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| The bastard French terrorist sunk the 1st one..... |
The new Rainbow Warrior is coming back to New Zealand! Hooray!
It's to celebrate NZ's new Jacinta Arden's Labour party, in that the other month it made a law that there would be no new licences issues for offshore oil exploration in NZ's 200 nautical mile sovereign zone. Apparently it made world news.
Arden has defined banning these licences as a "nuclear free moment" for NZ. Harking back 1987 when NZ declared itself the first country in the world to be nuclear free. Back then the ban led to American warships being banned from Auckland Harbour because NZ didn't know if they were nuclear powered or not.
It also led to America dropping us out of the ANZUS alliance saying their ships couldn't dock here so what was the point of us being in it? They cut us off from all American intelligence, which was probably a blessing as Kiwis didn't go to Iraq, ha ha. But Australia gave NZ all the intelligence the US was giving anyway, and us Kiwis still didn't go to Iraq. Ha ha, stupid Australians and Americans..... (dual citizen speak there).
I was living in Auckland at the time being a Kiwi in the lead up to the nuclear free legislation. I remember an American warship coming into Auckland harbour and having to stop because there were so many protest boats in front of it. The next day the headlines read "Protesters stop US warship!".
NZ's position to the French was entirely understandable. We had protested long and hard against the French nuclear bombing tests on Moruroa Atoll in the South Pacific that was progressively turning the atoll to smithereens and releasing radiation into the South Pacific. The French considered it "their land" which begged the question, why couldn't they then carry out these tests in France itself? Their land, and not in our space?
But the French kept on, even going to underground testing and sinking the atoll lower and lower. Kiwis kept on protesting, and back then the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior felt compelled to protest with us. Those protests would include going into the bomb zone to stop the testing. NZ'ers considered the Rainbow Warrior an expression of our protest and supported it's actions.
However the French powers that were hated it, and us Kiwi's, for daring to even protest their destruction and radioactive release to the environment that Moruroa Atoll had become, and most of all they hated the Rainbow Warrior for daring to interfere in what they considered their own territory and own testing grounds.
It came to a head with the French gov committing an act of terrorism in Auckland Harbour on Marsden Wharf, NZ's largest city of 1 million people. On July 10th 1985, French secret agents in wet-suits dived into Auckland Harbour and attached two bombs to the outside of the Rainbow Warrior moored on Marsden Wharf. When they exploded they sink the ship instantly, in the process murdering the photographer on-board who couldn't get out.
NZ was shocked to the core. However the secret agents were soon caught (dumb asses) and in NZ custody. Us Kiwis wanted to bloody throttle them! Put them under our laws and jail them as the NZ judiciary would. However it was not to be. You see France is a big world power, particularly in the European Union.
France told NZ to give up the two terrorists or it would use it's EU powers to block all NZ dairy product exports to the UN, thereby destroying NZ's economy. The gov had no choice but to give the terrorists over. It was sort of a bit of a deal, not really.
The two ended up going to French Polynesia, a tropical island sort of thing holiday place. A year or two after that the France repatriated them back to France as heroes. After that I realised that in the world we have little countries like NZ get shitted on by big countries like France, and that's just the way it is in this world.
But in the end, decades later......
Now the NZ prime minister Jacinta Arden calls stopping all future oil drilling licences offshore in NZ waters as her generation's "nuclear free moment". All of the above puts perspective on that for all Kiwis.
“New Zealand has led the world on climate action with the ban on new offshore oil and gas permits, but our work has only just started. Despite the climate crisis and the obvious need to rapidly wean ourselves off dirty energy, oil companies with existing licenses to explore and drill could still have a presence here for decades to come,” she says.
“We’re in the midst of a new age of technology, and clean energy is our trump card in the fight against climate change. By making significant investment in a new clean and smart electricity system for New Zealand, we could make dirty energy obsolete quite quickly – New Zealand could be an oil free nation.
” The first stop for the Rainbow Warrior will be Matauri Bay on September 10. The Northland bay is the final resting place of the original Rainbow Warrior, which was bombed in 1985 by the French Secret Service in retaliation for protests against France’s Pacific nuclear testing programme.
In 1987, New Zealand became the first country in the world to declare itself nuclear free.
Simcock says it’s fitting that forty years later, in the lead up to the offshore oil and gas ban announcement, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern famously labelled climate change her generation’s “nuclear free moment”.
“The Rainbow Warrior is the link between these two important historic events. Back in the 1980s, New Zealand stood up to the world’s nuclear powers, becoming leaders on the biggest global threat of the time,” she says.
“In 2018, there has never been a greater threat than climate change, and it’s driven by the relentless pursuit of more fossil fuels to burn. By replacing the dirty energy industry with clean energy, we have a real chance in New Zealand to make oil history.” Greenpeace
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