I was born two years after the bombing, however, the bombing not only changed New Zealand history it also had an important role in shaping my political views. When I was at primary school during the 1990s the French resumed nuclear testing at Mururoa and during that time Greenpeace sent their replacement Rainbow Warrior II ship from Auckland to protest the testing. My connection to the two ships comes through primary school friends, the father of one of my friends was onboard the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in Auckland harbour in 1985 and parents of other friends were onboard the Rainbow Warrior II and other ships when they were detained by the French in 1995.

So 25 years on where are we? Once France had finished “testing” aka bombing the shit out of an island in the middle of nowhere because apparently no one would care they signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty, since then France has not detonated another Nuclear Weapon. However, Pakistan has, India has, North Korea has. The work of Greenpeace has slowed the Nuclear Winter but I don’t think we are out of the autumn yet.

Today Greenpeace have blogged links to 4 videos on the Rainbow Warrior.

They have also posted a long blog remembering the ship, the life lost, and what the Rainbow Warrior achieved.

There is also the remaking of the song Anchor Me done for the 20^th Anniversary

And who can forget French Letter (audio only, can’t find the video):

Finally a year and a half ago I blogged on why it is so important for Kiwis to never forget the Rainbow Warrior.

We currently have the USA and the UK fighting a war on state sponsored terror and here we have a MEP encouraging it!

What the French did was completely wrong and defied international law and is something that no member of Greenpeace or New Zealander will ever forget.

Greenpeace have now also posted some photos up. I am in the second row with the green text on white background 40% by 2020 sign.

A selection of comments from the blog (http://www.signon.org.nz/blog/keisha-rhys-push-cut-price-bangers-500-raised#comment)

This is repulsive. The UN panel on climate change has reported that meat production contributes more to global climate change than the entire transportation industry combined, and here in NZ agriculture is responsible for almost one half of our total emmissions. And here these people are selling beef in an effort to raise money to combat climate change? Ridiculous

Note that we used organic sausages for Darby’s Barbie, meaning there’s zero chance they were feed on palm kernel supplements, because there is no such thing as organic palm kernel. Any supplementary feed given to those cows would have been organic maize, hay or sileage.
Greenpeace is not, and never will be, anti-farming. As you point out, it’s not the farming, it’s how we’re farming.

I think you guys are being a little melodramatic here are you not? We need to change our ways to fight climate change but we don’t all need to be cave dwelling vegans

In normal circumstances yes, we’d use vegetarian food for a Greenpeace activity or event, but this was, quite strategically, a traditional Kiwi sausage sizzle. With the Sign On campaign the important thing is for us to reach out to all Kiwis, not just our usual soy-sausage munching friends, so we decided we needed to keep Saturday’s event as traditional as possible.

Save the whales, but kill the cows! This is complete hypocrisy 100%.
Where’s your integrity Greenpeace? Killing cows, whether organic or not, is far from peace.

Greenies at war, very funny. Read the full thing, check out the passion in the comments. ROFLOL

The Green party spell it out really well over here:

http://blog.greens.org.nz/2009/08/05/nick-smith-doesnt-get-it/

The Government has relied on macro-economic analysis about emissions prices instead of analysing opportunities. Smith had made it clear that it was up to NGOs and volunteers to work out how to meet a target, not the job of the well resourced government departments he controls.

…he attacked the idea of reducing farm animals by a third. That would mean reducing dairy farm stocking rates from 2.83 cows/ha which is the current average to 1.86. Our proposal was to reduce them to 2.3, which is the intensity that research has found is most profitable for the farmer if milk prices are below $5.50. The current price is $5.20, which is also the average price (inflation adjusted) over the last ten years. The extra return from additional animals per hectare just doesn’t pay for the huge increase in urea, bought in feeds, off farm grazing of animals not in milk and animal health costs that are needed to cram more animals on to the same land. Dairy farmers could be making more money and reducing emissions.

So the greens are releasing ideas, good ideas, factual ideas. And how does the Government respond? Like This: Greens want to shoot the cows

…a reduction from the business as usual case of 57%, and that to do this one would need to ban every car, bus and truck in NZ, close down every fossil fuel power plant and on top of that hire vigilantes to shoot every third cow.

…the little fruitcakes are serious. They do want us to shoot the cows. They just use the nice Orwelllian term of “de-stocking” instead.

In 1999 we had around 3.5 million cows. So the Greens policy is to exterminate around 700,000 cows.

I encourage you to read both articles and decide for yourself who is playing scare tactics.

The other really strong part from the Greens blog was this:

Then, he set about rebutting things we had not said – like proposing 100% renewable electricity, which he said would raise power prices 30%. That’s the reason we didn’t propose 100%. When I was leadng EECA’s work under the last government, we had some robust analysis done by EECA and MED  to determine the costs of various levels of renewability in the electricity system. We found 90% renewable by 2025 was entirely achievable and hardly raised prices at all, as there is a lot of low cost geothermal and wind energy waiting to be built.

Going to 100% is costly because you have to build a huge amount of capacity which just sits around unused until there is a very dry winter, given that people don’t like power cuts. Much better to have a couple of gas peaking stations that are cheap to build and only run a small proportion of the time. The greenhouse gases are negligible in the scheme of things and the saved capital is much better used to make significant reductions in transport or agriculture which are a much bigger worry than electricity.

So it is really aparent that the Greens are playing with facts while the Nats are playing with fire. Liar liar pants on fire politics.

Visit http://www.signon.org.nz to sign on.

P.S. Don’t tell political activists like Keshia Castle-Hughes to stick to the acting, unless you also want to stick to the currency trading.

Okay for those who haven’t been following the news recently here is a quick update: Last Sunday the Sunday Star Times (Newspaper) revealed that an key political activist was actually a police spy who had infutrated a number of left wing groups. He was reporting to the SIG a group set up after the 9/11 attacks in America to combat terrorism. The Police immediately claimed that the SIG was acting within its boundaries protecting NZ and not spying on activist groups. Since then it has been revealed that the Police through its SIG Counter-Terrorism Spying Taskforce has been spying on a number of political action groups, climate change groups, Greenpeace, the Green Party (yes the political party in parliament), a number of major workers Unions incluing UNITE, and the NDU, and students’ associations especially VUWSA.

Now this is nuts. There is a clear boundary between what is terrorism, what is a terrorist action, what is a threat to national security and the actions of small political lobby groups. I personally believe that if you have done nothing wrong then you should have nothing to hide. But that is not the issue here, the issue is police used a counter terrorism unit to spy on many harmless, democratic and legal political lobby groups.

There are two columns in today’s HoS which add more to this story (and be sure to read the other articles as well there are heaps of them – google is showing over 100 stories written already (http://news.google.co.nz/news?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&tab=wn&nolr=1&hl=en&q=police+spying&btnG=Search+News)

The first is Bill Ralston who calls for an inquiry into the issue:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10549093

Initially John Key, sensibly, said only those who “present a real or credible risk to the safety and security of communities” should be the subject of such investigations. He then passed the issue on to Judith Collins to sort out.

She spoke to Broad and promptly ruled out any need for an inquiry, saying Broad had assured her police were “meeting their responsibilities”. Hiding behind the old “Governments can’t interfere in police operations” line, Collins blithely accepted Broad’s assurance they were not targeting groups but individuals who might commit criminal acts.

Wrong. Emails from their spy show the SIG was targeting the activities of entire unions, including the EPMU, the CTU, the Maritime Union, and the Unite union.

Its spy also infiltrated the Green Party and reported on the plans of Greenpeace, conservation groups, climate change organisations, animal rights groups, and anti-war protesters.

Oh yes, police also used SIG surveillance to protect its own vested interests, targeting anti-Taser protests and investigating a man who is trying to take action against the police after he was pepper-sprayed.

The SIG was set up and received funding after 9/11 to combat the threat of terrorism. None of the groups listed even remotely come near that description. The SIG seems oblivious to the fact that peace groups are, by their very nature, largely peaceful in intent and, ironically, one of its targets, Greenpeace, is the only victim of terrorism in New Zealand.

You have to watch those dangerous unions. In emails to the SIG, its spy breathlessly reports that the NDU and EPMU were having a day of action and locked-out workers would be planning pickets and making banners. Shocking criminal acts that surely imperilled the safety and security of the community.

What has happened is that, in the hysteria after 9/11, the police got a big budget to set up the SIG which then found it had no real terrorism to combat. To protect its budget and its reason for being, the SIG and police then busied themselves with trivia.

Collins has more than enough evidence to show the SIG was acting outside its brief. She should set up a ministerial inquiry, with a QC or someone like the Ombudsman, verify the facts and get serious about cutting costs by axing the unit.

Yes that is right. The police are spying on the only group ever in NZ to have been targeted by terrorism! (and for those with poor knowledge of NZ history it is a reference to the 1986 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour by the French Secret Service.

The second column is by Matt McCarten head of the Unite Union and a victim of the police spying:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10549080

These groups which were being spied on are incorporated societies carrying out legitimate work on behalf of their members and supporters. They are democratic and transparent. No one has ever accused them of criminal behaviour, let alone terrorism.

…

Gilchrist started collecting information on our union three years ago. At that time we were running our SupersizeMyPay campaign, set up to abolish youth wages and raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour.

Through a combination of employer negotiations, community demonstrations and parliamentary lobbying, we won. Tens of thousands of workers have since had their wages lifted by more than $3 an hour, in large part because of this campaign, and youth wages were scrapped.

Are our spies seriously suggesting minimum wage workers and school kids working in fast-food restaurants were part of a budding al Qaeda network?

The actions of this spy unit go to the heart of our democracy. Frankly, their actions are worse than the so-called danger they claim to want to protect us from. What could be more of a threat to our society than a secret police force paying undercover “Walter Mitty-type” informants to infiltrate and secretly report on civil and political groups? Isn’t that what totalitarian governments do?

…

A meat worker who ran as a communist candidate in the last election was detained at Auckland Airport for four hours after returning from Australia. She was subjected to a humiliating strip search. Nothing was found. But what was disturbing is the Customs officers spent the whole time grilling her on her political activity and were well aware of her history.

The only way you can explain this is that a file has been compiled on her and given to other state agencies. If this doesn’t worry New Zealanders, we’re in real trouble.

…

The new Prime Minister, John Key, should agree to the request by the targeted unions for a full inquiry. If the unit has been spying on organisations carrying out lawful work, it should be disbanded and the Police Commissioner sacked.

In future, when our political leaders tell us we need greater police power to fight terrorism, just be aware it has little to do with keeping us safe and everything to do with keeping us under control.

And so we end up back with a scene from V For Vendetta.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

One of the songs was French Letter 1982 by Herbs. When I saw this I immediately phoned a friend and said watch it now. French Letter is one of the most powerful and well known songs in NZ History. One of those songs that defines us.

French Letter is about the French Nucelar Testing in the Pacific at Moruroa Attol.

For me the testing in 1995 was a major issue. And thinking back it was probably my first involvement in Political Activism. At the time I was a seven year old in primary school and one of my friends was Ruby the daugther of Henk Haazen who served on the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in Auckland in 1985.

Something that I have never understood is why the French tested in the pacific. On one hand they claimed it was completely safe and on the other they stuck it on the other side of the world and not in their backyard.

Now coming back to the point of the post. What scares me is the person I phoned has no knowledge of French Nuclear Testing in the pacific. No knowledge of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland by French Secret Agents in 1985 (Read about that here: http://www.police.govt.nz/operation/wharf/ and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior).

Now I didn’t expect this person to know the intimate details of these events. They didn’t spend their early childhood in NZ. But what did scare me is the statement why should I care, how does this apply to me?

This statement is as dangerous as the one made in 1995 by the then National Party leader, Don Brash, who stated that if elected the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone would be “Gone by lunchtime.”

At the time this caused an outrage. But I wonder if it would do the same now. Only three years down the track.

So why should we care?

Knowing your history is vital to any citizen or resident of a country. We learn from our personal mistakes and victories as does each and every country.

When we go forward we must remember our past, knowing where we came from, what defines us and what makes us us!

Look around Auckland and NZ there are a few things that you will see that clearly define us. The most obvious is War Memorials and RSA’s. Another would be the local pub. But the third would be our political activism. There are signs of it all around the place you just have to know where to look. Probably one of the most famous pieces is a series of paintings on KRoad done in the mid 1980s. If ever there was a clear demonstration of what NZ stood for and what it was about it is these sets of images:

Internationally, around the world, New Zealand is known for its stance on Human Rights and Environmental Protection. But it seems at home our young generation don’t know about the very things that define us. And that is sad.

You can read about the history of NZ Nuclear Free here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand%27s_nuclear-free_zone

Watch French Letter 1995