Nickel-plated
p. 17 · Read in the full issue
French cinema
From a Noumea correspondent The New Caledonian public, which never knows what new spectacle Paris is going to surprise it with next, now has a new super-show lined up for the nickel industry in May.
The mining company Societe Le Nickel (SLN) plans to fly some 200 visitors to the territory over May 3-7, including representatives of French, US and Japanese steel smelting groups and members of the press.
This mammoth sales promotion is planned at a time when the SLN is widely publicising its intention to gear up production capacity to 90,000 tonnes of nickel annually.
Caledonians would readily recall May 1971, when the Baron Guy de Rothschild himself flew in from Paris and hired a local cinema theatre to announce SLN expansion plans. As the then president-elect of SLN, Rothschild was accompanied by the top echelon of his company and the international press. His pro mises at that time included the famous assertion, “Poum will go ahead”.
Yet Poum, in the north of New Caledonia, is still only a project under debate in Paris. Rothschild also claimed that SLN nickel pro duction in Noumea would reach 80.000 tonnes in 1973: it reached 70.000 tonnes in 1975.
But the Caledonians, accustomed to shows performed to amuse the gallery will no doubt sit through the forthcoming May spectacle as through many others. And some of them, who have lost their right to export Caledonian nickel, admit grimly they have paid dearly for their front row seats. The plebs watch the show acted out by the chosen French “elite”, and they love it.
There was a fore-runner to the SLN drama and that involved three Caledonian politicians who in Feb ruary made another of those rushed trips to Paris to “sound the bell of alarm” they have been sounding, in vain, for quite some years now.
For the latest visit, it was made clear French Overseas Territories Minister Olivier Stirn would speak only to three particular members, and they happened to be all pro- French government. They went flit ting around in the Paris winter try ing to get some SAIO million to balance the swollen Caledonian terri torial budget.