Press release - July 8, 2015
Wellington, July 8: The four Greenpeace activists who climbed to the roof of Parliament House last month in order to expose the government's failure to act on climate change will attend their initial court appearance on the day of the 30th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing.
Climbers Johno Smith, Jeff Harrison, Abi Smith and Verena Maeder scaled Parliament at dawn on June 25 with a delivery of six working solar panels. They also unfurled a large banner targeting the Prime Minister.
“Cut pollution, create jobs? Yeah, nah” read the banner text, which sat alongside a smiling headshot of John Key.
The group stayed on the roof for the day, connecting with people around the world using social media applications such as live-stream app, Periscope. Their phones and computer were charged by the solar panels they had up there.
This Friday, July 10, the climbers will receive confirmation at Wellington District Court about what charges they are facing for the action.
Coincidentally, this is also the 30th anniversary of the day when French secret service agents, on orders from their government, planted two bombs on the hull of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior, and sunk it.
Photographer Fernando Pereira, who was part of the crew, was tragically murdered in the blast.
The bombing will be commemorated with a photo exhibition, celebrating New Zealand’s history of activism and protest, at The Cloud on Auckland’s Waterfront starting this Friday.
Before it was sunk, the Rainbow Warrior had been preparing to lead a flotilla of NZ boats to protest against France’s nuclear testing programme at Moruroa in French Polynesia.
Climate campaigner Simon Boxer says the coincidental timing of the court appearance and the 30th anniversary is fitting.
“In 1985, the Rainbow Warrior crew were preparing to leave their families, their jobs and their homes, to get onto a ship, sail across the Pacific and into a nuclear testing zone in Moruroa, with the sole aim of stopping a nuclear explosion there," he says.
“Today, nuclear tests in the Pacific have been halted, thanks to all the people who kept standing up in the thousand different ways it takes to change the course of history.
“Our four activists who climbed Parliament House a couple of weeks ago are a continuation of that legacy. They’re willing to take on legal risks in order to stand up for the most urgent issue that the planet has ever faced – climate change – at a time when our government is letting us all down terribly.”
Yesterday the government announced the climate change target New Zealand will be putting on the table at the Paris Climate Conference in December.
It is equivalent to cutting emissions to just 11% below 1990 levels.
Boxer describes the new target as a “con job” that is actually worse than what was pledged six years ago at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, when the NZ government said it would conditionally cut emissions to 10-20% below 1990 levels by 2020.
“But the most shocking thing is not that the government is putting forward such a low target - it’s that at the moment even 11% is not achievable because there is no plan going forward,” he says.
“The way we’re heading, and by the government’s own figures, the increase in New Zealand’s total emissions by 2020 will be almost 30% worse than it was in 1990.”
-ENDS-