Bruce Bisset: Save it before everything is gone

At risk of inviting last-minute disaster, those afflicted with triskaidekaphobia can breathe much easier come Wednesday, when we put the thirteenth year of the millennium behind us and say hello to a far more comfortable number.

Well, comfortable for those with that peculiar fear, but not so for the rest of us. For if this year was one of vexed agitation as we watched the big boys line us up in their sights, next year is the year the hammer comes down.

The year they start fracking the East Coast and drilling in the deep sea basins and prospecting with a will in our forest parks; the year we get sewn up in a tidy disposable bag mislabelled "free trade" and dumped on by all our "friends" around the Pacific rim.

Yep; if this was a year of living anxiously, next is a year of kissing your assets goodbye.

And I don't mean just the family silver - Genesis, Meridian, and the like - I mean the real treasure: our only-in-New Zealand environment.

You know, that fantastic abundance of natural delights that is the backbone of our pride in being Kiwis. The thing that attracts every tourist and their dollars; the thing that even the long-term ex-pats dream of revisiting someday.

Yeah, that. Kiss it goodbye.

Because Key and co will have finished their work, and be taking the money and running. Leaving Labour and the Greens with the near-impossible task of trying to mitigate the contracts and agreements that have sold us out, while getting bad press and no thanks.

As usual. In case you hadn't noticed, with the exception of Rogernomics it's the normal political cycle: Blue balls-up followed by Red (Red/Green, this time) recovery - though naturally that's not how the money paints it.

But with the RMA gutted, regional councils being abolished, and our sovereignty signed away to foreign corporates (and their enforcers) who see paradise as an opportunity for despoliation, it will be very cold comfort by the time the election rolls around and we boot this pack of traitors out of office.

Because they'll be laughing with their banker mates, in some tropical tax haven.

And all those smarmy yes-men who parrot the "good for business is good for us all" line, ignoring (at best) the ruination that comes with intensive resource development, will be snivelling about how one shouldn't turn off the money tap - while they pretend our country is still fine, if not exactly 50 per cent pure any more.

Think I'm overstating it? Must you have your nose rubbed in an oil slick on the beach or your child die from swimming in a toxic river before you appreciate what it is that is being lost?

Because that's where we are heading. And we're heading there this year.

In Costa Rica the government is being sued by a multinational for not allowing them to destroy a rainforest for mining. In Australia the government is likely to approve a coal port that threatens the existence of the Great Barrier Reef. And in the US innocent farmers are still being sued for growing GM-crops that they don't want, but that have blown in from neighbouring GE farms.

This is how the big boys operate. They don't care what gets ruined, so long as they make money, and they don't let anyone stand in their way. And these are the people this government is letting in here, in droves.

Surely things won't get that bad. Surely, you say, we're more civilised, more responsible, than that. Well, maybe we are.

But the ones who will own us are not.

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.