Greens call for action, not rhetoric

The Green Party has kicked off election year with a hard hitting speech by Co-Leader Jeanette Fitzsimons in the annual State of the Planet address.

Speaking on Waiheke Island at the party’s annual Picnic for the Planet, Ms Fitzsimons issued a challenge to the leaders of the major parties and the media.

“I challenge Helen Clark and John Key to an election in which political parties compete on something more substantial than an appeal to fear and greed. I challenge them to compete over who can be the most trusted to take urgent action to safeguard the social and environmental future for each and every New Zealander. I challenge the media to make this election about the substance of policy and not just about the horse trading and gaming of politics.

Ms Fitzsimons dismissed conjecture about who the Greens would or wouldn't work with following the election, “It is election year, and there are those who are already starting to assign the Greens to this or that coalition bloc or framework, onto this or that side of the political spectrum. Well, they can say what they like, but let me tell you that the Green Party will not do deals based on rhetoric or spin. We won’t barter to get power for power’s sake or the baubles that go with it. … We will, however, be asking a high price of our co-operation. Because this planet is worth a high price. Because a decent future for our children and grandchildren is worth a high price. Our price is real action, not greenwash.

In her wide ranging speech Ms Fitzsimons touched on the destructive effects of the single minded pursuits of growth at all costs, and the dangers of basing all measurements on GDP. Highlighting the licences recently granted to international oil companies to drill in the Great Southern Basin, Ms Fitzsimons said: “Once again we sacrifice our precious wildlife heritage on the altar of commerce.

Ms Fitzsimons also painted a picture of the positive and sustainable future the Greens are working to create.

“Only the Greens have the ideas, the courage, the people, to steer a new direction for the sake of the planet and all our people.” 


Sustainable? Carbon Neutral? It’s time for the Real Thing

Jeanette Fitzsimons – 12pm, Picnic for the Planet, Surfdale Hall, Waiheke Island

Welcome to the Green Party’s fourth Picnic for the Planet. Once again, to talk about the State of the Planet we have come to Waiheke – an island within an island state, a paradise of sun and sea and laid back lifestyle, grapes and olives and alternative ways of doing things. What’s more, Waiheke has just become the first place in New Zealand to be formally named as a transition town with active programmes to reduce the community’s dependence on oil.


I hope you are all having a great summer, and are making the most of our unique environment. Because it may not always be like this.


Coincidentally, 2008 has been officially named International Year of Planet Earth by the United Nations. This recognises the urgency of giving priority to the health and wellbeing of our only home. But let us make it a year of action for the planet, not just talk. We have had the rhetoric about carbon neutrality and sustainability – this year demands that we turn that into action.


After thirty years of the Greens’ concerns about the State of the Planet being first ignored, then ridiculed, then violently opposed, they are now accepted by the mainstream as self-evident. We have even seen the first glimmerings of action.


The reality is that the Greens have led this change - and reluctantly, belatedly, the old political parties have begun to follow. The Green views that we were once told were way out on the fringes – are now central to the mainstream debate. This is very significant, but it is only a start. Action - not words – is needed now.


And who is best qualified to lead this action? It was the Greens who first clearly diagnosed the problems facing the planet and first set out the responses we need. So, in 2008, we can fairly claim that it is our policies that should provide the framework for action. The Greens are providing the only coherent response to the crisis facing the planet.


For that reason, a strong presence for the Greens in Parliament is the only realistic leverage that voters can exert over any government. Only the Greens can ensure that we do move beyond the current stage of greenwash and rhetoric - and into the realm of realistic and effective action.


It is election year, and there are those who are already starting to assign the Greens to this or that coalition bloc or framework, onto this or that side of the political spectrum. Well, they can say what they like, but let me tell you that the Green Party will not do deals based on rhetoric or spin. We won’t barter to get power for power’s sake or the baubles that go with it. We have achieved a great deal for sustainability in the last two years without any of those baubles, just with sheer hard work and smart negotiation.


We will, however, be asking a high price of our co-operation. Because this planet is worth a high price. Because a decent future for our children and grandchildren is worth a high price. Our price is real action, not greenwash.


In ‘State of the Planet 2005’ I said, “I cannot disguise from you the enormity of the task we face. It is no less than to transform our civilisation so it can meet the challenges of peak oil, climate change and ecological collapse of the oceans. More than that, it is the challenge of meeting these threats without letting go of the values of civilisation - values of personal freedom, peace, and justice.”


The threat to these cherished human rights is now real. Already, we are seeing that the hard fought gains of civilisation – freedom, peace and justice, enshrined in the UN conventions that emerged from the rubble of the Second World War – are being undermined. We may not have joined Bush’s war in Iraq but we have certainly joined his war of terror. Many kiwis were shocked and disturbed to see home invasions by masked police carrying guns and looking and behaving like terrorists, under legislation vehemently opposed by the Greens. Those home invasions were later shown not to have been justified by the evidence. While the Greens strongly condemn violence or the threat of violence and agree that the activities in the Urewera needed investigation by the police, we have perfectly adequate criminal laws to cover such occasions. The way the police proceeded was not designed to protect us from terrorists, but to terrorise. New Zealand will pay the price of that, as whole communities lose respect for police and the rule of law, and suspicion of pakeha authority by the most disinherited Maori will intensify.


What of the other challenges: climate change, peak oil and the ecological collapse of the oceans?


Climate change is hot. The tables have turned. It is now the sceptics who are on the fringes of this debate because we can see change with our own eyes. People and even many businesses, are way ahead of government, and of other political parties. The main backlash comes from those who say it is now too late to do anything, so we may as well not try. The Green Party does not accept that – and the community wants, and deserves more.


Across the globe people are frustrated at the lack of Government action. Evidence keeps accumulating that climate change is accelerating much faster than predicted, oceans are turning acid, putting the marine food chain at risk; there is 22% less sea ice area at the North Pole than just two years ago, and 80% less summer ice mass than 40 years ago. The extra heat absorbed by the dark ocean is predicted to lead to total disintegration by 2013.


Those who disagreed with the IPCC were right – but not in the way they thought. That august but conservative scientific body has under-predicted the damage done by rising temperatures. Quite small amounts of temperature rise are now shown to cause major change to the environment.


Does the political will exist, globally, to respond to this crisis? Not yet. But on the international stage, the US is now isolated as the only developed country to refuse to accept a binding target to reduce its emissions. With Kevin Rudd ratifying Kyoto on behalf of Australia the pressure on the US has increased and at last month’s meeting in Bali it was forced to shift just a little to allow a framework for future negotiations. The next two years will be critical as an agreement for the second Kyoto period is hammered out with a new US president perhaps more open to collaborative action for the sake of our future.


When it comes to the sea, we now know that its life supporting processes depend crucially on a diversity of species in the deep ocean, yet the world’s fishing fleets are still destroying thousands of species with methods like bottom trawling.


I’m very happy to report some good news among the sea of bad stories. The last year has seen some progress in international agreements to protect seafloor species under Regional Fisheries Management Agreements. In particular, the agreement to prohibit bottom trawling and gill netting on the high seas in Antarctic waters, and the partial moratorium and strict conditions in the South Pacific. Even so, the South Indian Ocean still has no protection whatsoever. We can expect some slowing of the rate of destruction from these measures, but it is too soon to predict a reversal of the situation – because the actual changes in fishing practices are only just beginning


Ironically, the best protection the biodiversity of the deep oceans will ever have is the rise in the price of oil. Deep sea fishing is the most energy-intensive food production on the planet by a long way and the world’s fishing fleets are feeling the cost of diesel.


Three years ago when I spoke here the world was reeling from a doubling of oil prices to $45/bbl. Seems like a bargain now, doesn’t it? It was clear then that the rate of discovery of new oilfields had plummeted since the sixties, most large fields were beginning to decline and companies were putting effort into mergers and takeovers rather than into new production facilities. Some had been caught lying about the size of their reserves to keep their share prices up.


Most people thought – and were encouraged to think - the high prices were only temporary. Treasury had recently predicted the price would go down to US$19/bbl by the end of 2004, and stay there indefinitely.


In ‘State of the Planet 2006’ I reported that it had reached US$66. Now, in the last month the psychological barrier of US$100/bbl has been breached twice.


Effective action in New Zealand to make our country less dependent on oil has been blocked by the chronic refusal of Government and its key agencies – Treasury, MED and the Reserve Bank – to admit what is happening. Year after year, those three agencies have predicted oil prices were about to fall steeply, and year after year they have been more and more wrong. It is a denial of reality equivalent to the climate change sceptics. The Reserve Bank can’t get its inflation predictions right because it gets the price of oil wrong. The Treasury can’t predict the balance of payments deficit because it’s in lala land on future oil prices. And no-one is planning for how to adjust our farming, forestry, fishing, tourism and transport industries because the official line is there is nothing to worry about.


The first thought is what it will cost to fill the car. What is less well known is that oil has driven up world food prices to record levels.


In just the last year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ food price index rose by 40%, good perhaps in the short term for food exporters like New Zealand, but spelling death by starvation and malnutrition for those developing countries who have to import much of their food.


World wheat stores are at their lowest since 1980 and amount to only 12 weeks worth of total consumption. Corn stores are down to 8 weeks, partly because fools are making it into biofuel, often getting out less energy than they put in.


Wheat prices have more than doubled in the last year and on top of that oil prices have doubled the cost of shipping.


In a major policy shift, the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization - always one of the global trade cheerleaders - has suggested aid agencies should revisit their policies and instead of sending food to poor countries, help farmers to grow food locally. Greens have of course been saying that for decades. What he didn’t say is that it will require land tenure reform and political stability.


The public is way ahead of the politicians about the need for action. I hear it around me all the time – most recently the forestry contractor operating the skidder that salvaged our logs felled by the big July storm said to me: “Jeanette, what are we going to drive these machines on in future? The oil won’t be there. Is there a future for forestry? Biofuels aren’t going to be able to do it”.


The New Zealand Energy Strategy published in October for instance, remains deep in denial. It says there are “immense quantities” of non-conventional sources of oil such as gas, lignite and oil shales, and that the world has “plentiful sources of fossil-based oil.”


This astonishing conclusion is based on a cocktail of old out-of-date reports, wishful thinking about high prices stimulating new developments, and denial of the rate at which new developments would have to come on stream to balance the steady decrease in conventional oil supply.


Government is in denial because anything else would require them to plan for a different kind of society, and they don’t think they can sell this to the public. Once again though, the public is ahead of them and already wondering how our society will survive.


They have read the newspapers and heard the many authoritative warnings, such as Rick Wagoner, chairman of General Motors, saying at the Detroit car show last week, "There is no doubt demand for oil is outpacing supply at a rapid pace, and has been for some time now."


How do you not feel a sense of anger at the gap between rhetoric and reality? These issues are too fundamental to be reduced to matters of electoral positioning and party branding. Yet the Prime Minister has announced a national goal to be carbon neutral and the first truly sustainable nation in the world. What are the prospects of them achieving that? Let’s look at the record so far:


The 2003 Sustainable Development Programme of Action. No final report, no obvious outcome and it seems the ministerial group set up to co-ordinate action never met. The ten sustainable development principles it set out were never made mandatory for government departments.

The Sustainable Water Programme of Action. Result: no improvement in our increasingly polluted and depleted streams and rivers and no mechanisms likely to affect it any time soon. Is calling this a “Programme of Action” Labour’s idea of a joke? Do they think we won’t notice that we can’t fish in our rivers, that it’s no longer safe to take the kids down for a swim on a hot summer’s day?


And so with climate change. The cancellation of the carbon pollution charge has finally been replaced by an emissions trading proposal which will not be fully in force till 2013. Half of our emissions - the half from agriculture - are to be subsidised by the taxpayer for a further five years. You are going to be paying for the emissions of the dairy industry - the most profitable industry in New Zealand - as well as for your own emissions.


Business is already keen to make money from speculating in the price of carbon. It remains to be seen whether it will much reduce New Zealand’s own emissions, since the cheaper option will be to purchase emissions reductions from developing countries. If this genuinely makes them more efficient and reduces their emissions, that’s fine – but I am concerned at the evidence cited by the London Financial Times that many such projects are rorts which use our money to subsidise business as usual.


While Government concentrates on setting up this very elaborate set of rules for carbon speculation, its own SOEs are busily increasing our emissions and wrecking the climate.


Government owned Landcorp is using its expertise as a consultant to clear thousands of hectares of forest and converting the land to dairying.


Government-owned Solid Energy is expanding its coal mining for sale to China and India while we criticise those countries for their growing emissions.

Then there are the small details that matter because they show where the government’s thinking really is. The new BMWs to take Ministers from the airport to Parliament, touted as a huge increase in sustainability over the previous gas guzzling Fords, won’t even meet the fuel efficiency standards set by the Government for everyone else.


And what of the $2.75 million dollar subsidy from your taxes earmarked to the Taupo A1GP motor race, because it will bring $25m into the economy?


Look at all the institutions successive governments have invented to promote sustainability, look at all the papers that have been written by bureaucrats. The pile of acronyms has risen faster than the price of oil. The Ministry for the Environment and DOC and the PCE in the 80s. The QMS. The RMA in the 90s. Since then the Sustainable Development Programme of Action, Govt3, the NZES, the Sustainable Water Programme of Action, the ETS, yet still our emissions are growing fastest in the OECD, our water is getting dirtier, our land eroding more, our waste mountain growing, our fisheries depleting. Why is that?


It’s because the Government’s goals for our nation are wrong. Their measurements of success are wrong, the things we give economic value to are wrong.


Government’s commitment to sustainability goes only as far as it contributes to increasing GDP. As soon as it comes to a choice between a bigger economy or a better, more sustainable one, bigger wins. The ETS is primarily a trading scheme, not an action plan to save our climate, though it may have some useful side effects by putting a price on carbon.


The greenhouse emissions of the dairy industry and its huge environmental toll on our waterways won’t be confronted by governments because dairy provides 20% of our export earnings and is the most profitable industry we have. Why is it so profitable? Because it is heavily subsidised by the environment and the taxpayer. Even a Government owned corporation will be encouraged to continue trashing and burning forests to convert the land to dairying.


And even assuming oil exploration in the Great South Basin will bring economic growth (and remember the oil will be sold on the world market, not here) this will only be because our Government has given the likes of Exxon Mobil a generous tax and royalties package, with few safeguards against the serious threat to wildlife and fisheries of an oil spill in those extreme weather conditions. Once again we sacrifice our precious wildlife heritage on the altar of commerce.


If coal is an important part of our trade with China, the climate effects of burning that coal will be ignored by our government – even the methane emissions from the underground mine which are part of our Kyoto liability must be subsidised by your taxes.


Since the 1940s few have dared question the world-wide goal of a bigger world economy, higher and faster GDP growth with nations competing to grow faster than their trading partners – a race only one can win and most must lose.


The tragic thing is that GDP does not measure human happiness or wellbeing. It mainly measures the rate at which resources are turned into trash. Every tonne of metal mined, timber logged, fish caught, raises GDP. Every tonne of trash dumped raises GDP. Every million dollars we spend trying to mitigate these effects, from landfill management to land restoration, remediating toxic sites, raises GDP.


But if we use less to do more; grow our own food, recycle more resources, take a shopping bag instead of a throw away plastic one, fish more carefully to waste less and leave more in the sea, use smaller motors where they are appropriate for the job, farm with our intelligence instead of toxic chemicals, we often don’t raise GDP – we just increase human satisfaction, the quality of our food and our environment, reduce our energy bills, and add to human happiness.


This is exactly the way of life we need to live well in a future with increasingly tight ecological limits, but current economic measurements would count it as going backwards.


We need to replace economic growth with a more sensible measure of human wellbeing or all the action plans, trading schemes, and high sounding talk of sustainability will not change the damage we are doing to the planet and to ourselves.


Otherwise, we will continue to put more and more of our national effort into things that don’t make us happy – working longer hours, having less time with family and friends, polluting more, creating more stress and crime, just to grow the economy instead of designing an economy that will serve people, rather than enslave them.


Few internationally have dared to challenge this treadmill. But there are some examples: the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Index of Sustainable Wellbeing, even a nation which measures Gross National Happiness rather than the accumulation of money. Internationally, more and more people are recognising that the old economics is threadbare. We could design better goals too.


The Greens are here to lead that change.


We offer a future that starts by measuring and valuing what kiwis have always valued – healthy families; rewarding work; decent homes; a clean environment with an abundance of our unique species (yes, even noisy tui in Wellington!) It is a future where all resources are used wisely and without waste. Where power bills are low, even though power prices are high, because our homes and businesses are well insulated and efficient. Where our fuel bills are low even though oil costs $200/bbl because our vehicles are smaller, and we use them less. A future where we can leave the car at home because we have excellent public transport and safe cycling routes and universal broadband and widespread videoconferencing facilities. A future where no child goes to bed hungry or can’t afford school trips.


Help us create a future with much more diversity of forest on the land and far more fish in the sea. Where most of our food is organic and grown locally. A future where trade is fair and we import things we can’t do so well here – which doesn’t include biscuits, ice cream, pet food, meat, and merino clothing!


Let us create together a future where we are known internationally for the science that underpins sustainability - and where the world comes to our door to learn how to raise animals with less methane, manage fisheries without damage to the rest of the marine ecosystem, manufacture with less energy, restore eroding soils, make second generation biofuels from wood and algae that don’t compete with food or biodiversity. Let us plan cities which are people-friendly and good to cycle in.


But what will be the big issue of the 2008 election? The Greens believe this election should be fought over who can offer the best action plan to tackle the challenges of climate change and peak oil and ecological collapse while protecting the freedoms New Zealanders hold dear. This election should be fought over who is most committed to enabling New Zealanders to become healthier, smarter and better able to achieve our dreams; who can be trusted to invest in the leading edge science that will give us the tools we need to reverse ecological collapse and smarter technologies we can share with and market to the world.


I challenge Helen Clark and John Key to an election in which political parties compete on something more substantial than an appeal to fear and greed. I challenge them to compete over who can be the most trusted to take urgent action to safeguard the social and environmental future for each and every New Zealander. I challenge the media to make this election about the substance of policy and not just about the horse trading and gaming of politics.


But I fear the political debate – or what passes for it – will be only about tax cuts. Not even about the wisdom of cutting taxes, but how much and for whom.


John Key talks a lot about luring New Zealanders home by offering lower tax rates. But what do kiwis away from home really yearn for – is it this country’s low taxes or our high mountains and crashing waves? Do kiwis believe this is a great place to get rich quick at the expense of others – or do they say “I came home because this is such a fantastic place to bring up kids – because it’s green and beautiful, because we have safe communities that look after one another”. If only that were always true! But what is true is that our nation’s wellbeing is not a number on a GDP chart.


The people have already spoken – given a choice between better services and tax cuts, they want better services. Given a more precise choice - ‘would you like proper child cancer services at our hospitals, a more frequent and reliable bus and train service, smaller classes in overstretched schools, more of our threatened species protected, better mental health services, or $10 a week off your tax?’ The result would be even more overwhelming. But that is not what they will be offered by National or Labour.


Let me make it quite clear: if the point comes when the government really has health, education and sustainability all well funded, the fair place to cut taxes is at the bottom. The Green policy has always been to replace some income tax with resource and pollution taxes so we encourage good things like work and enterprise and discourage bad things like waste and pollution. That would allow us to take all tax off the first band of income which would give everyone the same tax rebate. Any other kind of tax cut increases the gap between high and low income earners – a gap which has grown dramatically in New Zealand over the last two decades.


We are not here to preside over the same old, same old. I say to voters for the old parties, if you vote the way you always have, you will get what you’ve always got.


As Margaret Mead said several decades ago, “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” That is the role the Greens play in politics.


We are not in Parliament to be an add-on to some other party and support their plan for the future – if they even have one. We are there to provide leadership on the issues never before dealt with by other parties, and challenge them to share our vision and work with us to achieve it.


Any arrangements after the election will be based on policies, and on all four of our founding principles.


We have shown over the last year that we can work with any party issue by issue where we have common ground. We have worked with Act to stop the waterfront stadium monster; with United Future, Act and the Maori party to repeal the sedition laws; with National to stop the trans-Tasman control of natural food supplements; and with the four MMP parties to improve behaviour in the House and to promote a code of conduct for MPs.


For two terms we have had a co-operation agreement and significant policy gains with Labour governments we have not been voting for on confidence and supply. In fact, since 2002 we have not voted for any government on confidence and supply, and have voted on legislation according to its merits.


While our politics clearly lean more to the left than the right, we will work with anyone to help achieve the changes we need for sustainability and fairness.


This is all part of the new future coming. We can make it a better future, and over the last 11 years we have made a good start, without ever being in government.


We have legislated to improve energy efficiency, and led the development of NZ’s new Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, helping prepare for climate change and peak oil with things like home insulation and fuel efficiency standards for cars.


We have legislation before the house, which will pass this year, to create a framework to minimise waste.


Another bill before the house will shift funding from motorways into public transport and cycle facilities and rail.


Our lobbying over several years helped secure the buy back of the railtrack, the continuation of the Overlander service and the electrification of the Auckland rail system.


We have built pride in New Zealand manufacturing and support for our businesses and workers with the Buy Kiwi Made scheme.


We have contributed to strong families and better work-life balance with Green legislation for flexible working hours, adult rates for young people doing adult work, and supporting legislation for fairer working relationships, parental leave and four weeks annual leave, none of which would have passed without us.


We have profoundly changed the culture, as well as the law, in favour of better ways of disciplining kids than beating them.


We have contributed to healthier food with support for organic farming and new guidance for school tuckshops.


We have helped raise a generation of young people aware of the state of the planet and their place in it, and their contribution to it, with funding for environmental education.


We have made the justice system fairer.


In short, we have reached the point where a State of the Planet speech is not long enough to list all our achievements in Parliament.


This is what I mean by action, not rhetoric.


People are saying that at this election it is time for a change. I say to you, there is no point in changing the face on the bridge, if you don’t change the direction of the ship. For decades we have yo-yoed between captains while the ship has been headed for the iceberg. Only the Greens have the ideas, the courage, the people, to steer a new direction for the sake of the planet and all our people.


We welcome all fellow travellers. But to paraphrase Dylan,

“The old order is agein’ – if you can’t give us a hand with the new one, get out of the way.”