Cypress/Happy Valley News No. 4
Dirty Tricks Department. A friend of mine who was working at Stockton Mine says someone filled out a pro-mining submission in his name. He only realised when he started getting all the paperwork mailed to him. The envelopes have his name miss-spelt and his address not quite right.
It makes you wonder how many rigged pro-mining submissions there were.
Over the last week or two, Solid Energy consultant Ruth Bartlett has been phoning around those NGOs appealing the proposed Cypress Mine. SE wants separate meetings with each. Forest & Bird, Ngakawau RiverWatch and Buller Conservation Group have rejected SE’s offer. We see it as a divide-and-rule tactic. We’d all prefer mediation with a court-appointed mediator. From what we hear, all the appellants are prepared to go to an official mediation where everyone is together and everything is upfront. But SE has refused, preferring the backdoor approach.
The Environment Court has set down the appeal for early next year. One advantage of the appeal is it stops SE taking the diggers and dozers into Happy Valley for a pre-emptive strike.
Save Happy Valley activists are due back on the Coast next week. They plan to camp again in Happy Valley, with some taking up SE’s offer of a mine tour. I think this is a good tactic, since it is hard to get an overview of the mine any other way.
Blind Copy. This newsletter is now going out incognito. I like the idea of names at the top so everyone can see who it’s going to. However some people like to print out a newsletter before they read it and for some others it may cause difficulties with their jobs. For the record, this issue goes to 38 people from top to bottom of the country.
