Distinguished guests ladies and
Gentlemen.
As many of you know, before I became a Labour Member of
Parliament, I had an unusual career path for a politician, in that I spent quite
a few years working in the business community.
In other words, I was mainstreamed before I was
institutionalised.
Given that some of this time was spent working for the
then Macraes Mining Company Limited, now Gold and Resource Developments NL, I
feel that I may have a perspective on how things are seen, on both sides of the
fence.
In terms of public perception and esteem I am not sure
which career option was the step up and which was the step down.
So far what I have found very familiar, is that in both
roles there is a gulf between the reality and the perception of that reality - a
gulf that is both huge and hard to bridge.
I think it is a point worth making here amongst another
busy industry cluster, that we can all too easily get so embroiled in the day to
day activities, that we lose sight of how this might look to those running on a
different treadmill.
I can still remember scratching my head at the beginning
of some days, as I worked to get new mining projects started that I knew were
going to bring real jobs and economic benefit to New Zealand, but ending the day
feeling like I may instead have been proposing bringing back both strip mining
and slavery.
If I learnt one valuable lesson out of that time it was
this: .... mining has become so publicly demonised on the road to ecological
nirvana, that even attempting a lucid dialogue on mining issues, with some, is
incredibly difficult.