National's big economic "strategy" for the past six years has been to gamble on finding oil. As part of their bet they've sold our right to protest to foreign oil companies and played Russian roulette with our beaches. And now that gamble has failed:
American oil company Anadarko says its maiden New Zealand deep sea exploration well failed to find commercial quantities of oil or natural gas.
Drilling of the Romney 1 well in the Deepwater Taranaki Basin - about 160 km off the Raglan coast - began in November but was found to be "water-bearing" after reaching its total depth of 4619m, the Texas-based firm said in a statement.
So that's National's entire economic plan gone. They had one idea to boost economic growth (I'm not going to say "raise living standards" because that includes clean beaches), and it has failed. What are they going to do now? Pray for a pot of gold to fall out of the sky? Oh wait, that's what they were already doing...
There are cleaner ways to earn a living than polluting the oceans and baking a planet. And we desperately need a government which will pursue them. National seems incapable of it. Time to toss them out and get someone better.
