CORONAVIRUS CRISIS : TIME FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL

We face not only a coronavirus crisis but an economic and environmental crises as well. In response the Labour-led Government is desperately attempting to prop up a 'free market' teetering on the edge of collapse. But shouldn't we be using this time of crisis to call for the transformation of the economy and society via a Green New Deal? And why isn't the Green Party doing exactly that?

THE ECONOMY IS clearly going into a meltdown and teetering on the edge of collapse, but the focus of the business-friendly Labour-led Government is to desperately try and prop up the 'free market' by throwing billions of dollars at it. While money for the poor and impoverished has been in short supply over the past three years, the Labour-led Government certainly hasn't been reluctant to come to the aid of the corporate sector. Suddenly money is no problem. Even the right wing Taxpayer's Union got a chunk of it last week. I imagine it won't be attacking welfare beneficiaries from this point on.

Despite all the talk by the Government about 'saving jobs', this is just a by-product of its attempt to restore an economic and political status quo that has benefited the one percent at the expense of everyone else. And the Government wants to save an economy that puts corporate profits ahead of the fight against climate change. Yes folks, the existential environmental threat endangering us all has not just gone away for a few weeks. In fact we face more than just the coronavirus crisis. We also face an economic and environmental crisis as well. A trifecta of crises no less, all converging together.

Rather then the Government implementing a gigantic business stimulus that is aimed at rescuing the corporate sector, should we not be talking a Green stimulus that would beneficial to us all, instead? Is this not the perfect time to pour a huge amount of money into green public investment and one that will set the country on a zero carbon future? Do we not need to focused, as activist and writer Naomi Klein says, on 'fighting for the kind of transformative change that can not only curb the worst effects of the current crisis but also set society on a more just path' ?

A Green New Deal is something that a sensible and progressive Green Party would be advocating. But the New Zealand Green Party isn't a sensible and progressive Green Party. Such is its intractable loyalty to neoliberalism and its complete subservience to Labour that, in a time of crisis, it has got nothing more to offer than a proposal to widen footpaths. Its analysis is as robust as a marshmallow, its vision as myopic as Mr Magoo.

The current crisis has only underlined that the Labour-led Government is not going to take this opportunity to introduce the kind of real transformational changes that we urgently need. And the Green Party, despite all the empty bravado from the likes of Marama Davidson and Chloe Swarbrick, is complicit in joining Labour in its defence of the status quo.

In September last year some 170,000 people demonstrated throughout the country, demanding urgent action on climate change. An appropriate response to that call for urgent action would be to campaign for a Green New Deal. The basis of a Green New Deal is that we’re entering a new era for politics — a whole new terrain, material and imaginative, for deciding how to channel our collective energies. But, in this time of a coronavirus-induced crisis, the Green Party is again nowhere to be seen. It has demonstrated that its political loyalties lie with those who cling to the old politics and the old way of doing things.