Interview: The Green leaders on 2022
Marama Davidson and James Shaw talk bigger plans for tackling inequality and climate change, as well as their favourite ice blocks
Mōrena and welcome to The Bulletin for Monday, December 13, by Justin Giovannetti. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.
In today’s edition: PM calls for fall in house prices; Auckland could move to orange; more Transmission Gully delays likely; but first, Green plans for next year.
Green Party co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw (Image: Tina Tiller)
The Greens are keeping a focus on the long-term. Green co-leader Marama Davidson is nursing a gumboot tea at her party’s offices in parliament. It’s been a good year, she starts, only days earlier she launched Te Aorerekura, the country’s strategy to eliminate family and sexual violence. The strategy is the kind of thing the Greens have focused on in their partnership with Labour: big, meaty, long-term policy programmes that speak to their party’s concerns around inequality and the environment. The other big focus is climate change, a long-term problem that is increasingly becoming shorter-term.
“We’ve had a good year, a hard year, a challenging year. But we’ve been getting stuff done. I’m not going to stop talking about Te Aorerekura, it just took every bit of grit and energy from a lot of people and I was proud to get that to a point where we could launch it,” says Davidson, who is the minister for the prevention of family and sexual violence.
Taking a moment to celebrate before getting back to the grind. Her co-leader, climate change minister James Shaw jumps in: “Nothing comes easy. When the wins come, you tend to celebrate and move right back into the grind. It has been nice this week to take a moment and reflect on the year. Marama’s strategy was a great cap for the year. On climate change, the work that we did last term is coming through to fruition now,” he says.
He lists his achievements over the past year: A new clean car subsidy; $1.3 billion in climate aid for the Pacific; a better functioning emissions trading scheme, as well as more programmes to rip the coal-fired boilers out of schools, hospitals, universities and businesses. “Those are tangible actions that have happened as a result of the work we’ve done. It’s been satisfying seeing our green progress on the work of government,” he adds.
What’s the plan for 2022? Davidson’s focus will now be making the violence strategy a reality, which will require getting 10 government departments and agencies working together. For Shaw, this coming year is the one where the climate agenda needs to pivot towards a higher level of urgency. He’s got the prime minister’s back on that. That means finishing an emissions reductions plan in the first half of the year—that’s a fairly innocuous name for something meant to completely remake nearly every sector of the economy and life in New Zealand. Then there will be what he calls “the big crunch” on agricultural emissions, where the government will set the pricing, measures and strategy to start reducing emissions from the country’s farms. With many in rural New Zealand bristling at a tax on utes and current measures, you can expect that this will be a difficult and divisive debate.
An area of deep disagreement with Labour: housing. As the country’s housing crisis has worsened, the prime minister has stood repeatedly in parliament and said that her government is using all the levers at its disposal to deal with the situation. “Clearly we disagree,” says Davidson, launching into the party’s housing programme. It’s worth noting that she’s also the government's associate housing minister devoted to homelessness. She says there needs to be a wealth tax, now more than ever, to redistribute the gains of homeowners who have seen their property values surge. “The urgency in rent unaffordability at the moment needs a rent freeze alongside the other parts of the work that need to happen, including a massively upscaled housing build,” Davidson adds.
“There are other things the Green Party believes we should be doing. I acknowledge that this government is building and replacing more public housing than any since the 1970s. We’ve made some changes in tenancy legislation to limit increases to once a year, etc, I absolutely agree that a lot is happening. But we’re clear that a lot of levers haven’t been pulled and they have yet to make a difference in getting the waiting list for public housing down. They aren’t pulling them, yet,” she lingers on the last word, optimistic that changes are coming.
Favourite ice blocks? Only a few days ago Madeleine Chapman ranked the country’s 87 ice blocks for The Spinoff, so I asked the Green leaders which is their favourite. Davidson: “The lemonade popsicle”. Shaw: “Lime.” Lime? “Yeah, lime. The funny thing is I don’t eat a lot of ice blocks, but when I do, I err towards citrus.” I asked Chapman for her thoughts on their choices:
“Lemonade popsicle is an extremely safe choice, like saying your favourite drink is water. But at least a lemonade posicle exists. Lime? What is lime? I assume he meant either the raspberry and lime FruJu or the passionfruit and lemon FruJu. Citrus is a good quality in an ice block but I very much believe Shaw when he says he doesn’t eat many because any fan of FruJus would remember the name of their preferred flavour.”
This is the third in a series of end-of-year interviews.
Jacinda Ardern says she wants house prices to fall. After nearly two years of calling for a “slowing” or “sustained moderation” in the housing market, the prime minister told RNZ that it’s time for prices to “come back” to where they were a year or two ago. Last week, Ardern told me that what’s happened to prices in her own neighbourhood is “just wrong”. It’s a significant change in message and could be the first sign to investors and homeowners that the safety net is being removed and the government won’t be coming to their rescue with lower interest rates and easier lending if prices start to fall.
The Covid numbers: There are 61 cases in hospital and 3 in ICU/HDU. There are now 9,714 cases in the delta outbreak. 86 new community cases were reported in Auckland yesterday, 9 in Waikato, 3 in Bay of Plenty, 2 in Northland, 2 in Canterbury and 1 in Rotorua. 15,910 people were vaccinated on Saturday. 75% of eligible Māori are now fully immunised.
The Spinoff’s Covid data tracker has the latest figures.
An orange Auckland? Cabinet will meet this afternoon to discuss the country’s traffic light settings and as Stuff reports, a move to orange for the Auckland region is a possibility.
The slow-burning earthquake under Kāpiti. Jamie Morton writes in the NZ Herald that scientists are watching a slow-slip earthquake beneath the Kāpiti island area that could last for months. Experts are gaining a better understanding of how the slow events occur and what they might mean for future earthquakes and volcanic activity. In nearby Wellington, council wants the government to help building owners with earthquake strengthening, according to The Dominion Post. About 590 earthquake-prone buildings need to be fixed or demolished within six years. It can be revealing to walk through the capital’s downtown and see which of the larger buildings are largely empty as they await strengthening.
Transmission Gully opening before Christmas looks unlikely. In recent days signs were painted on the existing SH1 pointing towards a ramp for the 27-kilometre shortcut north of Wellington as the new route for SH1, but it’s a tease for now. The Dominion Post reports that the long-delayed opening, scheduled for September, now depends on a number of safety and consent checks that aren’t close to being done. If the road can’t be finished in the next week, an opening will likely need to be pushed to 2022.
New Zealand’s dance with China hits a snag. After New Zealand’s traditional allies joined a diplomatic boycott last week of the coming winter games in Beijing, it appeared the Beehive pulled off another slick move to avoid making a stand: We weren’t joining the boycott, but we were also not sending any officials because of Covid border restrictions. Then some ministers complicated things. As The Diplomat reports, the trade minister said New Zealand was joining the boycott, while the deputy prime minister contradicted both the minister and the earlier position and said we might send diplomats after all. Somehow they stepped on the collective feet of Beijing, Washington, Canberra, London and Ottawa in a single day. Pursuing a policy of strategic ambiguity between east and west is incredibly hard and will require much more discipline.
The missing ingredient for Christmas baking this year. A massive recall of brown sugar last month over fears of contamination has left shelves across the country bare, according to RNZ. Some people are experimenting with alternatives to the ingredient in baking, but sometimes a substitute won’t cut it. The country’s only sugar refinery is working overtime to restock groceries before Christmas.
Got some feedback about The Bulletin, or anything in the news?
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Ashley Bloomfield and Lil Anderson, head of Māori-Crown relations. (Archi Banal)
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For a longer read, is it time for NZ to go nuclear? Coal imports are at a record high, greenhouse gas emissions are climbing and meeting the country’s climate targets is getting harder every day, so The Listener looks at whether the country’s long-standing prohibition on anything nuclear should go. After a year of blackouts and power failures, New Zealand’s electrical system is in for a rethink. There will be more renewables in the coming years, but no real solution has yet to be proposed for replacing coal and gas as baseload power, the generation that you can turn on when you need it. Obviously, the nuclear option has some pretty significant drawbacks.
Australia, a nation without a single professional curling rink, just qualified a team for the Olympics. As Fox Sports reports, the team got into the games on their final shot of a qualifying match in the Netherlands. It’ll be Australia’s first appearance at the Olympic curling rink. The sport has almost no funding or facilities in Australia and the national effort seems to be based on grit and love for the game. For practice, players need to travel to the closest facility, which is across the Tasman at the Naseby rink in central Otago. Curling, a wonderful sport.
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