Antarctic secrecy

Press, 11 October 1986, Page 18

Antarctic secrecy

Sir,—The 1959 Antarctic Treaty is silent on mining. For over four years treaty members have been equally silent as meeting has succeeded meeting (the next in Tokyo later this month) to redress this omission — not by banning such operations, but by legalising them. Why has there been no public debate on this vital issue, on the threat of bringing international resource rivalry into our backyard, and on the implications for our administration of the Ross Dependency? Such secrecy suggests nothing so much as cover for a devious diplomacy that, as a prelude to exploitation, is concocting a cosmetic farrago of conditions both unenforceable and inevitably inadequate in the Antarctic environment. While New Zealand, along with its treaty partners, prepares to compromise the world’s last great wilderness laboratory, we issue an instruction book for non-government visitors which reads like the rules for an international park. What irony. — Yours, etc.,

ERIC BENNETT, Wellington. October 5, 1986.