Chlöe Swarbrick: We need a rulebook that supports both people and planet

Chlöe Swarbrick with Ollie Langridge's climate emergency sign in the members chamber of Parliament in 2019.

OPINION:

Four years ago, 54-year-old Ollie Langridge started sitting outside of Parliament with a hand-painted “Climate Change Emergency Now” sign.

Ollie had read the then-latest UN Climate Change Report detailing how extractive global economies threaten extinction of one million species. He went straight to the hardware store before turning up with a still-drying call-to-action that he’d sit alongside for 100 days on Parliament’s lawn. He said he was just a normal guy who didn’t know what to do, and this was the best he could think of. It was something.

I brought Ollie’s sign into Parliament a number of times, pushing our Parliament to acknowledge the scientific reality of the climate emergency.

A declaration by itself is, of course, just rhetoric. If we’re to cut through the pomp and nonsense, that symbolism is partially the point of Parliament. Politicians commit to things, then are consistently held accountable for making those things happen.

That symbolism came after a year of fighting. Post-election 2020, the newly formed Government agreed and declared the Climate Emergency. National and Act voted against.

Once again, the stage was set for the “nuclear-free moment” of our generation. Every minister needed to become a climate minister. While the Greens held the framework ministerial portfolio, Labour held 65 of 120 votes in Parliament - an absolute, historical MMP majority - and they needed to use them.

Wellington climate activist Ollie Langridge. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Covid had taught us all that many of the things we’d been told were politically, economically or otherwise impossible, like direct payments to people in need, flexible working arrangements and rent freezes, were in fact just questions of political willpower. They could be and were deployed virtually overnight. That’s how responses to crises are supposed to happen: quickly, based on the best possible evidence.

Three years on from that declaration, our new Prime Minister has declared a policy bonfire. In the wake of a climate-change-charged cyclone and flooding, the Government is justifying culling the bare minimum in climate action, citing a focus on “bread and butter issues”.

There’s nothing more bread and butter than protecting the climate necessary to grow wheat. Farmers, often invoked as rationale to delay climate action, tend to also be the first and worst hit by the impacts of climate change, as we’re seeing across swathes of the North Island.

In his first Parliamentary speech as Prime Minister, reflecting on the devastation, Chris Hipkins promised New Zealanders his Government would “build back better”. A month on, we’re left with even fewer concrete foundations of what that could possibly mean.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins promised New Zealanders his Government would “build back better”. Photo / Mark Mitchell

This leaves us with a clear fork in the road as a country.

There’s seeming political consensus of the scientific reality of the climate crisis, that we’ve got infrastructure creaking under decades of under-investment, that regular New Zealanders are struggling to get by. Heck, even the National Party is waking up to something fishy with bank profits.

Sure, we can double down on the same extractive, trickle-down economic thinking that supercharged inequality and emissions these past 40 years.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, though? Madness.

We can, alternatively, recognise that the fundamental rules of the game need to change. The same economic rulebook which sees lower-income New Zealanders struggle to buy essentials while supermarkets report record profits also drives global warming, privatising profit and socialising cost.

In the 1940s, in the wake of world wars, our government instituted higher taxes on the wealthiest to pay for the creation of the world’s first welfare state, high-quality public services and pave the way for a decent quality of life for even those who might have to work a little harder to get by.

In the 1980s, that safety net and shared prosperity was shredded in favour of fairy-tale, trickle-down economic thinking.

In the 2020s, confronted with the highest rates of inequality this country has on record and immediate, tangible memory of the climate crisis, it’s high time for our latest half-century-odd economic transformation. For a rulebook that supports both people and the planet, instead of one that sacrifices both. That’s transformation the Greens have always fought for.

We can change the rules of the economy. We can’t negotiate with the scientific laws of chemistry and physics.

The choice sits with New Zealanders this election year.