Three Action Phases: A Bailed Climate Activist Gives Insight Into Restore Passenger Rail
Arrested, charged and on bail: The Wigram interviews a member of Restore Passenger Rail
“I suspect there’s probably some frustration on the part of the Police. And I can understand that. They’re trying to do their job on a day-to-day level but on a societal level, on a bigger picture level, we must change our behaviour. We have one planet. We. We’re currently. It’s like starting a fire in the spare bedroom of your house.”
Climate Activist and member of Restore Passenger Rail during the Third Action Phase in Wellington, August/September 2023
Wellington. Morning, rush hour traffic. May 2022. Action Phase 2.
Climate activists were ready to make a daring move on a highway delivering traffic into the capital.
Supplied
“Once we had the banner in place, and tied off, we waited for a wee while. The heart’s still pumping. But just happy that it was going smoothly, and unfolding as we had planned, and had hoped,” he recalled. These were the words of a climate activist and member of Restore Passenger Rail. He is on bail and charged with endangering traffic.”
“At that point they hadn’t stopped the traffic and so our goal was to stop the traffic. So then the next step which we knew we might well need to do was to start incrementally lowering the banner.
The risk of being arrested was real.
“It’s mildly illegal to be doing what we’re doing. But for me that’s where the stakes are at, that’s where it’s at. I’m prepared to do illegal things, if, for me, it makes sense in the bigger picture.”
“I’m not going to do stupid things or random illegal things. But this is part of an organised push to try to wake society up to the.”
The move to close the highway formed part of the second phase of actions by Restore Passenger Rail. In total, the group has conducted three coordinated, three-week “action phases”. Phase 1 took place in October 2022; Phase 2 in May 2023; and the third in August and September.
Supplied
Action Phase 1 - Transmission Gully
Supplied
“October last year, yup, yup, yup. That was pretty big. That was 50 or 60 of us staying in Poneke Wellington for three weeks. Some people coming and going over that time. but it was three-week actions. Three-week phase of actions.”
“We began with a weekend of training, some of that was technical training for things like climbing, and harness work and rope work. Practising with superglue. Some of that also was also, a large part of that was peaceful, non-violent training. So working to, working as a group on our own personal safety but also safety of members of the public and interactions with the Police.”
He told me the intention was to avoid confrontation and that safety was paramount.
“It’s core to what we do. Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup. Everything we do is planned.”
Time was also spent scouting and preparing.
“So the culmination of that first 3-week action phase was Transmission Gully. That’s a fairly new, four-lane highway to and from Wellington from the north. It’s got two lanes feeding into capital city. It’s one of the busier thoroughfares of people commuting to Wellington. And we blocked both lanes. We had thirteen people sitting on the road.
“Yes. Two lanes coming south, feeding into Wellington.”
He told me they had the road.
“So we had thirteen people sitting across sort of two and half lanes, two lanes, and the shoulder each side.” The first thing we do when we do an action like that is phone the police. Actually, no we phone the fire and ambulance, and we tell the fire and ambulance that we are blocking this road, so straight away they know to re-route.
“We phone them as we are about to do it.”
“So that’s so they can re-route any traffic around, any emergency, fire and ambulance vehicles around us and we always have one lane such that it can be quickly removed. The one lane only parked off. When we glue, we only glue on one lane, so that we always have one lane available.
This was to allow for ambulance or fire truck movement.
“And we tell them before we go out on the road that we’re going to block this road. So there again keeping public safety at the forefront of what we do.”
The protesters had glued themselves to the road. He said when they glued but it was a sensitive topic.
“Just say yes, I was one of the, about half of us glue, 6 of it out of the 13 were using superglue. And so I was one of those 6.”
Impact
“Yeah, it was pretty big for NZ. It was at the forefront. Yeah.”
“Traffic was backed up for kilometres. I think it was about 6 or 8 kilometres. Maybe more. It might have been 10 kilometres. It was big.”
“Overall reaction from the drivers is frustration but generally everyone is really well behaved. People sit back. And shrug their shoulders. They often make phone calls through to their work explaining that they’re going to be a little bit delayed.”
He says it last that traffic was prevented from going into Wellington for 45 minutes to an hour.
Ending the Impasse
Police couldn’t dig the protesters out.
“It took a little while. The first few police cars didn’t have any [] of removing us so they had to radio back to their people, and they had to hustle. And, yeah, bring some solvents, and some things that could dissolve the glue, so it was beneficial to us because it bought us more time. It made it a bigger story; it made it onto the news.”
“It was a controversial road.”
He agreed that was already the case.
Lessons from Transmission Gully
“Well that was the culmination of three weeks of action. It was the end of the first phase of action. That was yeah, one of the bigger actions I’ve been part of. We were really pleased it went well on the day. We were pleased that public behaviour was good. The police treated us fairly. We were charged and then I was sent home. On bail from the Police.”
The Second “Action Phase”
Supplied
“It was April/May of this year, yes. Autumn, yup, yup, yeah.
“Probably a mix of, a little bit familiar to be back in Poneke, to be back together with some of the other activists from around Aotearoa. It was there again a mix of excitement, and a lot of planning, and a lot of preparation, a lot of safety meetings and.”
“So again we were blocking traffic to raise public awareness. We’re trying. Trying to get the public to see the facts, to be aware of the place we are in history of humans trashing our one and only planet.”
The location was not Transmission gully.
“The particular action that I was arrested for was again on two lanes of motorway feeding into Wellington. It was a different road. And we were using a different method. This time it was just two activists on an overhead gantry sign, overhead signage gantry, above the motorway, and our plan was to use a large banner to trigger the motorway safety control people to force them, the traffic to stop.”
“So our plan for the day was to raise awareness by forcing the public to see our message and we were going to do that by blocking the road and stopping the traffic. A two-lane highway feeding into Wellington.”
The road was chosen for its “traffic density”.
“We wanted people. So we needed people. In a peaceful, non-violent way we wanted to force the people to see our message.”
The road was important at that time of day, because of “morning traffic and lots of it.”
“Probably about 7:30, 8 o’clock in the morning.”
He says they wore “High-vis. Climbing harness. Warm clothing, because it’s early in the morning. Helmets and with us we had a about a 3-meter-long banner.”
Helmets and harness gear were worn because of “safety. 100% safety. Safety for us and safety for everyone involved. Safety is our primary concern.”
He judged the risk as “medium.”
“We’re on an overhead gantry; we’re climbing around the. Nah, I think we were cutting. Yeah, I think we cut with bolt cutters the lock so that we could access the hatch which gave personal access onto this overhead signage above the motorway.”
“It was probably about 4 meters above the motorway. Clear of all the vehicles. It’s got traffic signs on it to alert the drivers if there’s to any danger further up…It has road signs on it and there’s a little thin on the walkway to allow roadworkers access for maintenance of a.
“Yes. We had daylight. We weren’t using headtorches.”
They were alone and nothing unexpected happened.
“No. It went to plan. It went well. Yip. Yip. Yeah, the heart’s pumping. Yeah, yeah, for sure.”
The hear was pumping because he knew the risk.
“100%. 120%. Definitely a risk of falling. Didn’t want to drop anything or cause any problems for the traffic below us. So being careful in that regard. There might have been a risk, there would be a small risk the Police had worked out what our next move would be. So they might have been on site.”
“It went well. It went smoothly. We got up there. We were able to get ourselves in position. We had radio so we could radio back to base. We had scouts further up the motorway keeping an eye on traffic, keeping an eye out for Police. And then when the time was correct, we unfurled our banner lengthways across the overhead gantry facing towards, facing the oncoming traffic, and I think we also had photographers in position, so that they could photograph our actions.”
The banner was in place. It was time to lower it.
“We knew that we had a sort of a range of options from (a) through (f), and if (a) didn’t work, then we went to (b), and if (b) didn’t work, then we went to (c).”
Supplied
“And the banner had weights on it. And so then we were lowering the top ropes, and sort of incrementally lowering the banner sort of five or 10 centre meters at a time and then waiting about a minute, and then lowering another 5 to10 centre meters and waiting a minute.”
“Individual motorists were just carrying on driving but we weren’t looking for their attention. We were looking for the attention of the motorway control. So would have known we were up there by then.”
“Cameras everywhere. Once we had lowered it to a threshold which triggered them stopping the traffic.”
(how far lower)
He estimated the lowered the banner “probably about half a meter, so then it’s hanging about half a meter below the gantry. and that crossed their safety thresholds. and then they (the motorway control) were stopping the traffic.”
“So they have oversight and they are in control of safety on the motorway, and once our banner had crossed their threshold of being a danger to oncoming trucks, then they were forced to shut the road.”
The time between the banner being unfurled and traffic being stopped was “I’d say about 15 minutes. 15 to 20 minutes.”
“Then we can kind of start to unwind a little bit. We’d achieved our, most of our,…the initial part of our job at that point. We had stopped the traffic so then it was a case of staying in position.”
“And we probably could have got away. However our goal was to raise as a much awareness on that day as possible. And the best way to do that is unfortunately to inconvenience as many people as was possible. So it was time. We wanted to buy time. We had chained the access hatch of the banner and padlocked it on our side with our padlock, so that was to slow the progress of the Police that were going to arrest us.
“That’s when the Police sirens and the multiple cars arrived. So they came on site, they.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The New Zealand Reporter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.