instead of dairy it still has to come off a farm. The day that they all go to live in a cave…”

The west coast has 664.1 million tonnes of coal resources and reserves, but not all of it is accessible or extractable, according to the ministry of business, innovation and employment.

While it could be tempting to write off the west coast’s love of coal as an alarming but otherwise harmless anomaly of small-town New Zealand, the push back against the Ardern government’s environmental policies is shaping up to be a big election issue for 2020, and Simon Bridges’s appearance at the rally did not escape the attention of Greenpeace.

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“At a time like this, it is morally bankrupt for the National party to be spouting climate denial about how we can mine coal for another 1,000 years, and for Federated Farmers to block the shift away from industrial livestock farming,” said Greenpeace campaigner Gen Toop.

“The west coast ‘way of life’ is under threat, indeed life as we know it is under threat (and) fossil fuels and industrial livestock farming are driving the climate emergency.

“Government and industry need to step up and support the people of the West Coast through the just transition away from coal and other climate-polluting industries like intensive dairy.”

Protest organiser Peter Haddock said he was a “firm believer” in climate change and all he and other west coasters want is for Ardern to “hear their stories”.

“We are not feral New Zealanders here on the west coast, we are bloody good people,” he said. Haddock said further protests could not be ruled out for the future.