The Big Reset
By Keith Beautrais
Forest and Bird member
I have never felt more grateful for living on our twin-hull waka Aotearoa than I do now. Our strength as a small resourceful crew way out in the Pacific has been tested hard and we are still upright and paddling. But now there is a great big hairy-scary deficit on the loose and it must be repaid if we and our children are to live a happy life ahead. Worse still, there are two scary deficits, but last week's Budget turned out to have a lot to say on both.
The obvious deficit is the multi-billions Grant Robertson embraced to keep our economy afloat. There is a consensus that to maintain employment and human welfare we need to borrow against our very good credit rating. That credit is good because we have tended to repay borrowing much more conscientiously than other western countries.
The other deficit is even more fundamental to our futures because it is the result of centuries of withdrawing resources from nature and only recording that in the credit column of our economic budgets. As a result our soils, forests, wetlands, rivers, fish stocks, aquifers, atmosphere and nearly all our native wildlife have been in serious decline as deficit after deficit occurred without any thoughts of repayment.
The State of the Environment report called it out last year. Without the political pressure applied by previous governments to sugar-coat the realities, scientists were freed to explain how our environmental deficits were becoming unsustainable. We must not take for granted the services nature provides, from healthy water to rich soils that can grow wholesome food.