Nickie Muir: Rock solid? Yeah right

Late last year I wrote about a local Whangarei lad who'd headed south for a rock solid job with Solid Energy and how hard it was on the men and the families they leave behind.

A life of transience and separation and, yet, the money was good. He'd been up to the Denniston Plateau and it was odd for a coal miner to say he hoped it wouldn't be mined. It was "so beautiful up there," he'd said.

He's back - of course. Caught up in the "perfect storm" of plummeting coal prices and rocketing CEO and senior management salaries - the only things that seem to be immune from any reality checks from a real world market. Except it wasn't a perfect storm. It was just business as usual.

It may grate that a mine can leave a big hole in the ground where good earth used to be and, often, toxic waste to boot and still leave taxpayers nearly $400 million in debt. Or that substantial job losses like the 400 last year at Spring Creek or from the latest meltdown can be part of a mining boom. That's the reality though in an industry that is highly volatile and, by definition, unsustainable.

Back on the coast, Bathurst mine is projecting profits of about the same magnitude as Solid Energy's loss if only they can get consents to mine the same product on the Denniston Plateau. By the time dividends to overseas investors, lost employment opportunities in creating other businesses and the loss of flora and fauna is taken into consideration (something mining economists never seem to do), it's questionable whether the benefits are that great.

Geoff Butcher, Bathurst's economist, said the Department of Conservation would get $9 million towards pest control. One wonders if DoC wouldn't just prefer the Denniston intact and what the true value, due to it's remarkable ecology, is. Bathurst chairman Craig Munro was getting antsy last week that the resource consent process was "unproductive" for his company.

Solid Energy could have said the same of its CEO. Disingenuous too to blame Solid's foray into "green technology" as a reason for failure when it was half-bottomed and not supported by this government.

Back in the courts, two environmental groups have won the right to appeal to the Supreme Court against the High Court decision to rule out climate change evidence in terms of the wider effects of coal's end use in granting resource consents. Meanwhile, mining leaders like Don Elder appeared arrogant and aloof; empty apologies to the miners doing little to help their expensive PR teams keep it seemly. The beneficiaries of a system which rewards bad performance and yet insures its own against any personal risk.

Hearing of the Vatican's new Argentine leader, the mad Latin said the white smoke issuing from the chimney was probably the chattels lists and the mafia boys would be lining up outside to strip the place for scrap in the morning. It was fairly irreverent even for him but he may not be too far off the money.

Pope Francis may be an entirely different sort of leader to the ones we've worshipped over the last two decades; the financiers and real estate barons who became our new heroes. Named after St Francis of Assisi, this Pope, who admires the atheist socialists who fought the military junta during Argentina's dirty war, has spent his career being a staunch advocate of the poor.

Pope John Paul ll also made St Francis the patron saint of ecology and those who protect it; the same Pope who encouraged his followers "not to behave like dissident predators where nature is concerned".

Maybe Pope Francis is the new face of leadership with a social conscience and less bling. It'd make a nice change.