Editorial: End of mine is a blow to Coast

Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

It goes without saying that the week ahead will be a sad one on the West Coast. The deaths of the men in the mine disaster that began exactly a month ago today are still a fresh and raw pain. But their absence will be felt most keenly at Christmas: there will be 29 empty places at dinner tables on Saturday and the bereaved families will be once again in our thoughts.

Ours is a small country. There are fewer than the proverbial six degrees of separation between most of us and even when disasters have a particularly local impact, as the Pike River tragedy did, we all feel the effects. These deaths are like deaths in the family.

In times of strife, gathering round and offering support is what families do and that, quite properly, is what our national family has done. A week after the tragedy, donations to the Pike River Miners' Relief Fund Trust, which is being run by the Grey District Council, stood at $1.5 million. By the end of last week, the total had topped $4.4 million, which suggests that public sympathy - and the willingness to give practical expression to it - is not abating.

This is far from the only initiative being undertaken to assist the families hammered by the disaster. The major trading banks have set up accounts - collectively kicking in the thick end of $500,000 to get them going; supermarkets are collecting at the checkout; mobile phone users can text $3; a morning's Auckland bus takings were collected.

None of us would begrudge West Coasters a cent of that support. But the announcement this week that Pike River Coal has been placed in receivership put a different complexion on the Coasters' needs.

This close to the disaster that robbed her of her husband and her children of a father, Anna Osborne is richly entitled to the rage and grief she gave vent to when it emerged that she might get nothing by way of a payout from the company. Milton Osborne was one of about 100 men who worked as contractors to, rather than employees of, the company. With the company in receivership, employees have certain entitlements that contractors do not enjoy: contractors, who invoice for their services, become unsecured creditors, just like all the other suppliers who are owed money that they are unlikely ever to see.

"[Milton] worked his arse off for that company and it's a slap in the face to say, well, he's dead and there's possibly no money coming because of it," Anna said. And it would take the hardest of hearts not to agree that it is another bitter blow to a woman who has already sustained her fair share of them.

But as the processes of commercial law begin grinding through the detail of Pike River's affairs, it is important for all involved to remember that there are rules to play by.

No one would suggest that the miners should forgo something they are entitled to by law out of respect for, say, the shareholders, or other creditors, none of whom have benefited from the public generosity in the weeks since the disaster. Neither, however, should they be entitled to more by virtue of their bereaved status. It is not heartless to say that, as the receivers get to work, everybody should get what they are entitled to, and no more.

Sadly, many provincial towns have been decimated in the past by the collapse, for whatever reason, of their primary employer. The meat workers in Te Aroha are a recent case in point. The Government has pledged an economic stimulus package for the West Coast and it is to be hoped that something will come of that. But in a year when Canterbury and the kiwifruit industry were devastated and the recession continued to bite, West Coasters must - and surely will - acknowledge that there is plenty of need to go round.