JACINDA ARDERN ISN'T LISTENING

Jacinda Ardern : Empty promises on climate change.

When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern claims she's proud of the Zero Carbon Bill, it only highlights how much she isn't listening to the demands for more comprehensive and more urgent action on the climate crisis. But there are some 'progressives' who will still be campaigning for Labour in 2020...

DURING PARLIAMENTARY Question Time last Thursday, Green MP Chloe Swarbrick, who claims to be a 'friend' of Extinction Rebellion, asked her co-leader James Shaw a series of patsy questions on the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Reform) Amendment Bill.

Marshmallow-soft questions like 'What is the Government doing on climate action?' allowed the Climate Change Minister to puff out his chest and wax lyrical abut a bill that postpones carbon neutrality until 2050 as well as letting big agriculture off the hook.

Boasted Shaw: 'For too long, politicians have passed the buck and caused uncertainty for everyone, while the need for climate action was clear. We are proud to take on this long-term challenge together with farmers ready to go, and New Zealanders right behind them, to keep our planet safe for future generations.'

For good measure, that well-known progressive politician Winston Peters stood up and asked Shaw whether he thought the bill was 'a triumph of common sense and trust in responsible primary sector leadership?' Shaw responded 'It is indeed a fact.'

Just a month ago some 170,000 people were demonstrating throughout the land for urgent action on climate change. Despite Shaw's claim he 'understood' where the people were coming from, this Government hasn't budged on its 2050 target date, even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate says we have eleven years to radically cut global emissions.

And what Winston Peters described as 'responsible primary sector leadership' and which James Shaw agreed was 'indeed a fact' has seen this 'responsible primary sector leadership' ensure agriculture will pay nothing until 2025 and, after that, the bill says '“Gross emissions of biogenic methane to be reduced to 10% below 2017 levels by 2030, and gross emissions of biogenic methane to be reduced to at least between 24% and 47% below 2017 levels by 2050.” Methane – the most damaging short-lived climate pollutant – traps 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide for the first 20 years after being released.

When James Shaw said 'it is indeed a fact', he gave the two finger salute to the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who want him and the Government he loyally supports, to do more about fighting climate change. Much more.

If there was a truly progressive party in Parliament then some critical and searching questions would of been asked of James Shaw. But this Parliament has no such party - they are all loyal to market ideology - so there were no such searching and critical questions. Unable to disagree with the Labour-led Government's right wing market policies on climate change, the best the National Party could come up with was a question from Dr Parmjeet Parmar who wanted to know if Shaw supported the use of all scientific technologies to tackle climate change.

If we had truly a progressive party in Parliament it would be proposing an alternative to the supposed market-driven solutions to climate change. It might, for example, be proposing a Green New Deal for New Zealand. When the need for such party could never be greater, no such parliamentary party  exists.

In many respects the chickens are now coming home to roost. For over three decades (three decades!) progressive politics has been constrained by support for a right wing and neoliberal Labour Party. We've been told by an array of pundits, bloggers, trade union officials and the like that we must support Labour because it is, after all, preferable to National.

Greta Thunberg : The politicians aren't listening.

That was always a nonsensical argument, but there definitely is no 'lesser evil' when it comes to climate change. Are Labour supporters going to claim that 'carbon neutrality' by 2050 is 'the lesser evil'? When the demand is increasingly for system change not climate change, are Labour supporters going to claim that tinkering with the status quo is the 'lesser evil' and that's why we should vote Labour back into power in 2020? Such Labour Party apologists need to reminded that there are no greater and lesser degrees of climate barbarism.

We need to always remind ourselves that, in the fight against climate change, we are also in battle with a 'liberalism' that pays lip service to progressive values but, in reality, continues to prop up the status quo. The representatives of this dishonest brand of politics are people like Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw.

Perhaps if a different path had been chosen many years ago, one that looked to building something new rather than continually engage in the realpolitiks of electoral support for Labour, then perhaps we might not be in the position we now find ourselves.

We can demonstrate in the streets demanding greater and urgent action on climate change  but our so-called 'political representatives' are not listening. Greta Thunberg is right. While centrist politicians like Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw line up to praise her, their inaction on the climate crisis only goes to prove they are not listening to her message. They are not listening to our message.