When the Greens refuse to name the problem

The other day I wrote about the stripping of our rockpools around Whangaparāoa. Buckets emptied. Rockpools cleaned out. Coastal ecosystems smashed for quick gain. Once again, the Greens had nothing meaningful to say.

Now they have suddenly found their voice. Not to condemn the behaviour. Not to demand tougher enforcement. Not to stand up for the marine environment they claim to worship. Instead, they are insisting that immigration be left out of the debate entirely.

That position is not just dishonest. It is cowardly.

The uncomfortable truth is this that the people doing most of the damage are Chinese immigrants and Chinese visitors. That is what locals are seeing with their own eyes. That is what Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has said openly. It is even acknowledged that harvesting activity has been organised on Chinese language websites.

We are now being told we are not allowed to mention immigration. We are told we must not notice patterns. We are told to look away from the obvious red flag sitting right in front of us.

This is where the Greens lose all credibility.

Lawrence Xu-Nan claims the real threat to the marine environment is industrial fishing, bottom trawling and seabed mining. Fine. Those issues matter. But pointing to a different problem does not make the current one disappear. It is possible to care about more than one issue at the same time. What is happening in the rockpools is not theoretical. It is happening in broad daylight, every low tide.

The Greens want this framed as a generic fisheries issue. A law enforcement issue. An education issue. Anything except what it actually is.

Because acknowledging the role of immigration would force them to confront something they have spent years denying: mass immigration without proper integration comes with consequences. Environmental. Cultural. Social.

Instead of honesty, we get accusations of racism. Instead of solutions, we get moral lectures. Instead of backing the local communities watching their coastline being destroyed, the Greens rush to protect the feelings of the very groups being called out for the behaviour.

What makes this worse is the selective outrage.

These are the same Greens who cannot stop talking about Palestine. Who obsess endlessly over men entering women’s spaces. Who leap on every imported culture war they can find. But when a real, local environmental crisis emerges, one that directly affects Kiwi families, kids, and communities, suddenly they want everyone to tread carefully and mind their language.

Calling a spade a spade is not racism. It is reality. Pretending that ethnicity and immigration have no bearing on this issue does nothing to protect the coastline. It only protects political narratives.

No one is saying every Chinese person is responsible. No one is saying locals never break the rules. But when one demographic is overwhelmingly involved, pretending otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of New Zealanders.

Education alone will not fix this. You do not need a pamphlet to understand that stripping every living thing out of a rockpool is wrong. This is about enforcement, consequences, and expectations of those who choose to live in or visit New Zealand.

When you come here, you respect the rules. You respect the environment. You respect the host culture. That should not be controversial.

If the Greens cannot even say that out loud, they have stopped being an environmental party altogether. They are simply running cover when reality clashes with ideology.

And our coastlines are paying the price.