The Injustice of Blackball

Written By: - Date published: 8:04 am, November 2nd, 2023 - 14 comments
Categories: Deep stuff, Economy, tourism, uncategorized - Tags:

There is no “just transition” occurring on New Zealand’s west coast and there should be.

Blackball was in many senses the start of the labour movement in New Zealand, with the big 1908 miners strike going for 10 weeks making it the longest in New Zealand history, and they were staunchly militant right through to the closure of the mine in 1964. You get a glimpse of this hard mining history here.

This working class history of Blackball is beautifully set out in displays along its main street. Whatever it has left, it certainly has pride in its past.

But it is a town that has been rapidly depopulating and over half of what were houses are now just brick chimneys standing alone in buttercup. Others have vines and trees crowding them unkempt, like something out of The Lorax.

The Blackball Hilton is still going. The Blackball smallgoods factory and shop is still doing outstanding products. It’s still got a volunteer fire station.

It used to have a court, a police station, multiple shops, gold mining, multiple community organisations. It used to have many hundreds of people but can now muster about 250 in total. No skaters use its skate bowl.

In 2010 it formed the Blackball Museum to Working Class History. In this museum you will see a memorial to those who have died at work in New Zealand, with a special section for the 29 miners who lost their lives in the Pike River Mine disaster in 2010. That Pike River Mine is just up the road. They have annual commemorations there for it.

There is little chance of further change of the land into dairying since it’s really tough country already, and the land that could be furrowed-and-mounded has already had it done. Of the houses that still front the main road, two of them have really large anti-1080 handpainted signs together with further signs that encourage you to align your energies with peace. They are not friendly to DoC.

In the only store, the Blackball General Store, the woman who runs it has been working at that counter since she moved to Blackball at 40 which was 25 years ago. She has not had a holiday in that time because she can’t afford replacement staff, if there were any. She admits she is massively depressed. She hasn’t got further than Greymouth in a decade. The building is barely surviving. She is the living embodiment of Blackball. She now keeps the business going because she can’t sell it and she now gets the NZ Super to help her and keep it going.

For much of the west coast, Blackball is an illustration.

It illustrates, for them, the moralising and disconnection of urban elites making centralised policy pronouncements about their lives which are and always have been incredibly hard. Both west coast mayors and Poutini Ngai Tahu have rejected the Significant Natural Area classifications, but it’s happening anyway.

Coal production is declining right down the line that connects Stillwater and Westport and Greymouth, eventually taking the coal over to Christchurch. It still goes all the way up to Inangahua for high quality coking coal, and it’s a lifeline.

Now let’s ask the question that is going to get asked of us all: what would a “just transition” start to look like for the depressed proprietor of the Blackball General Store? What kinds of investment would need to be made to help her life to something joyful? What scale of public services and public servants would be required to assist this? Because that’s the same question that will come to us in so many of our towns.

Let’s remind ourselves of what “just transition” is. It seeks to ensure that the benefits of a green economy are shared widely, while also supporting those who lose economically – be they countries, regions, industries, communities or workers.

The one little glimmer for Blackball is the Paparoa National Park, which also has the Paparoa Great Walk. Done well it would need several backpacker outfits, tour guide, electric and manual bike rentals, and several good cafes. Some services are starting up which is great.

In time it would need a lot more than the Blackball Hilton.

You get a bit of an insiders’ guide to the track and the Pike River Memorial Track here.

But unlike the Milford, Kepler and Routeburn, the Paparoa is nowhere near an international airport and Greymouth isn’t even serviced by Golden Bay Air that looks after the Heaphy Track. International airports are the hub that pushes out capital and connectivity and people and wealth for otherwise agrarian communities – whether we like them or not. The closest with any plans for expansion is up in Nelson.

It would need a lot of capital and dedication and time to turn the Paparoa Great Walk into a feature strong enough to bring investment and enthusiasm strong and sustained enough to really stabilise the decline of Blackball. It would need one almighty “transition”, with very little local capital or people to achieve it.

Even forming this Paparoa Great Walk took eight years, two cyclones, COVID, a landslide and a whole lot of hard work to finally get it ready for action in 2019.

With international travel back, the Department of Conservation is forecasting that international tourists will eventually count for 24-38% of walkers and 16% of bikers. There is no doubt that this is effective and targeted state investment in a dreadfully poor community.

It may well be just a cruel bit of fate that Blackball first lost gold, then its millable native forest, and then lost coal and has come to the limit of dairying. But that’s pretty much the story of New Zealand as well so let’s not dismiss it. Blackball is what many of us are facing on a nationwide scale.

Blackball is not what a just transition looks like. The injustice of the Blackball “transition” to something else is a basic lesson for the whole of New Zealand.

14 comments on “The Injustice of Blackball ”

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  1. Adrian 1
    2 November 2023 at 9:40 am

    The lesson is that extractive industries have a limited lifespan, often it is too late for those involved to realise and make. other plans, they just move on as we have done for the last million years.

    • Belladonna 1.1
      2 November 2023 at 10:24 am

      Well, that'll learn them.
      Not surprising that the left vote is dropping like a stone in rural NZ – with that kind of attitude.

      • AB 1.1.1
        2 November 2023 at 11:29 am

        Capital moves into an area to get a return and it moves out when it can no longer do so. Working people follow capital around in a series of disjunctions, or they stay put and try to get by. That's the existing economy, and it simply doesn't do just transitions and doesn't ever intend to.

        One approach is to get capital out of external private hands and into communities. The Preston model is interesting – but in comparison, Blackball and the whole West Coast is tiny and without the historical base of resources in people, skills, institutions and businesses upon which to build. More alarmingly, tourism might go the same way as gold, timber and coal if tourists ever have to pay the real cost of their emissions, or if the places they used to visit are wrecked by climate events.

        Local autonomy with initial central government assistance seems vital. But as Ad notes the cost to taxpayers would be large and there's no prospect of it happening even under a Labour government .

        Instead we get something like Winston's provincial growth fund, which strikes me (perhaps unfairly) as operating like a paternalistic charity with a penchant for extractive industries. National/ACT probably believes that the market can revive these areas if they just cut red tape – i.e. lower wages, fewer environmental regulations and postponing action on CO2 emissions – and if that doesn't work, then nothing can be done. There are no good options on the table presently.

        • Belladonna 1.1.1.1
          2 November 2023 at 12:27 pm

          Thanks, that's an interesting response.
          I don't expect any useful action from the 'right' – the way that you've described capitalism is exactly the way that things 'should' work from their perspective.

          I do expect/hope for more nuanced support from the left (especially as many of the 'left' environmental policies have disproportionate impact on these communities).

          One worth considering is tax cuts for critical local businesses. That is for core infrastructure businesses, which are essential (or nearly so) to their local community. Thinking of things like the Blackball General store from the OP, but also GP, chemist, dentist, etc. Creating an economic environment where there is a positive economic reason to be located in smaller, rural or poorer areas. [As a contrast, my local shopping centre – inner-suburban Auckland – is about to have a 4th (entirely unnecessary) chemist open.]

          However, there are also environmental reasons for towns to close or be relocated. I question the long term viability of Westport (despite my strong family connections there) – it's on a flood plain between 2 rivers, and at sea level. I really don't see that any party has a well-thought-through and costed plan for significant relocations. It's reactive (following a disaster) rather than planned.

        • Ad 1.1.1.2
          2 November 2023 at 2:06 pm

          Provincial Growth Fund applications were remarkably hard fought and well contested.

          If you go onto the MBIE PGF site you can see the many obscure regions that have had their little shunts of public funding and civic entrepeneurship.

          Much good has come from these enterprises already, and not too many failures.

          It will take something at least as big as that, again.

      • observer 1.1.2
        2 November 2023 at 1:29 pm

        Adrian's statement "extractive industries have a limited lifespan" is a self-evident truth, as seen through history and around the world. It's not an "attitude".

        • Ad 1.1.2.1
          2 November 2023 at 2:08 pm

          But it is particularly pressing upon New Zealand.

          Water (as proxy for milk) may be slower to extract and deplete than gold, but you don't need too many Lake Ellesmere's or Rotoaira's to see it's near-impossible to reverse.

        • Belladonna 1.1.2.2
          2 November 2023 at 3:20 pm

          The "attitude" comes from the absence of a sequel. We could do X or Y, or change Z. Absent anything else, the subtext is – 'and we don't care'.

          West Coast-Tasman electorate (ignoring 2020 as an anomaly):

          Party vote Labour 2023 (provisional): 8732

          Party vote Labour 2017: 14,015

          Party vote Labour 2008 (last time National took the seat): 11,532

  2. pat 2
    2 November 2023 at 11:37 am

    Take the politics and 'economic ' lens away and ask yourself… if the resources needed to provide the desired lifestyle ceased to be available (in sufficient quantity/quality) in any given location what options would the resident community have?

  3. barry 3
    2 November 2023 at 7:26 pm

    I went to walk the Paparoa track a couple of years ago. Like most people I stayed in Punakaiki and took the shuttle to Blackball. Apart from buying a coffee and pie I didn't spend any money there. the facilities in Blackball are pretty good, but there is no reason to stay there. Some people cycle the track and link with the Ghost 2 Ghost or other tracks. Some of them stay overnight, but really from Ces Clark hut it is an easy day to somewhere nicer on the coast. Blackball will never make much of a living from tourists.

    Coal mining has to stop. It has provided a living for people for a long time, but it has killed a lot too. Now the planet can't afford it.

    There are a few people that scratch a living from finding gold, and a few farmers, beekeepers, or others who can make a living growing food. But farmers are not shopping in Blackball. There is a supermarket in Greymouth.

    If people go there to retire they will find it hard to live off super. Houses are cheap, but food costs are high, and health care requires travel.

    So really the only possible growth industry is DOC. Track maintenance and predator control could support 100 jobs in the area. Would the workers want to live there, or would they commute from the coast?

    Blackball is nice, but really doesn't need to exist any more. You are right that there is no justice for the people who call it home.

    We have to decide if we want to maintain communities like them, and how we support them. People will move away for jobs, for entertainment, for health services etc. Each one that moves makes it a bit harder for those that stay.

  4. Obtrectator 4
    2 November 2023 at 7:49 pm

    Over the last four decades I've watched the same sort of dismal narrative play out at Rata, on SH1 in the Manawatu/Whanganui region. And that was a place with much better transport links than Blackball. But as long as local industries continue to disappear in the interests of consolidation/centralisation, economies of scale, the "need to be nearer our markets", etc, etc, it'll go on happening.

  5. Visubversa 5
    3 November 2023 at 9:40 am

    My maternal grandfather was born in Blackball – his parents came from Ireland to work in the mines. There are several people with his family name om various memorials, but his family left Blackball in the early 1900's and moved to the Waikato.

  6. Tom Hunter 6
    9 November 2023 at 2:58 pm

    I'll draw your attention to a post made in 2019 by Chris Trotter where he noted a Working Class protest on the Coast, The Message From Messenger Park, but less for his comments than one by long-timer "Sanctuary":

    Wah wah wah, cry me a river. I am heartily sick and tired of the whining exceptionalism of coasters and farmers. Plenty of people work hard for sweet f**k all, try being an all night cleaner in Tamaki's industrial sprawl.

    The world is changing. Coasters seem to think they have a right to do what they want because, reasons. Nobody forces them to live in that rainy and dreary place. Yes, their way of life is out of date. So stop whinging that the rest of us have some sort of obligation to support a dying way of life, like some sort of giant outdoor paean to the 20th century and accept it.

    What struck me at the time, was the similarity of that comment to this one made in early 2016 in the USA:

    The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too.

    The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

    That's a hardline Libertarian Righty writing in National Review. I'm astounded at the convergence of thought.