The result is a New Zealand political system that maintains all of the absolute power of the British system whilst providing all the flash of the American system and none of its substance.

The question we posed to a number of different commentators was brutally frank: who are the most, dangerous, the most powerful, the most influential people in our land today?

National MP Murray McCully is one who has expressed growing concern over the past 12 months about the direction New Zealand is headed in terms of its concentration of power and control.

"I think you’ll find that the Prime Minister is moderately influential. You’re going to have a small group in any cabinet that calls the shots and I think it’s reasonably clear who that group is in the current administration: Clark, Cullen, Mallard, and Maharey to some extent. Also in the public service there are certain people who work into the folds of influential players: the chief executive of the department of Prime Minister and the Cabinet, Mark Prebble, and the secretary of the treasury. I think also the State Services Commissioner, Michael Winteringham.

"Margaret Wilson certainly has a significant role in the policy making process. I’d say her stamp has been over quite a few things that have been done by the current government. She’s probably not in the operations loop as far as I can see but she is very much in the policy loop."

By far the biggest looming concern about Wilson, however, is capacity to stack the bench of the new Supreme Court with judges sympathetic to Labour’s social and political agenda.

In a perceptive analysis of the inherent danger surrounding the proposed new court, National Business Review’s Jock Anderson pulled few punches recently:

It will be run by a woman and a Maori is guaranteed a seat.

Who else will make up the new five-judge Supreme Court will be decided by advisers hand picked by Attorney-General Margaret Wilson and rubber-stamped by Governor-General and former High Court judge Dame Silvia Cartwright.

One of those advisers will be former governor-general, Anglican cleric and Maori Sir Paul Reeves.

The court will be headed by Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias (53), with part-time High Court judge and Waitangi Tribunal chairman Justice Eddie Durie (62) a certainty to fill the role of a judge "well versed in tikanga Maori."

There is an expectation that an overly-gung ho Ms Wilson will extend political patronage and appoint people sympathetic to her views on politics, judicial activism, social engineering, middle-class guilt and white-man bashing.

When Ms Wilson looks outside the judiciary for new Supreme Court judges she can appoint anyone who has held a lawyer’s practising certificate for seven years.

That is the same criteria for appointing High Court judges.

It would allow her, for example, to appoint high-profile briefs such as corporate lawyer and professional company director James Farmer QC, former publishing darling and lawyer to Prime Minister Helen Clark Hugh Rennie QC.

It could also open the door for the appointment of other high-profile Maori lawyers such as corporate lawyer and former law commissioner Denese Henare, Treaty of Waitangi specialist Annette Sykes and Justice Durie’s wife and treaty grievance consultant Donna Hall, who failed at considerable personal cost in her August bid to sue The National Business Review for alleged defamation.

Other names doing the rounds in legal circles include former Labour prime minister and public law consultant Sir Geoffrey Palmer and his professional partner Mai Chen, trendy darlings of the Wellington band wagon.

A National Party source said Ms Chen’s name had been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court appointment but this was discounted as it was widely believed she was being groomed to pick up a Labour list seat at the next general election…

"I think you’ve got a series of major risks around Margaret Wilson and I guess choosing judges is one," agrees National’s McCully.

"We’re also seeing her stamp on a lot of legislation. For example, the Treaty-related clauses in the local government legislation that was passed before Parliament stopped for Christmas. We’re seeing her mark on most of the significant legislation that passes through Parliament and then we’re seeing it over a constitutional level and an emergence in the Supreme Court where she’s a power player. So what we’re seeing is quite a profound influence over key decisions and constitutional infrastructure.

"She is going to be an influential player and I think that is going to be the area probably where the government is most out of step with the aspiration and attitudes of your average New Zealander. I think it’s going to be a major Achilles heel for the Government over the next twelve months."

"I think there is an element of security that some people derive from what looks like a clear and purposeful approach to policy making. If you have an effective spin machine and are definite in the positions you adopt then some people will find that attractive without looking too deeply at the content of the argument.

"Ultimately the way in which they are proceeding is going to become a major Achilles heel to them because one day people are going to wake up and see that quite a few things have been changed that they never agreed to.

"One example is the way in which the Treaty has been incorporated into our legislation and institutions. You see, I think there are fundamentally different views about our future. I think your average New Zealanders see some historical issue needing to be sorted out between Maori and non-Maori so that we can get on and do business as people who have got a common set of rights and responsibilities. Then there’s a sort of politically-correct view which says the Treaty should be enshrined in all our institutions and legislation, and that everything should be conducted by way of this structural partnership. Now the key players in the current government certainly are the proponents of that second view but it’s a view that is subscribed to by a very small minority of New Zealanders in my view. They’re charging ahead down that track and I think it will catch up with them.

"The ultimate danger [of people having too much power and influence] is that they can change the fabric of the country by an accumulated series of steps without anyone actually realising, and be at odds with the vast majority of the population. That’s happening.

"The Treaty is the big one and Margaret Wilson is behind that but I think the Government as a whole has signed up to that particular approach," says McCully.

"I mean, look at the way in which the Prime Minister reacted to only a moderate amount of political pressure on the ‘closing the gaps’ stuff by basically abolishing the phrase but maintaining the programs is particularly illustrative of how the current government operates. They’re committing a hundred million dollars a year to programmes that are ethnically funded, funded on the basis of race, but when the spotlight went on them she announced that the expression was no longer going to be used by the Government. Exactly the same dollars where being spent on exactly the same things but she expected that because she made the decision to abolish the phrase then everyone else should oblige, including the news media.

"I find that illustrative of how the Government does business. If it gets into difficulty then the answer lies in the spin rather than the substance."

Strangely, despite watching their Air Force get shot out of the sky without even one Parliamentary vote on the matter, National leader Bill English turned down the opportunity to embrace constitutional reform prior to the last election as a method of reining in Labour’s rogues. Murray McCully, on the other hand, appears to recognise that the constitutional imbalance is getting more noticeable.

"I think there always has been one in New Zealand. I think the reason we have MMP at all is because the public sensed that a relatively small group of people had a very high level of authority to make decisions on their behalf. They saw it that you had the will of a small group in Cabinet being translated into a majority in Parliament. I think people thought, naively, that MMP was somehow going to counter-balance that.

"That’s quite wrong in many ways because now those small groups have even more power in a less transparent way than used to be the case under First Past the Post because of this necessity to do side-deals with other parties on the way through. There isn’t the transparency in decision-making that you might like. I think the problem New Zealanders thought would be solved with the adoption of MMP has not been solved – arguably it’s worse than it was and with the disappearance of the Privy Council and emergence of employing people in the Supreme Court, it’s going to arguably be a further step down that path.

"I would argue that the public got it wrong and if excessive executive power was the problem then some other solutions should have been looked at."

So who are the new power networks under this administration?

"I think business groups, by and large, have less influence in the decision making process than they are accustomed to having. I think the power women’s network, if you like, certainly has more influence than it has ever had.

"If you look at the roles of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the Chief Justice, the Governor General – it’s a network of very influential women who have a hold on authority in New Zealand today."

Another who worries about Labour’s social engineering experiments is Bruce Logan, executive director of the Maxim Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Auckland.

"Aside from the obvious ones in Parliament there are one or two people who I’m reluctant to name because they annoy me, but they’re power brokers," explains Logan. "Tim Barnett from the Labour party is one. He’s from the ‘civil unions’ [de facto marriage] kick and he’s quite influential in the party on those areas. Whether he’s a power broker as much as an initiator – I suppose there’s a difference really.

"There are obvious people who might not see themselves as power brokers but are. I mean Stephen Tindall would have to be there. He’s got a lot of business acumen and because of his rather moderate status he’s not seen as the sort of business round-table kind of guy and government tend to court him. I know that Helen Clark tries to get him very much on her side if she can because he’s seen as a decent bloke and has the power.

"I think he has influence over political direction in so far as they [Labour] want to get his blessing. So he has power in that sense. Margaret Wilson would have to be in that category too.

"I would expect - if we’re looking at a triumvirate of people - you’ve got Helen Clark, you’ve got Margaret Wilson, you’ve got the Governor General…three women who I think are very influential. They’ve got their own particular points of view when they get going and they’re certainly in power broking."

Again, it’s the emergence of Wilson, the ‘eminence grise’, the Rasputin of New Zealand Labour politics, that gets commentators going. Despite having failed to get any electoral endorsement from the public, Wilson nonetheless finds herself, as an unelected MMP member, very much the power behind Clark’s throne. Wilson, as Attorney-General, will be appointing the full bench of the new Supreme Court – a move many are calling a democratic farce.

"Oh, it’s absurd," says Logan. "It certainly is a democratic farce - this whole idea of her very, very rapid promotion within the political system on the basis of her ideological outlook. One might also say on the basis of academic record too, but dear me, she certainly hasn’t had to do a lot of legwork or whatever you have do to get up there in Parliament. I don’t doubt that she’s a very astute woman, she obviously is but in my opinion she doesn’t deserve the position she’s in. But that’s only my opinion – I abhor her ideology.

"Power is a huge temptation to do things to suit yourself. If you’ve got the view of human nature that I have – that human nature is essentially flawed – there need to be checks and balances to keep it under control. If you don’t have those then people get tempted too readily to overstep the mark. The consequences of that are more likely to be negative than positive. Now, to a degree, I think that’s what’s happening in New Zealand.

"The law has to be above the state because if it’s not then the citizen has no one to appeal to above the lawmaker. And the lawmaker must be subject to the same set of propositions about truth and order and all that as the citizen is. In a democracy that’s very, very important. If you don’t have that in place then the grounds for tyranny are laid because the state then becomes not only the lawmaker, but the determiner of what laws should be made."

Are the key figures of this Government becoming, like their counterparts in the Lord of the Rings, too strong and influential?

"Yes they are," grants Logan, "but I don’t think you’ve actually got a group of people in Wellington who are getting together in a huddle saying, ‘look we’ve got to impose our views on the rest of the population’. I think it’s a natural consequence of the way we’re going as a culture because of our loss of confidence in some kind of shared moral vision. If a culture doesn’t have a shared moral vision someone is going to take the reins and shape it for us. That’s what’s happening now – the state is essentially doing that.

"Lets go back to that guy Tim Barnett. He’s publicly said, in the Christchurch Press, he wants to see a new sort of legislative framework which gets rid of historical prejudice. He’s basically saying that the past is irrelevant, ‘we have a much better idea of the way we should be going’. I mean, that’s just chronological snobbery. But this Government is going down that path. It’s bought into that in the way it’s steering universities and shaping university direction. This whole concept of light steering of universities comes out of that concept. I think you can find a lot of incidences where that sort of thing is happening in our culture."

And like Murray McCully before him, the Maxim Institute director also has concerns about the reinterpretation of Waitangi.

"People are trying to insert all kinds of things into the treaty but it’s a back reading into the treaty – it’s not what was intended. It’s sort of assuming a set of values today, a having become convinced of those values now ruling, they take those values and insert them back into the Treaty of Waitangi and say, ‘that’s what the treaty was saying’. It wasn’t saying that at all.

"Political correctness is simply a revision of history and that’s what’s going on."

So who’s to blame – is there too much pandering to political correctness?

"I think they [Government] actually believe it. They actually believe that political correctness is the right way to go because civil society is something that needs to be controlled by government rather than the other way around."

Which goes back to the point at the beginning of this article. New Zealand’s hybrid political system has bred a monster that’s fast going out of control.

"It’s patently clear to me," growls Newstalk ZB host Leighton Smith during a break, "that the PC set are in firm control and there’s not enough strength in New Zealand to do anything about them.

"New Zealand is in the grip of contemporary socialism in the form of political correctness, the cost of which will hit New Zealanders dearly in the not too distant future."

The point is amplified by Logan, who contrasts the past role of Government simply to provide rules that allow people to live free and enjoyable lives, with the modern trend towards using the law and the state education system to effectively brainwash the public.

"If the Government decides to make a law then not only is it ‘the law’, but it’s the moral framework as well. That’s why Margaret Wilson worries me because she has disconnected our understanding of law."

Is it time then to rein in rogue politicians with some form of constitutional reform?

"Yes, but it’s very difficult to get constitutional reform in a culture where there’s no agreement on primary principles. We simply do not have the same [as the American] cultural, religious and social agreement."

Constitutional lawyer Graeme Minchin takes a longer-term view of the power elite, and believes the sycophants who surrounded the Lange Labour Government still hold sway, at least in spirit.

"Looking at the events of last year I noticed that Fay and Richwhite were up there for making so many millions but they made a lot of that money by selling their railway shares. I suppose one of the issues for me is that some of those power brokers have been created by the sale of undervalued public assets.

"I don’t agree with it, but you can have a New Right policy which says the Government is involved in business but in my mind you cannot then have a policy of selling those assets.

"If you’re looking at where that power is coming from you need to look at whether it’s come at the public’s expense.

"Look at the Tindall Group too. It looks all nice and rosy but what everyone forgets is that it has changed the New Zealand infrastructure whereby we no longer make anything, we buy it all from countries that use slave labour, like China, and it’s imported at a rate that no local labour can compete with. There’s not much value being added. Basically, you may have people doing very well selling cheap things but you don’t have people in jobs making things."

Minchin isn’t the first to single Stephen Tindall out for mention and, like Logan before him, argues that the Government is cosying up to "moderate" business leaders like the Warehouse founder.

"That’s exactly right. He’s been very successful and they want to be associated with success. But what I’m saying, is look at the big picture, his success has been our failure. You don’t have people in jobs – they’re on unemployment. They’re the lost souls who tend to lives of crime. There’s nothing valuable added to our culture – there are a lot of knock-on effects.

"We need to ask are they doing well because we’re all doing well, or are they doing well because there’s been a shift, a spread of wealth. I think that’s been the case."

Nor does the constitutional lawyer think it’s just politicians and business tycoons calling all the shots. Also pulling some pretty powerful triggers are the New Bureaucrats, the civil service politburo.

"I think certainly so. I think, for example, organisations like CYFS or ACC, see themselves above the law.

"ACC are certainly powerbrokers, I mean they’re the biggest corporation in the country and they deal with a very large amount of money, and they play pretty roughly, especially when you consider who they’re dealing with – people who are damaged."

Add in IRD or WINZ, and suddenly the occasional breach of rights by the police begins to look positively minimalist by way of comparison. On a daily basis, ordinary New Zealand citizens are being trodden on by a State drunk on power. The abolition of the Privy Council, our final appellate court and a safety check on the excesses of the Government, is a prime example says Minchin.

"Personally I think it was not a great move, and worse was the manner in which it was implemented. It was treated as a fait accomplit. We were given a range of options on how we were going to replace the Privy Council and so the replacement was, in effect, a foregone conclusion.

"She [Wilson] is very much a power player. I think she had an agenda and she wanted to put that into operation whatever the opposition. When you talk about power brokers you’re talking about people who want to exercise power rather than achieve consensus. Well, we’re going through that process with this issue on the Privy Council. In other words it was a total agenda and they just pushed it through.

"What you now have, in effect, is the Executive determining the [judicial] review process. If you look at the way the law is operated, it’s supposed to operate as a review mechanism with a limit on the power of the Executive and that’s the constitutional role. Fundamentally, if you look at this system now, it basically accepts that we’re all corruptible and the way you manage that is you have different bases of power which check each other and don’t allow one to get out of control. That’s the importance of the independence of the judiciary."

"Yes, very much so. And I think there’s a lack of appreciation of that whole issue of where the Privy Council leads to. There’s a lack of perception of exactly what constitutional issues are at stake and therefore an imbalance in our society in that way. The other way of looking at it is the Bill of Rights – basically we have a bogus Bill of Rights because it’s overridden by any other Act. So if you have an enactment that says all blue-eyed people get shot - well, that’s just it. You can talk about the Bill of Rights all you like but that Act overrides it.

"It’s part of the change in our culture. I think we’re changed from being a more egalitarian culture to one that is less so and those power brokers are less sharing of the wealth. There’s no understanding of society flourishing as a whole.

"There’s that old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that’s what’s happening. I think if you look at it, we’ve gone from being an egalitarian society to one that tolerates massive suicide rates, very large numbers of urban poor – society is changing. There’s an unequal distribution of wealth and power that can lead to uncivil society.

"This is so concerning because when you have a society that is dominated by power and wealth then those people move to protect that and you protect that by increasing your power. Then, civil liberties go out the window. The values become the values of the very rich and very powerful."

It was obvious the ship was in dire trouble. She was foundering like a cork in the tide, her entire superstructure intermittently disappearing as one barrage of waves after another broke over the deck, engulfing her in frothing, foaming jaws.

But between each mighty surge the ship miraculously reappeared, only to be marked by plumes of thick black smoke pouring from the hold. The acrid fumes filled the inside of the ship, forcing the crew up onto the open deck and directly into the sea’s savage path. Like wretches they clung for dear life to the railing, trapped in a living hell.

It wasn’t until after nightfall that the ship’s captain gave the order to lower the lifeboats - some sections of the deck railing were starting to melt as the fire below continued to rage. It was a futile order. The quarter boats were immediately capsized or devoured by the raging sea as soon as they hit the water. Terrified mariners, left with no other option, leapt over the railing, following the dinghies into the roaring black void.

Although two tugboats managed to reach the stricken ship and tow her back to Whangarei Harbour the following day, seven of those on board the Captain Bourganville lost their lives that stormy night in the mid-seventies. The captain, for his part in choosing to risk the voyage in the treacherous sea-state, not only lost his job, but he lost his wife and daughter too.

As a coastal resident overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the eyewitness who recounted this harrowing tale has a memory full of shipping sagas. His most recent report was of a near disaster just before Christmas last year. North of Whangarei, perched on a cliff high above the ocean raging to the tune of a southeasterly storm, he recalls observing a large freighter approaching from the south through the passage between the Poor Knights Islands and the coast.

"The ship appeared to be moving closer and closer to shore and eventually passed my position no more than about a mile off the coast. As it passed it looked as though it was having steering difficulty – trying to bear away from the shore – because the swell was so big that the prop could easily be seen coming clear out of the water."

As the story goes, the freighter narrowly avoided running aground on the craggy coast but, as the witness says, "the captain would surely have been sweating".

A string of recent shipping accidents provide some element of evidence. In February last year the Jody F Millennium ran aground near Gisborne in large seas. Six months later the fishing vessel June sank at Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island after hitting rocks. Then in October the bulk carrier Tai Ping ran aground in heavy fog at Tiwai Point, near the entrance to Bluff Harbour.

These were just some of the high profile local incidents that made headlines last year, generally brought to the public’s attention because of the potential environmental threats posed by oil and fuel leaks.

But, a little over a month prior to Christmas, an overseas shipping disaster dominated national media attention for days. After being battered by an Atlantic Ocean storm, an aging oil tanker, the Prestige, snapped in half more than 300km off the northwest Spanish coast. The tanker took most of its 77,000 tonnes of fuel oil 3.6km to the ocean floor where it continues to seep from the wreck three months after it went down.

Numerous giant oil slicks have washed ashore since the ship sank, polluting more than 400km of the Spanish coastline. More recently though, high winds have broken up other major slicks and blown hundreds of thousands of foul-smelling globs of oil on to the popular sandy beaches of France’s Bordeaux region.

Environmental organisations have estimated that the first slick contained 20,000 tonnes of oil. A second slick was judged to be twice the size. Innumerable fish, seabirds and ocean mammals have already been killed by the pollution, and the spill has also decimated the Spanish fishing industry. Now officials predict that more oil deposits are on the way to France, some covering an area the size of New York City.

The ongoing environmental disaster the French and Spanish authorities are fighting now makes the 25 tonne spill of the Jody F Millennium pale into insignificance. Although no final sum has yet been released, the Maritime Safety Authority (MSA) calculated that the first two and a half weeks of the Jody spill-response cost over $1.4 million and that the figure was rising daily. In Europe, the French Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin has pledged $100 million to the Prestige mop-up operation.

Although none of the recent shipping incidents in New Zealand have had significant or lasting environmental effects, the scale of which can be seen in France and Spain, the Prestige spill has prompted one of this country’s most well-known marine conservationists to warn that a similar catastrophe is waiting to happen right here in our waters.

Northland diver, author and marine conservationist Wade Doak recently went public with his concerns that it is only a matter of time before New Zealand has to cope with a Prestige-style disaster. In an article penned for the Herald he wrote: "The risk of a major oil-spill on the New Zealand coast has never been greater."

What has prompted Doak’s dire predictions are the "distinct parallels" between Spain and New Zealand.

"What’s happening in Spain is interesting because it’s on the opposite side of the world – it’s antipodal. Everything that’s happening is in our latitude. They’re reliant on their fishing industry; they’ve got similar exposed coastline and weather. Those are some of the parallels."

The MSA says about 75-80 foreign oil tankers call at the Marsden Point oil refinery each year, which averages roughly one ship every four days. These vessels travel down Northland’s east coast to reach the refinery and unload their cargo. Doak believes that the law of averages suggests the conditions that drove the Captain Bourganville or the Jody F Millennium into dire trouble will catch a tanker unaware sooner or later.

"As I see it, it will be a big cyclone in summer. Now that season [cyclone season] runs right through to April and with that amount of tanker traffic the chances of having a ship out there when there’s a cyclone is very, very high," he says.

"Tankers have been averaging one major Prestige-style disaster every 15 months in Europe. That’s how bad it is. So how the hell do we think we can sit out on this? We can’t."

A simple Internet search shows that the recent safety record of international oil tanker shipments is as questionable as Doak suggests. Some of the more noteworthy incidents include the Ecuadorian tanker that grounded on the Galapagos Islands dumping more than 900,000 litres of heavy diesel fuel. In July last year a Papua New Guinea registered oil tanker grounded on a reef near a tourist resort in Fiji. Then, a fortnight after the Prestige sank, a Panamanian tanker carrying 20,000 tonnes of inflammable gas caught on fire and was abandoned. The same day, the Singaporean owned Tasman Sea collided with a fishing boat off the Chinese coast. The ship, carrying 80 000 tonnes of crude oil disgorged a huge slick into the Bohai Sea. The list goes on and on …

Admittedly there were a number of different factors behind these incidents – human error and navigational glitches were responsible in some cases, adverse weather conditions in other instances. Regardless though, figures from the Institute of London Underwriters show that more than 80 percent of insurance losses have involved ships built more than 15 years ago. Clearly this indicates that the older a tanker gets the higher are its chances of being wrecked.

Doak says this correlation becomes even more startling when you consider that two-thirds of the world’s tanker fleet is now more than 10 years old, and that these vessels are frequenting our waters.

Northern Hemisphere governments have recognised the link between older ships and spills for some years but the Prestige provided a poignant reminder that more needs to be done to prevent further catastrophes.

The Prestige was one of the old single-hull vessels – unlike modern tankers with double-hulls, the cargo of oil leaks directly from the hold if the hull is ruptured or damaged. A double-hull ship has a separate or second hull encasing the hold. This affords added protection and reduced risk of spilling oil.

British politicians are now calling for a ban on tankers more than 15 years old and want double-hulled vessels to be mandatory, as is the case in the United States (the Americans incorporated a ban on single-hull tankers after the 1990 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska).

France has also campaigned forcefully for stricter European Union rules on oil tanker safety following an oil spill disaster off the coast of Brittany two years ago, and even threatened a unilateral ban on all single-hull tankers. In response, the European Commission proposed to phase in a ban on the vessels over 10 years starting from 2005. Effectively, by 2015 only double-hull tankers will be shipping in European waters.

John Lee-Richards, Divisional Manager of the MSA National Oil Spill Service Centre, says MSA has a well established marine oil spill-response strategy developed on international best practice. He would not comment directly on whether or not New Zealand could handle a Prestige size spill because "there are a number of variables in any spill which dictate our ability to mount an effective response".

"We have adequate resources and structures in place for a first response to any size of oil spill. In the event of an extremely large oil spill, New Zealand would seek assistance from its overseas partners. This is how just about every country in the world operates. Most, like New Zealand, are signatories to an international convention - OPRC. This requires and obliges the provision of mutual assistance in the event of a major oil spill," he says.

While Doak praises the oil response team’s high level of training and equipment, he believes there are flaws in the established system.

"When he was questioned on the television news about whether such a disaster could happen here, the head of the MSA told us that we had nothing to worry about. In actual fact, that’s not the case," says Doak.

"We do have great equipment and the MSA people have had excellent training but with that equipment it is limited by a number of parameters. For instance, certain weather conditions can render it completely ineffectual.

"What’s happening in Spain is that they’ve got the power of Europe behind them but they still can’t get that oil cleaned up. In one respect, we are lucky not sharing the problems of other countries around us, but at the same time our isolation puts us in a very vulnerable situation. The Prestige had the world’s biggest super-tug hanging onto it and pulling it out to sea, even in that huge storm. My point is that they have the resources of their neighbours close at hand but if we need assistance we’re three or four days voyage away and in storm conditions that’s too long to wait.

"Just because we’re a small country doesn’t mean they send us small tankers – they send supertankers, single-skin too. We’re right in the gun. We’ve got away with it so far but it would be foolish to expect that to continue."

A major oil spill is the single worst disaster that could hit New Zealand according to Doak. He says that although national cataclysms like earthquakes, eruptions, fires and floods are beyond human control; they are relatively easier to deal with than large-scale oil spills.

"The social, economic and environmental consequences of a spill the size of the Prestige disaster are almost unthinkable."

It has been estimated that around 400km of the Spanish coastline has been affected by the Prestige spill. Doak hypothesises that if a similar spill occurred off the Northland coast – say a tanker broke up off the Bay of Islands – a black tide would smother the shore from Cape Brett to the Bay of Plenty. New Zealand has one of the longest coastlines in the world, roughly the same as that of continental United States, and because of the rugged nature of the area, Doak says a cleanup would be near impossible.

Residents living close to where the Jody F Millennium spill washed ashore had to be evacuated from their homes because the nauseating fumes became overwhelming – that was a relatively small spill. Doak says a major spill would have shattering economic consequences because coastal locales would be turned into ghost towns.

"I don’t know how far inshore the aerosol pollution would go but the coast would probably be uninhabitable – you can’t breathe the stuff. Imagine how that would affect the business hub of Auckland when the pollution gets trapped in the Waitemata Harbour bottleneck.

"Throw in all the tourism, the farming, fishing and forestry – yeah, the economic consequences would be crippling for a small country like this."

This scenario paints a grim picture, but is there any chance of such a spill actually occurring? Clearly, Doak says yes – "we’re playing Russian Roulette" – but even Lee-Richards of MSA admits, "a major oil spill could happen in New Zealand".

Doak says that is proof that the current MSA strategy has too much focus on reactive measures and more emphasis needs to be placed on preventing such a disaster. Most of the world’s oil tanker fleet are single-hull vessels and Doak is pragmatic about the demand and supply problems associated with a blanket ban on those tankers. However, he believes we should adopt a regime, similar to Norway, whereby inspectors assess the vessels at their point of departure for New Zealand.

"It seems daft having an inspector living in Whangarei when we’re regularly taking oil from Indonesia. Why the hell can’t he have his salary and live over there?"

Additionally, Doak suggests only the highest quality ships (recently built, double-hull vessels) should be allowed to enter our waters during the cyclone season. He also says a system of controlling and monitoring coastal shipping with ground radar could dramatically reduce the risk of collision and grounding, and ensure that ships don’t travel through restricted areas – a scheme that would be significantly more cost efficient to implement than cleaning up a major spill.

But Lee-Richards backs the MSA strategy saying that not only is shipping traffic in New Zealand waters substantially lighter than around Europe, "which reduces the risk of major oil spills occurring," but the inspection systems in place are more than the proverbial ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

"The oil companies that bring oil to New Zealand are required to have a satisfactory pre-charter inspection carried out on any vessel intending to come to the Marsden Point oil refinery.

"A safety inspection is carried out on all foreign tankers when they first arrive at a New Zealand port. Vessels that do not meet our safety and marine environment protection standards can be detained."

He also points out that New Zealand is part of an Asia/Pacific-wide inspection regime that includes the sharing of information about sub-standard ships and agreements on action to be taken if a substandard vessel is found.

Lee-Richards says because overseas administrations check vessels and provide this country with information it would be "infeasible" to send New Zealand inspectors offshore to do the job. He says the collaboration with other international bodies means "we generally have a very full and up to date picture of the history of any ship before it arrives".

But "generally" is not good enough for Doak who says there’s simply too much at stake.

"Tankers will continue to run aground because of poor navigation, there will continue to be collisions and engine room fires, there will continue to be storm damage. What we need to do is think about scenarios to stop any of those things happening to the utmost degree.

"It’s a credit to the guys at Marsden Point that we’ve got one of the best and cleanest refineries in the world, so why can’t we have the best oil spill prevention measures in the world?

"The top MSA guys in Wellington aren’t approaching it like that though and they don’t want their prestige inhibited by admitting they can’t do it.

"It’s great that, unlike Europe, New Zealand doesn’t have to share its neighbours’ problems. You know, the Spanish may get it right but then the French mightn’t. We’ve only got ourselves to blame if we don’t get it right. That gives us a wonderful sense of mastery that we should be exploiting."

Suppose we don’t have it right. The ship-spotting enthusiasts may find themselves staring down the barrel of something far more ominous than a violent vessel-destroying storm. The next wave could carry with it a devastating black tide - a sinister surge that wouldn’t recede but would linger to smash our environment and our economy like a foundering ship on the rocks.

"Sooner or later it’s going to happen," predicts Doak. "How much later? Not before oil runs out I hope. One thing’s for sure though – we’ve got loads of guns pointing at us."

Wade Doak makes it clear that he doesn’t intend to make enemies by raising these concerns. Nor does he intend to offend any person or agency. He simply believes that it is better to debate the issues in a rational manner than do nothing but wait and see if there are bullets in the gun when the trigger is pulled.