A sense of urgency: vote for the future

Gavin Maclean

Opinion

With the election upon us, three quotes spring to mind.

Al Gore, 1992: “The future whispers while the present shouts.” The campaign is randomly shouting about immediate problems and hardly mentioning the overwhelming crisis. Yet the future is shouting, even screaming, more and more now, as heatwaves and floods continue around the world almost daily, and people right at home are struggling to live among the ruins of February’s Cyclone Gabrielle. The future of the planet is the outstanding important issue.

New Scientist editorial, April 2021: “We now need pandemic-sized emission cuts — but permanent ones that build year on year.” Deep down, we know this, despite some Herald contributors who ignore all the present and future fatalities, and think that controlling growth would somehow be a fate worse than death. They lack the simple insight of maturity, that less is more. The future can be saved, by consuming and polluting less, and by nothing else.

Chloe Swarbrick, 2023: “Politics engages with you, even if you don’t engage with politics.” In other words, don’t give up and throw away your chance to make a difference. It pays to vote.

Quite simply, it’s important to vote, it’s important to vote for what’s most important, and most important is the future. You don’t have to be a Green Party supporter to arrive at such logic, but if you are logical, you might have to become one. Their election slogan speaks for action in a crisis: the time is now.

The Green Party is suddenly looming as a more-than-minor party, while the two large but minor-brained ones keep squawking about a myriad of lollipop policies which, where they’re any good, should have been thought of years ago.

Laughably and tragically, National’s answer to the climate crisis is to drive faster on the roads. To them the climate problem is trivial. You can only conclude that either it is, or they are. They are adamant that we can’t afford more government spending, but will do almost anything to get more private spending instead. They want to reward the affluent, whose wealth is a matter of luck and greed more than care or compassion, and pile even more stress, ill-health and desperation on to the less fortunate.

The role of governments is to work in the opposite direction. Private enterprise, in the formal business sense, simply cannot. Many are now trying, but if profit rules, their efforts are just window-dressing to retain market share. It’s only healthy, fairly paid, community-supported people who can afford to help restore the whenua and moana for the good of all. Hence the Greens’ guaranteed income policy — unique to the Greens — is not just simple humanity, but fits into that long-term picture.

Labour has always been a broad-church party, approximately 10 times as compassionate as National, but still some of them are hooked on growth and business-as-usual. Such a wobbly body needs the Green Party to stiffen their backbone. They hate to admit it in election campaigns — always have — but the two parties work well together in Parliament, and by the magic of MMP party-voting, to ensure a Labour-Green government instead of a National-Act one, a Green Party vote counts exactly as much as a Labour one.

Science tells us we have very few years in which to effect a change to our pollution habits, and the evidence continues to mount that official zero-emission targets are much too slow. I have faith that many people will be smart enough to vote for the environment, the biodiversity, and future generations, before it is too late.