The Greens set out their stall
So far they've struggled to attract disaffected Labour voters. With less than 100 days to go, can they turn the ship around?
Mōrena and welcome to The Bulletin for Monday, July 10, by Catherine McGregor. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.
In today’s edition: Auckland bus users left stranded after union calls a late-notice strike; Act wants 17-year-old defendants back in adult courts. But first, the Green Party meets for a conference that’s heavy on policy pledges, light on drama.
The Green Party unveils its manifesto
This weekend in Auckland the Green Party held their annual conference, the last of the four major parties to do so. Co-leader Marama Davidson introduced an election manifesto featuring hundreds of policies ranging from “delivering free lunches to every school to recognising Palestine as a state”, writes Stuff’s Glenn McConnell, with housing, climate resilience and wealth redistribution the main priorities for the campaign. Davidson’s speech was met with rapturous applause, reaching a crescendo when she quoted internal polling that found one in three voters are “considering the Greens as a real option this election”. However official polls tell a different story, of a party unable to capitalise on Labour’s precipitous drop in support since the last election. An average of the last five polls has the Greens on a fraction of a point over their 2020 vote share, as Act sees its support jump from 7.6% in 2020 to over 12% now.
The party falls back in love with James Shaw
One relief for the party is the drama-free reaffirmation of both Davidson and James Shaw as co-leaders. Last year the conference was the site of a quasi-mutiny by a left-wing bloc that denied Shaw the 75% support he needed for re-election, on the basis that he had failed to properly hold the government to account on climate issues. After an awkwardly public two-month campaign for his job – and a brief period when it seemed that then colleague Elizabeth Kerekere might throw her hat in the ring – he was re-elected in September by an overwhelming majority. As this is an election year, it was hardly surprising that there was no replay of last year’s protest. The frustration at the government’s approach to climate remains, however. The Green Party was the only party to “treat climate change as the crisis it truly is” and wanted to do more, said Shaw, but Labour “had other priorities” this term.
Pine forests no longer the only path to carbon success
While a number of election pledges had been announced early, Davidson and Shaw had some new policy on climate to share. Davidson said the Green Party would establish a standalone Ministry of Climate Change, Newsroom’s Marc Daalder reports, while also ensuring all government decisions were consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5C. Meanwhile Shaw, the climate change minister, revealed that cabinet had signed off on a change to the Emissions Trading Scheme to recognise more forms of carbon sequestration on farmland, such as wetlands, peatlands and native vegetation. New Zealand is currently one of only two signatories to the Paris Agreement that limit sequestration in their carbon accounting to forests, generally pine. “The issue had been a stumbling block in negotiations with farmers to introduce pricing for agricultural emissions,” says the NZ Herald’s Michael Neilson.
The recycling myth that won’t die
The Greens’ conference came on the heels of an annual Ipsos poll on climate change issues that reveals both falling support for strong action on climate and dwindling faith in the government’s ability to act. As Marc Daalder reports in Newsroom, the poll also shows that many New Zealanders have a poor understanding of the biggest drivers of climate change. When asked, most respondents named recycling as having the most impact. Recycling is good for the broader environment, and manufacturing plastic in the first place is horribly carbon-intensive but, as Daalder notes, recycling itself has “an almost negligible climate impact”. A 2020 study ranked recycling 60th in a list of consumption changes (page 14 here) that mitigate climate change. The top five? In decreasing order: Living car-free, changing to an EV, taking one less long return flight, using renewable energy, and shifting to public transport.
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Hundreds of Auckland bus cancellations after union calls last-minute strike
If you’re a bus commuter living in Auckland you’re probably going to need to find another way to get to work this morning. Up to 700 morning trips are cancelled after operator NZ Bus announced short-notice industrial action last night. The strike is currently set to last until Thursday, though only services scheduled between 4am and 8am are affected each day. Auckland Transport is urging bus users to check the AT mobile app or online journey planner to find out whether their service is affected and to see alternative transport options. NZ Bus operates bus services across the Auckland isthmus, though not on the North Shore. The public transport union’s president Gary Froggatt said Auckland drivers were asking to be paid the same rate of $30 an hour as drivers in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, RNZ reports.
Seventeen-year-olds should be tried as adults – Act
The Act Party wants 17-year-olds to be sent back to the adult justice system, four years after a law change that moved them to Youth Court jurisdiction. In 2019 Act supported the change, proposed by the then National government, but now leader David Seymour says it was a mistake. Both National and Act had “brought into the idea that if only offenders were treated more kindly, there would be less crime”, Seymour says. Serious and violent offending by 17-year-olds is still tried in adult courts, with only trials for lower-level offences held in Youth Court. Moving all of them back to the adult system would allow Oranga Tamariki to better focus on vulnerable children and not to “house young men who are well on the way to becoming hardened criminals”, Seymour tells the NZ Herald. A spokesperson for corrections minister Kelvin Davis says it’d be a “backwards” move that would put New Zealand out of sync with peer countries such as Australia, Canada and the UK.
Click and collect
A great read from this weekend: the Sunday Star-Times’ Tony Wall has lunch with Meng Foon and asks him how it all went so wrong.
The WorkSafe prosecution of six defendants charged in connection with the Whakaari/White Island eruption begins today.
Substandard ventilation on NZ trains and buses is increasing the risk of Covid and other airborne diseases, especially when it’s standing-room-only onboard.
Blanket 30kph speed restrictions in central Tauranga have many drivers up in arms, including MP Sam Uffindell (he’s launched a petition).
Got some feedback about The Bulletin, or anything in the news? Get in touch with me at thebulletin@thespinoff.co.nz.
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Sporting snippets
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Dana Johannsen on the rise and fall of disgraced pole-vault coach Jeremy McColl.
Eleven New Zealand-based players to watch at the Fifa Women’s World Cup (The Spinoff)
The small hill that attracts 17,000 visitors a day
Last Saturday I woke up early, hopped on the Metro, and got to the entrance to the Acropolis just after 8am. The site, Greece’s most-visited attraction by far, had been open mere minutes and already the queue snaked a hundred metres down the pedestrian boulevard outside. Once through the gates, I headed straight for the Parthenon at the top of the hill in a bid to outrun the worst of the crowds. It made no difference: around the ancient building was a roiling, pushing, selfie-snapping sea of tourists, all baking in the searing summer heat.
I was absolutely thrilled to see the Acropolis up close. I also vowed never to visit it – or any world-famous monument – in high season ever again. A week later, the Guardian’s Athens correspondent published this story on the Acropolis’s crisis of over-tourism and the dramatic steps the government is considering to address it.
