Ian McLean Green candidate for Tauranga

Has the response been enough? The initial response has already failed, therefore it was not good enough.

No criticism of the people working against the odds to deal with this enormous problem is intended or implied by that comment. They were and are quite simply overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the problem and have been beaten by the weather.

Was New Zealand prepared for such an event before it became a disaster? Answer, clearly is no.

Are the laws governing coastal shipping effective enough to minimise the risk of ship groundings? Answer, apparently no.
The implications for a blowout from a deep water oil drilling operation are profound and disturbing.

Was it possible to use the window of opportunity provided by stable weather for five days? Answer clearly maybe. We have been bombarded with justifications and excuses on this issue, including constant reference to technical complexity. Come on. This is something we know how to do.

The reality seems to be that international protocols and liability and insurance issues drove the decisions of the first three days. That is why so little was actually achieved in terms of the central problem. The owners had to appoint a salvage company. The salvors had to arrive and assess the problem. They had to come up with a plan. That process took an amazingly quick three days.

But infinitely too slow for the local environment.

If technical issues genuinely prevented action in those first five days, then we need to ensure that the likely equipment and expertise is available on call for next time. If protocol and legal issues caused the lost time, then we need new protocols and to restructure the law. Risk assessment is a science of probabilities and informs risk management extremely well. But its predictions are of no value or interest when a rare event actually occurs. If zero risk is the only acceptable outcome, then we must choose to avoid entirely the context of that risk.

If you do not get in your car, you cannot have a car accident. If you do not drill for oil in deep and rough waters, you cannot have an oil rig accident in deep and rough waters.

The Rena event is the best demonstration possible that both maritime law and our ready response capability are woefully inadequate to deal with a marine oil-spill disaster on our shores.

It seems the response was everything that it could have been. But it was nowhere near enough.