Big coal company bought West Coast election campaign

It was the 1908 miners’ strike in Blackball on the West Coast that led to the birth of the Labour Party.

So there was a rich vein of irony last year when Stockton mine management stopped work, called a meeting and told all its 310 workers to vote for its own man instead.

“That certainly pisses me off, given the advocacy that I have undertaken for the mining industry on the Coast, through all my time in Parliament,” says Labour’s Damien O’Connor.

The veteran MP is smarting at a revelation in new disclosures published by the Electoral Commission: ASX-listed mining firm Bathurst Resources donated $32,600 to 29-year-old independent Patrick Phelps to fully fund his campaign for more mining on the West Coast. 

Candidate spending limits were $32,600 at last year’s election. So Bathurst, unhappy with a Labour policy banning more mining of conservation land, funded Phelps’ entire campaign – every last dollar. It gave him a far bigger war chest than the more established candidates.

“Look, it was a very credible result for him. And I acknowledge that,” O’Connor tells Newsroom. “Clearly, across the wider West Coast region, people saw our policy as a blockage to any further mining development.

“There are many international companies and organisations wanting to influence New Zealand elections for their own purposes – the smoking industry, the investment and real estate industry as we’re starting to see. And there’ll be many more.

“I think what people have to do is follow the money, ask the question: why such investments would be made? And for the most part, no business makes an investment without some realistic expectation of a return.”

Phelps is manager of Minerals West Coast Trust, a Hokitika-based industry association funded by mining companies to the tune of $220,000 last year, and chaired by Bathurst’s Richard Tacon.

His LinkedIn biography says, “My daddy was a miner, and I’m a miner’s son,” before self-effacingly acknowledging that to be a Pete Seeger lyric.

In fact, he tells Newsroom, his parents and grandparents had worked in earthmoving in Gisborne, before they moved down to the West Coast to drive diggers. Phelps himself has never worked in a mine – he’s a former RNZ journalist.

But in laconic Coast style, he’s publicly described himself as “a stooge for the mining industry” in YouTube videos funded by that industry, so it should be no surprise that his election stump speech would be pro-mining.

In response to questions at a public meeting early in the campaign, Phelps had disclosed he had support from Bathurst, but not the extent of it.

He says he wouldn’t have volunteered it, as there was no need for disclosure: “It’s not as if every other candidate, be it Damien or Maureen or Sue Grey or anyone else in that campaign, stood up and just gave a full disclosure of who their donors were,” Phelps says. (See statutory disclosures.)

Richard Tacon says the company’s man was never going to win – but he did pull enough votes away from O’Connor to hand the West Coast-Tasman seat to National’s Maureen Pugh.

What Tacon and O’Connor do agree on is that Phelps took more votes off O’Connor than he did off Pugh.

In the biggest insult, Phelps even won the vote at the Blackball booth, at the community’s primary school: 48 votes to O’Connor’s 41.

Across the whole electorate in the 2020 election, O’Connor had won 6208 more votes than Pugh. In 2023, Pugh turned that around to a 1017 vote majority.

And the difference? There was a big nationwide swing against Labour, but that on its own wouldn’t have been enough to unseat O’Connor. For him, it was exacerbated by the 5903 votes won by the independent candidate.

Pugh saw her vote cut from 14,545 to 13,317. But the impact on O’Connor was far worse: his vote plummeted from 20,753 to 12,300.

What O’Connor and Tacon don’t officially agree on is Labour’s policy against more mining on conservation land.

Behind the scenes, O’Connor insists, he militated against applying the policy to extensions of existing mines. That might have allowed Bathurst to proceed with its plan to expand its big opencast coal mine at Stockton into neighbouring Department of Conservation land.

Especially because it is conservation land only in the loosest sense of the phrase – it’s actually former mining land being held in stewardship by the department, pending political decisions about its future.

And the high-value coal from Stockton isn’t burned in industrial boilers and furnaces, O’Connor says, but is instead used in the slightly less carbon intensive process of manufacturing steel.

“My firsthand experience is different from that of people who are sitting in Auckland, who just think that all mining is bad,” he says. “But on top of that, there was the issue of coal and global emissions, which is a larger philosophical issue about how we tackle climate change.”

While O’Connor trod that fine line on the hustings, Pugh was unequivocal, telling voters that National was entirely “pro-mining”.

Tacon is certain that if Labour had won the election, it would have stopped Bathurst’s extension to Stockton mine. “With all of their various changes to the law, I think you’re 100 percent right,” he says.

And under the National-led Government? “It’s early days,” he says. “I’ve read the coalition agreements, the same as you. Both of them, between National and Act and New Zealand First, they both prioritised economic development as the cornerstone.

“Obviously, we’re part of that. At Westport, we’ve got 300-plus jobs getting paid 100 grand a year. That’s a hell of a lot of tourism, or a hell of a lot of other industry you got to do to replace that.”

According to Bathurst’s annual report, a key company focus this year is the renewal of the mothballed Escarpment consents that are beginning to expire over the next few years, and completing mine planning for its Escarpment Extension close to Stockton.

The “stop work meeting” at Stockton was called by mine boss Ian Harvey. Workers were told to cast their votes for Phelps – because O’Connor and Pugh would get in regardless, on the party list.

“Are you asking if it was sanctioned by the rest of board or by me? No,” says Tacon. “But the Labour government had just passed massive policy statements, which basically put a drop-dead date on allowing coal mines to even be able to get a consent path.

“You’re sitting there talking to 300 miners whose whole livelihoods rely on coal mining. It’s a pretty natural reaction, to me. Self-preservation is one of the most basic human instincts.”

Phelps agrees: policy must balance the needs of the community with the needs of the environment, in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

“I’m not a climate change denier, I believe in climate change,” he says. “And I’m actually fairly worried about it. I’m not even 30 yet, but I can see the change that’s occurred in the climate, even just in Hokitika in my lifetime, in terms of the loss of frost and ice.

“It’s clearly happening because of fossil fuels – that needs to be said. But it’s just my view of how we get from where we are to where we’d like to be is just different to some other people’s. For the foreseeable, we’re going to continue to need coal as an energy source and as a material for producing steel and cement and things like that.

“I’m worried about climate change, I’m worried about biodiversity loss, but I just don’t see that as being at odds with having a healthy mining sector. And other people are free to disagree with me on that.

“It’s not Big Oil trying to buy an election or anything like that. That’s my point.”

Is it Big Coal trying to buy an election? “Oh, well, if you say so.”

Greenpeace Aotearoa spokesperson Niamh O’Flynn says: “Along with the fishing industry’s cosy relationship with Shane Jones and NZ First, this blatant fossil fuel industry influence on politics and elections here in Aotearoa will continue to fail our environment.

“People and community should be at the heart of governance, not self-interested corporations which threaten to destabilise the climate and rip the life out of the oceans for profit.”

Bathurst is headquartered in Wellington, but listed on the Australian stock exchange. Tacon estimates about 14 percent of its shares are in New Zealand hands.

It owns a 65 percent stake of Stockton, Upper Waimangaroa, Rotowaro, Ruawaro and Maramarua coal mines.

The other 35 percent is owned by Talley’s Group, whose founder Sir Peter Talley has also made headlines over his political donations to National and NZ First in past years – and on one occasion, to Damien O’Connor.

Approached last week for comment, Talley said: “You can just piss off, cobber, piss off.”

O’Connor doesn’t speak quite so bluntly as Talley, but he does seem freed of some of the tongue-tying constraints of his past six years as a minister.

Earlier this week, he blew up at Parliamentary Press Gallery journalists for not asking the tough questions of the new Government. “You need to ask the questions, why the Government is doing these things? What is driving their agenda? Look at the connections between David Seymour and the Atlas Network – follow through on that.”

Now, he tells Newsroom: “We need to be looking at the effect of campaign donations on our small, open democratic country.

“The classic dilemma that Westport faces is a multimillion dollar bill for water, and for the township. And in most other areas of the world, where mining occurs, the company has to pay for the town, and the infrastructure and support for the people who run the mining operation,” O’Connor says.

“The mining operation in Stockton has always had the luxury of the wider Westport community, paying for all that infrastructure for their people. And unfortunately, there’s not been a system for ensuring some of the benefits of the mine go, not just indirectly through wages and salaries, but directly back to the town’s infrastructure.

“That remains a failure of the Stockton mining operation. And unfortunately, the billions of dollars of coal that have left the Buller region for the world hasn’t left the town any wealthier, or with a good infrastructure, or with a good future.

Should Bathurst Resources Ltd be investing in community infrastructure, rather than in political campaigns? “If all the operators of the Denniston and Stockton plateaus had invested a little bit over a long time, we would be a wealthy town with with modern infrastructure and attractive alternative industries.”

Donations to West Coast-Tasman candidates

Sue GREY, NZ Outdoors & Freedom Party:

• $5000 from Graeme Clegg, Mangere Bridge
• $4340 from Aly Cook, Tasman

Damien O’CONNOR, Labour:

• $2500 from Warrick Cleine, Vietnam
• $9018 from West Coast-Tasman Labour electorate committee
• $2000 from the Maritime Union

Patrick PHELPS, independent:

• $32,600 from Bathurst Resources Ltd

Maureen PUGH, National:

• $5000 from Westfleet Fresh Ltd
• $13,242 from NZ National Party