THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT

Vernon Tava and James Shaw : Competing brands of 'green capitalism'.

At a time when New Zealand needs its own Green New Deal, we've now got two political parties both flogging the same failed corporate environmentalism.

ALTHOUGH VERNON TAVA, the leader of the fledgling Sustainable Party, has tried to paint the Green Party as red, the reality is that both Sustainable NZ and the Green Party are flogging the same corporate environmentalism.

Like Green co-leader James Shaw, Tava believes in a environmentally friendly capitalism. He told The AM Show this week that 'This idea that economic growth and capitalism itself is somehow the enemy of the environment is incorrect. That's a core assumption that we're really challenging."

This could easily be James Shaw talking. This is, after all, the man who said in his maiden Parliamentary speech that he was 'a huge fan of the market'. As he guided the corporate-friendly Zero Carbon Bill though Parliament he blamed the climate crisis not on capitalism but on 'human activity', although just one hundred companies are responsible for over 70 percent of the world's carbon emissions.

Since entering Parliament in 2015, Shaw has been entirely consistent in his view that a' green capitalism' can be moulded via taxes, some appropriate market mechanisms and some light regulation. All that is required are some 'tweaks' to the system.

As former Green MP Sue Bradford has observed:

UK Labour adopts a Green New Deal.

'The Greens in their current form have moved so far to the centre and right of New Zealand politics that they are very much a party of green business, of corporate social responsibility and of a desire to work within the confines of the same neo-liberal economic settings as any National government, as demonstrated by James Shaw’s promotion of the Budget Responsibility Rules before the last election.'

In the end the realpolitik of New Zealand's parliamentary machinations has resulted in two centre-right parties, each claiming that their brand of 'green capitalism' is the best. Whether Sustainable NZ can achieve lift-off is debatable, but if it manages to slice just, say, one percent of the vote away from the Green Party, then the Green Party will be in trouble.

Beyond the swampy morass of centrist politics lies the wide open spaces and blue skies of the left, devoid of a major progressive party that could challenge the unholy neoliberal consensus and present a real political and economic alternative. If such a party did exist it would be party that would have seized the moment to campaign on the platform of a Green New Deal targeting decarbonisation by 2030 through a 'radical policy package to increase social and economic justice”. That's not just me talking. This happens to be the platform of UK Labour, adopted by its annual conference in September.

That we don't have such an avowedly progressive political party in this country is the result of three decades of much of what constitutes the left continuing to insist that Labour's brand of neoliberalism is better than National's brand. The tragedy is, as we head toward another general election and at a time when the clock is ticking down on a climate catastrophe engulfing us all, the political landscape is missing a political party that recognises that the situation demands zero net carbon emissions by 2030 and, because that isn't possible within the current system, then the system must go.