AFTER CORONAVIRUS, A GREEN NEW DEAL

The coronavirus pandemic has underlined that we must must combat and defeat the current economic model that is based on the pathological pursuit of profit. The pandemic makes what we’ve already known clear: we need a Green New Deal to stop climate change, provide desperately needed jobs, and halt future mass pandemics.

AS WRITER AND activist Naomi Klein has repeatedly explained a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic can be exploited by the powerful to increase their stranglehold on society - a phenomenon she has called 'disaster capitalism.' But, on the flip side, a crisis such as this can also be used an opportunity to advance the argument for an altogether different kind of economy and society.

In the United States only the Green New Deal, first proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then embraced by Bernie Sanders, has come close to proposing a working class solution to the current pandemic. Indeed the GND proposes a realistic strategy to combat three crises converging together; the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting economic recession (depression?) and, of course, the climate crisis.

It is obvious that we must combat and defeat the current economic model that is based on the pathological pursuit of profit. We reject an ideology that speculates on what level of fatalities is acceptable in order to allow the cogwheels of the capitalist machine to start ticking over again. That ideology was recently articulated by NZ Herald columnist and regular RNZ guest commentator Mathew Hooton. He suggested that we could not maintain the current lockdown just in order to 'briefly maintain the life expectancy of some thousands of people in their 80s'. Eugenics, anyone?

In New Zealand there is support for our own Green New Deal.

At the risk of blowing my own trumpet (OK, I will) I've written about a GND for New Zealand for the past three years or so. Before she resigned as a opinion writer for the NZ Herald Rachel Stewart was championing 'a clean green agenda' for New Zealand. in April of last year Jess Berentson-Shaw of the Wellington think-tank The Workshop was proposing a GND for New Zealand. This year Mike Treen, national director of the Unite Union, came out in favour of a GND and has followed that up with a proposal to nationalise Fletcher Construction. And while his continued deference to Jacinda Ardern will mean he will remain politically compromised, at least Martyn Bradbury of The Daily Blog had the good sense to argue for a GND in March.

Greenpeace NZ also wants a Green response to the coronavirus crisis. Although its proposals don't appear to be seem quite as transformative as the GND, leaving the basic economic and political power structures untouched, Greenpeace does reject the current neoliberal model. But its strategy is based on petitioning the Labour-led Government to support its Green covid proposal. Given its continued loyalty to 'the market', that's not about to happen anytime soon. And that loyalty is shared, we should also remind ourselves, by the Green Party.

While we are all firing flares into the sky and hoping that they might help to illuminate a dark and bleak political landscape, we cannot rely on our current crop of politicians to implement the kind of change that we want. That's very much a top-down view of change. In the end it will take the practical activity of a mass movement to advance a Green New Deal for New Zealand. Perhaps the pandemic crisis, the economic crisis and the climate crisis will spur the development of such a movement. We can't allow the one percent to return us to 'normal' . Perhaps more people, now that they have now caught a glimpse of the fraught future that lies ahead, will no longer be quite so willing to accept the 'normality' of the ruling elite.