KEY POINTS:
Moving from manicured rugby field to the wind-blasted hills of Central Otago, All Black Anton Oliver is lending his muscle to a campaign against a proposed $2b windfarm.
Oliver will make a detailed submission against Meridian Energy's 176-turbine Lammermore Range windfarm, called Project Hayes, at a resource consent hearing on Tuesday.
Near Dunedin, the 630MW windfarm is planned to be big enough to power every South Island home.
The first stage would produce about 150MW, with Meridian building more turbines as demand increased.
However, the project is opposed by local residents, who want to protect the tussock-clad ranges from 160m-high turbines and 12m-wide access roads.
A committed environmentalist, All Black hooker Oliver said the proposal was part of a politically motivated rush to appear green, with little real payoff for New Zealand consumers.
"When you look at the practicalities and economics of wind farms overseas, Meridian's and the Government's claims that this wind farm will ensure security of supply and help Mr and Mrs Consumer are quite outrageous," Oliver said.
"Meridian's campaign seems to have been one of half truths, misinformation and fudging information.
"The more I have looked into it, the more this has seemed to me tantamount to a Government-sanctioned corporate rort."
The former All Black captain, who played 51 tests for the All Blacks and 127 games for the Highlanders, is also a patron of the Yellow-Eyed Penguin Trust and has written for Landfall, New Zealand's oldest literary journal.
Oliver's always been comfortable in his own skin - last year he posed nude at five sittings for Dunedin artist Simon Richardson, whose oil painting of the All Black's back view sold for $16,750 to a Kiwi art buff.
Oliver said at the time that he did it to "get out of my comfort zone".
His green conscience or "green tinge" as he has called it, was inspired by his All Black experiences. "It all started three or four years ago," he said recently.
"When you're standing up there singing the national anthem [before a test match], myriad thoughts go through your brain."
Oliver used the pre-match process to examine what it meant to be a Kiwi.
"When I think of New Zealand, I think of our mountains, streams, rivers, valleys and coastline - they're the most indelible images I've got of New Zealand."
He has been vocal about his opposition to the windfarms for several months.
"If anything, consumers are going to be left with a less reliable energy supply, more infrastructure and higher power prices, while a prime slab of their much-loved landscape is sacrificed to the gods of Comalco and Holcim, major Meridian clients," he says.
"That's who this mad scheme is really for, and what makes it even more ridiculous is that the Government is dangling carbon credits as an incentive to its own state-owned enterprise."
- NZPA
