Anonymous criticism by Te Ipukarea Society ‘misguided’

kelvin passfield on 24/02/2021

I want to clarify that our article was not anonymous. I emailed Gerald before submitting our article to let him know we had issues with several of his points and would therefore be replying in the newspaper. I also said I hoped he would not take it personally. I received a cordial response from him. I could have put my name to the article but it also had input from a number of other Te Ipukarea Society members, so we signed off as TIS. We regret that Gerald has perceived our response as a personal attack on him - it was not. Our main issue, as stated clearly in our article, was that the Seabed Minerals Authority shared, in a post they paid to promote, his opinion and conclusions, which we believe are flawed, without first having them vetted by deep-sea scientists.