There were howls of outrage when SailGP cancelled racing on Saturday after a Hector's dolphin was spotted on the course. But some of the critics were missing important context, which one journalist has been cataloguing for two years.
New Zealand SailGP Team helmed by Peter Burling cross the finish line to win the final, New Zealand Sail Grand Prix in Christchurch, 2024. Photo: PHOTOSPORT
Hear Hayden's report and his interview with David Williams in this week's Mediawatch here
Newstalk ZB’s Jason Pine broke into his Sunday Sport show last weekend to air an extraordinary statement from a prominent New Zealander.
Sir Russell Coutts, the former sailor and chief executive of SailGP, wanted to talk about the decision to call off competition in the yacht racing league’s Lyttelton leg the day prior after a Hector's dolphin was spotted on the course.
There were fears the marine mammals could be killed by foiling catamarans travelling at speeds of up to 100km/h.
But Coutts thought those concerns were overblown. The dolphins would get out of the way, and even if they did not, at least there were plenty more where those came from.
"It’s been my experience throughout my long career connected with the ocean that dolphins are extremely intelligent mammals and are inherently aware of boats around them. The Hector’s dolphin is not an endangered species as Otago University professor Liz Slooten recently claimed. That was a lie," he said.
Coutts went on to compare holding a high-speed yacht race in the Banks Peninsula marine mammal sanctuary to driving a car to work, saying both activities involve risk.
He had harsh words for not only Slooten, an academic and dolphin expert, but also for the Lyttelton harbourmaster, DOC, Environment Canterbury, and the local iwi Ngāti Wheke, all of whom he felt had “forced” Sail GP into signing up to an "extreme" marine mammal protection plan.
No other commercial users of the harbour had to abide by such stringent conditions, he insisted.
That stance got a lot of sympathy from Pine, who said it was "ridiculous" that an international sporting event would have to call off racing to cater to "minority interests".
His audience seemed to feel the same way, with Pine reading out texts and taking calls from people who thought authorities had overreacted to the threat of making some impromptu dolphin sashimi.
The cause also won political backing.
Prime minister Christopher Luxon said the race cancellation was emblematic of the country’s “obstruction economy”.
On TVNZ’s Breakfast his future deputy, Act leader David Seymour, echoed Coutts’ driving analogy.
"People die. People die terribly from car crashes. I mean, why did you drive to work? You take risks every day."
Christchurch paper The Press placed less blame on overbearing officials and more on dolphins "loitering" in the course.
That leaves open the question of the appropriate penalty is for dolphin loitering. Probably not community service. Flippers are terrible for picking up litter.
Over at The Platform, Sean Plunket had a punishment in mind: death.
"Don't forget the Hector's dolphin debate," he said. "Fried or raw?"
Plunket may just have been in a provocative mood.
He also called Maui dolphins the "Down syndrome kids" of marine mammals, and said they deserved to die.
Plunket went on the air the next day to say sorry after being called out for insulting people with Down syndrome.
In any case, so far, so good for those calling for baby dolphins to finally take some personal responsibility for their own safety.
But despite the early media onslaught, critics were given a chance to rebut these arguments.
They pointed out SailGP hadn’t accidentally stumbled into a marine mammal sanctuary. It had picked one as its event venue.
On Newshub, Juliet Speedy talked to DOC, Ngāti Wheke and others, who pointed out that SailGP was well aware that they were racing in an area where dolphin safety had to take priority, and had signed up to the marine mammal management plan voluntarily.
As Coutts’ least favourite zoologist Liz Slooten told Newstalk ZB’s Weekend Collective straight after Pine’s show, that makes the event less comparable to a daily car commute and more like staging a street race in a pedestrian park.
"No-one's saying we shouldn't be allowed to drive, just not at 300km/h - even though Formula 1 cars can do that. And if you want to drive that fast, you'd have to do that on a racetrack, not a city street."
Slooten also told Tim Beveridge that Hector’s dolphins are in fact endangered. She cited her own expertise, though she could also have pointed to the findings of the International Union for Conservation of Nature or objective reality.
"When my car won't start, I go to the mechanic. When I have a toothache, I go to my dentist. You'd think if you have questions about an endangered dolphin, you'd go to someone who's been studying dolphins for 40 years."
Newstalk ZB's Monday afternoons host Andrew Dickens noted that SailGP had traded heavily on the environmental protections that Coutts said were extreme and forced on them by iwi – including immediately after racing was delayed on the Saturday.
"The TV coverage - which is owned by Russell - promptly started playing a promo praising SailGP's respect for the environment, that they are powered by nature, and that they look after our marine mammal buddies," he said.
"It was good press until the dolphin didn't move on, and so then he unleashed a spray about New Zealand holding people like him back."
In other words, everyone is green when it looks good in the marketing materials. But the real test is whether you stick to your principles when the foils meet the water.
"They made a plan in the event of dolphins swimming into the course. Dolphins happened. They stuck to the plan. The racing was wildly successful. Is it just me, or does this seem like a good outcome for New Zealand?" asked New Zealand Geographic publisher James Frankham.
In an editorial headlined Day of the Dolphin, Frankham said the economic development and future prosperity Coutts and other critics of the cancellation seemed to be supporting would not have been helped by "butchery of a rare dolphin in front of 50 million people on TV".
The controversy would not have been news to anyone who had been following the coverage of Newsroom’s environment editor David Williams.
In the months before the SailGP event, he wrote a series of articles detailing the potential threats it posed to dolphins, and the calls for the safety of sea life to be prioritised over racing.
Just two days before the disrupted event, Newsroom published one of his stories specifically looking at the adequacy or otherwise of SailGP’s marine mammal protection plan.
Those articles now look pretty prescient, though Williams would not confess to any smugness at seeing an issue he has been raising for some time hitting the headlines.
"I will disappoint you there. I wrote these stories in the hope that people will do their jobs, follow the processes that they've set out and everything would be be hunky dory," he told Mediawatch.
Was he surprised by Sir Russell's reaction - and the strength of support for it?
"I was. It's almost like you're kind of burning the house down because you don't intend to come back when you put out a statement... saying that it was unlikely to come back to Christchurch because of all the barriers to what they were doing there.
"But this is exactly how it was intended. When the dolphins were there, racing shouldn't happen. That was the protocol. This is the voluntary marine mammal management plan that they own.
"When the prime minister talks about balance between the environment and commercial things, well, that's exactly what we had. They got to race a commercial race in a marine mammal sanctuary.
"I looked back and saw I'd written 14 stories about this since October 2022. That's the advantage of getting them on the record. You can compare and contrast what they're saying before the race - or before some controversial event happens.
"You can't say before the racing that it is part of our brand that we love the dolphins and we want to protect them - and then say dolphins are intelligent beings and they'll just get out of the way. It's not the same thing.
"They were instructed during the final race a year ago to stop racing because dolphins were too close to the boats. The race controller said later they didn't think they were. There were two DOC investigations, one of which was into that particular incident.
"The second was that there was an accusation from somebody who worked as an observer that the observer boats were actually chasing the dolphins away and herding them away from the racecourse. You could say that's good for the dolphins, but it was a breach of the sanctuary rules.
"Both of those investigations were dropped, and no action was taken.
"Russell Coutts said this [plan] was forced upon SailGP and they had to pay a lot of money for people to observe dolphins. But others would say that's just a cost of doing business, particularly where it was sited."
