Politicians are often urged to reach consensus on certain issues, so that everything doesn’t just flip back again when there’s a change of government. Unfortunately, these calls for consensus are often made with regard to a controversial policy, and can be little more than a bad faith attempt to stifle opposition.
The one area where continuity can normally be taken for granted is with respect to foreign policy commitments and international treaties. In these areas, governments of every stripe tend to honour the commitments made by their predecessors, if only because doing otherwise would diminish New Zealand’s reputation on the world stage, and signal that our word can only be trusted until the next time the votes get counted.
This is why the disdain that Finance Minister Nicola Willis has expressed for the emissions reduction targets that New Zealand embraced in the Paris agreement on climate change is so unusual, and so disturbing. Once again, Willis is blaming other people for her problems on the job. This time the alleged villain is James Shaw. This week, Willis ruled out buying carbon credits offshore as offsets for New Zealand’s failure to meet our agreed emissions reductions targets by 2030.
This U-turn on global warming has to be seen in the light of other coalition government policy backtracking on climate change. These reversals include: refusing to include agriculture in the emissions trading scheme, scrapping the Clean Car Discount, eroding the Clean Car standards for imported vehicles, and backing down on our efforts to reduce methane emissions.
What Did We Sign?
A previous National-led government signed the Paris agreement on climate change in December 2016. When doing so, we pledged to do all we could to enact policies to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To that end, every signatory agreed to submit a series of National Determined Contributions ( NDCs) setting out each country’s efforts to progressively reduce emissions, and to prepare for the climate change impacts coming down the pike.
Our first NDC was part of the original Paris agreement. In it, New Zealand agreed to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. Like every other signatory to the Paris agreement, New Zealand also agreed in 2016 to commit to more ambitious NDC targets in subsequent years.
In line with that pledge to rachet up our efforts, New Zealand agreed in October 2021 to update its NDC target for 2030 to a 50% reduction in net emissions below 2005 levels. It is this target that Willis has decried this week. In effect, she is blaming the previous government for following through on the enhanced targets that were signalled in the original Paris agreement. As Willis put it on Tuesday:
“It is also the case that the NDC the previous government set for us was well beyond what was required. … We don’t think New Zealanders … would thank us for sending billions of dollars offshore to meet that Paris obligation.”
Willis is not the only Cabinet Minister to ignore the commitment that National made in 2016 to progressively lift our emissions reductions, and pay for any shortfall. Her stance also has regional implications for foreign policy. Meaning: the coalition government to which she belongs has been more than willing to send “billions of dollars offshore” to US arms manufacturers, in order to combat the threat to the Pacific region allegedly posed by China.
Time and again though, our Pacific neighbours have told New Zealand that the imminent threat they face is from climate change, not from China. If Willis belonged to a serious government, she would be more inclined to be “sending billions of dollars offshore” to mitigate the effects of climate change, rather than in prepping for war with our main trading partner.
The reputational risks raised by us reneging on our climate change commitments are genuine. Since being elected in 2023, the coalition government has embraced a set of policies that undermine the mitigation targets we agreed to in Paris. Among other things, the refusal to buy carbon offsets to compensate for those policy choices is bound to cause harm to New Zealand Inc. Under current management, we are actively undermining the “clean, green, environmentally conscious” brand that’s central to the marketing of (a) our primary exports and (b) of New Zealand as a tourism destination.
Labour alternative
It sounds like a no-brainer, but the question has to be asked. Would a future Labour government live up to the agreement we signed in Paris, honour the further NDC commitments we made in 2021 and therefore – come 2030 – pay for any shortfall by buying carbon offsets offshore at the going rate? Incredibly, Labour won’t tell us.
RNZ presenter Corin Dann: “What is Labour’s plan to meet the 20230 target? Because you, too, if elected into government next year, would face this massive gap. How would you meet it, domestically?”
Labour deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni: This what you’ll see us roll out in the next year, leading up to the next election. I’m not here to announce our policy, pre-empting our spokesperson doing that.”
When Dann persisted, Sepuloni repeated: “That will be something that our climate change spokesperson announces closer to the election.”
Par for the course. Repeatedly this year, Labour has refused to state its position on many of the controversial issues of the day. Yet if and when Labour criticises government policy, it is utterly reasonable to ask what, if anything, Labour would do differently. Currently, Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall seems to be the only Labour front bencher willing and able to say what she, and Labour, stand for – and to propose policy alternatives.
The refrain from Chris Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni – “I’m not going to announce Labour policy right now on RNZ” etc – is simply not good enough. It may suit Labour politically to conceal its policy intentions until closer to polling day. In the jargon of political strategists, this is called a “small target” policy. (i.e. don’t give your opponents any ammunition to fire back at you.)
Yet by treating policy obfuscation as its priority, Labour is doing the public a disservice. Democracy is supposed to involve a contest of ideas, and that contest is not supposed to be restricted to three months before Election Day, just because that happens to suit the party strategists.
If Labour is refusing to state its intentions for fear of giving its opponents an advantage, that reluctance speaks volumes. It amounts to a concession that you have no confidence in your ability to defend your stance, and to win an argument. Voters will react accordingly. The public judges a party on what it stands for, and how it expresses and defends those values, in good times and bad. Fidelity to a party is built by identifying not only with its election year promises, but with how it stands its ground on their behalf, under fire, all year round. Of late, Labour has repeatedly chosen to duck opportunities to say what it thinks and what it would do if faced with the same circumstances, and the same responsibilities. As a result, it looks shifty, and sounds evasive.
This is particularly unfortunate, given Labour’s recent history in government. All year, centre left voters have been looking – so far almost entirely in vain – for positive reasons to cast a vote for Labour, rather than just voting against the status quo. Right now, a centre right government with a thin majority is carrying out the most radical reforms of New Zealand society since the last major neo-liberal experiment of the 1980s. While this has been happening, Labour has largely been missing in action.
This is all the more unfortunate given that Labour, when granted an absolute majority in 2020, achieved next to nothing with it. In Labour’s last year in office in particular, PM Chris Hipkins backed off from anything that looked like a centre-left policy, in a doomed attempt to placate centre right voters.
Despite the crushing defeat in 2023, there has been no public evaluation as to why Labour lost so badly, and so far, only minor changes of course have been proposed (e.g. a wafer thin capital gains tax) The same leadership with the same easily spooked tendencies remains in place. That being the case, it is entirely reasonable for centre-left voters to ask: what would be the point of electing a Labour-led government next year, when last time around, these same people backed away in fright from the huge mandate that voters had given them? (It is a definition of madness to do the same thing, and expect a different outcome.)
It seems more than likely that, if elected, Labour’s compass would be set once again in whatever direction that corporate sentiment happens to be pointing.
Sex, Death, Life, Fried Bread etc
Reportedly, the genesis of this new Florence and the Machine track had to do with events surrounding an ectopic pregnancy that almost killed Florence Welch. That personal meaning aside, the lyrics are shot through with all the elemental forces – sex, death and the whole weird business of life’s renewal. As Matthew Perpetua says, “It plays out like a dark fairy tale…grounded in equal measures of lust and loss, buzzing with a profound connection to the cycle of life.”
For the bigger, global picture when it comes to the cycle of life…there’s this :
Finally, here’s a song in celebration of the delicious, danceable outcome of putting the staff of life into a frying pan: