National’s former Environment and Conservation Minister is finally putting his money where his mouth is. He's dusted off his engineering degree to forge a new path in the renewable energy sector, after an often rambunctious 30-year political career. Tracy Neal reports.
The day that Nick Smith mistook a poisonous jellyfish for a rubbish bag is synonymous with the end of his career in politics. While kayaking a favourite spot in north Nelson, he plunged his arm into the sea without a moment’s thought for what lurked beneath.
“The Nelson City Council has these bright blue plastic rubbish bags, and I was kayaking along and cursed that some bastard had dumped a plastic bag which had ended up in the ocean, went to retrieve it and discovered too late it was a large blue jellyfish.”
Paralysed in one arm and in pain, he made it to shore several hundred metres away, where a stranger on the beach assisted his clumsy exit from the roiling surf.
Until June this year Smith ranked among the nation’s longest serving MPs. He was first elected in October 1990 as the MP for the former Tasman electorate, which was later divided between the West Coast-Tasman and Nelson electorates with the arrival of MMP in 1996. Smith stood in the re-drawn Nelson electorate and held it for the next 24 years.
The writing was on the wall in 2017 when Smith’s comfortable majority was dented by two main rivals in the Labour and Green Party candidates, and a definitive swing to Labour in the party vote. The loss of the electorate last year to Labour’s Rachel Boyack, the slide into semi-oblivion as a List MP and looming trouble over an employment matter in Wellington ultimately forced his hand. A verbal altercation with a National Party staffer in July 2020 was recorded by a third party in a nearby office who then laid a complaint with Parliamentary Services.
He says the matter has been concluded.
“I didn’t want to be a List MP. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to contest Nelson in the 2023 election. Certainly, the best thing for the Party would have been for me to continue until the middle of 2022 when National would be selecting, but politics is never a perfectly arranged thing.”
Smith is well known for his unbridled outbursts and some well documented blunders, some as a result of his dogged commitment to constituents and somewhat ironical disdain for red tape.
Smith says the pressure on politicians is immense, not only from within the Parliamentary bear pit but from the public, but he doesn’t deny that what happened in the end, did hurt.
“Politics is a bruising business and it’s incredibly challenging to be across all issues at one time. When you’re an MP the public rightly expects you to be well-informed on everything from international affairs, to health, education, trade and the environment and you just have to pedal so fast all the time to try and stay up to speed.”
These days, Smith’s eyes light up when talking about cranes, torque and turbines. He has joined the family business, Smith Cranes, which is building and lifting the 69-metre-high towers and attaching the turbines at Mercury Energy’s Turitea Wind Farm near Palmerston North.
It will be New Zealand’s largest wind farm and once fully operational it will meet the annual electricity needs of about 118,000 average homes, or more than 370,000 electric vehicles.
Smith, who has a first-class honours degree in civil engineering and a PhD in landslides, is now the firm’s contracts manager. He says it’s a complex mix of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, from the ground up to creating something that generates electricity.
“To be out on the cutting edge of new technology - and some pretty challenging engineering has kept me really busy, but it also feels like I’m making a solid contribution to an area in which I have strong views.”
Smith is a self-described “pragmatic environmentalist” and when it comes to our national parks, an “absolute protectionist”. He counts his part in the creation of the Kahurangi National Park in north-west Nelson as among his greatest political achievements.
His enjoyment of the hinterland was influenced by a childhood traipsing around Canterbury hills and riverbeds with his father, who founded the family business. Nelson’s mountains, rivers and coastline were places to where Smith escaped when politics and life got too much.
“Yes, Parliament is rough and robust, which is the price we pay for a country which actually has pretty clean politics. If I had the choice between journalists who ask nasty questions and who write nasty stories that sometimes hurt a bit, and a country that turns a blind eye to the abuse of power and corruption, I’d much rather have it the way we do.”
Smith says his new role feels a bit like closing the circle. Turitea was consented through a Board of Inquiry process a decade ago, via the mechanism Smith set up as Environment Minister. The Environmental Protection Authority – the nation’s environmental regulator, oversees the consents process for projects considered nationally significant.
Smith says New Zealand is well placed to capitalise on wind generated power; mainly because of where we sit on the planet – a sliver of landform, on the brink of the Southern Ocean.
“We occupy space in the Roaring 40s (the latitude belt where strong westerly winds are common) and in both hemispheres, these are the zones where wind energy has the greatest potential.”
Its “perfect partner” is hydro storage, which kicks in when the wind isn’t blowing.
“New Zealand could expand the amount of electricity that comes from the wind sector from the current five per cent to 20 per cent, utilising our existing hydro generation as the backup.”
Smith has been involved in drafting the firm’s bid for a “more exciting” project in Taranaki – the country’s first hydrogen plant which aims to help power the nation’s future trucking fleet. The plant would feature even larger turbines, capable of generating electricity in winds that might be considered a “pleasant breeze”.
He considers them vital projects if the country is to meet its climate change targets. New Zealand has recently pledged to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 to help limit global warming. While New Zealand’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions is small, its gross emissions per capita are high. Emissions in New Zealand rose 57 per cent between 1990 and 2018 – the second-greatest increase of all industrialised countries.
Smith says many overlook the energy that will be needed to power the nation’s future electric vehicle fleets.
“The bulk of fossil fuels burned in New Zealand are not in generating electricity – they’re in that huge transport and stationary energy sectors.
“The electric car is absolutely useless if we’re having to generate the power from burning coal. We have to expand the generation very significantly if we’re to displace the substantive use of fossil fuels in the transport and industrial sectors.”
Environmental protection stretches to how the landscape looks, and it’s hard to imagine today’s giant wind towers and turbines becoming as beloved as Holland’s ubiquitous windmills.
Smith says people will have their own opinions about whether wind turbines are beautiful or ugly. The impact of Turitea on the landscape did spark concerns about its visual effects and proximity of some turbines to private homes. It prompted Mercury to revise the farm’s layout and reduce the number of turbines, which the Board of Inquiry process further reduced to a total of 60.
Smith says there’s no doubt they do have a landscape impact, but says it’s the price we have to pay for clean energy.
“You can’t get all uptight about climate change and in the next breath say, ‘look, I don’t want wind turbines, I don’t want to see geothermal power, and there’s even been opposition to solar panels because they do have an aesthetic effect – I say that you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
He says it’s a “funny twist of history” that pre oil and fossil fuels, wind was a primary source of energy.
“Here we are centuries later, refining the design of wind farms as a key part of the energy equation.”
More wind farms are planned along the country’s windiest coastal points. According to the New Zealand Wind Energy Association the bulk of the potential for growth lies almost everywhere but Smith’s own stamping ground.
“If there’s anything I’m struggling with in my new job is that I promised my wife and family that now I was retired from politics I’d be home much more and entirely the opposite is true.”
Smith has been been watching closely the game of pass the parcel over National’s leadership. He says the multiple changes in leader clearly have not helped the Party. He points the finger at John Key, who Smith says created a culture within National where too many wanted to be boss.
“John Key was very encouraging of new talent coming through, almost to the point that when he retired too many people wanted to be leader and too few wanted to be part of a team that was going to be able to advance National.”
Smith says Christopher Luxon as the Party’s new leader and Nicola Willis as deputy, is an “awesome outcome”, made all the better through it being a consensus decision by caucus. He says Willis’ liberal views will provide a healthy balance to Luxon’s more conservative values.
But for Smith, a more pressing concern in this age of social media is the future of democracy
“For the best part of my political career, we saw the rise of democracies around the world, but in the last 10 years democracy has been going in the opposite direction.
“I think right now we really need to look at the US where the polarisation of their politics is making their country weaker.”
Smith says the challenge will be ensuring the contest of ideas between political parties is managed in a way that serves the national interest.
Tracy Neal worked (briefly) in Nick Smith’s Nelson electorate office, from November 2014 to March 2015, before returning to a role in the media.
* Made with the help of the Public Interest Journalism Fund *
