CYCLONE GABRIELLE : DON'T EXPECT OUR POLITICIANS TO TAKE CLIMATE CHANGE SERIOUSLY

Even the widespread damage caused by Cyclone Gabrielle won't be enough to make our present set of parliamentary politicians take climate change seriously- and act with urgency. 

WILL A cyclone called Gabrielle be the catalyst for our politicians to finally take climate change seriously? Will they survey the considerable damage that has been done throughout the North Island and finally come to the conclusion that we must act decisively and with urgency? 

The leopard will have to change its spots. Ever since former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced in 2017 that climate change was 'the nuclear free moment of her generation' the subsequent action taken to fight climate change has been piecemeal and ineffectual. When we face the prospect of being run over and squashed by a charging rhinoceros, the Government has taken a flay swat to the problem.  

In a column published by Newsroom, some 'heavyweights' of the local environmental movement have taken the Government to task for its failure to act. Nicola Toki of Forest and Bird, Gary Taylor of the Environmental Defence Society, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb of the World Wildlife Fund NZ and Russel Norman of Greenpeace NZ comment:  

'We are now experiencing events that require fundamental changes to the ways we manage our economy, our society, and our way of life. Extreme weather events are now the new normal. Homes and communities are being stranded or made unsafe - no longer accessible or serviceable. Farms and fisheries face the very real prospect that they will no longer be viable or sustainable due to shifts in temperature and weather patterns. We face an increasingly desperate battle to save indigenous species, the places they depend on, and the biodiversity that underpins the health of our waterways, landscapes, and ourselves.'

They say that our politicians, regardless of their party affiliations, must do much, much better:  'Our political leadership needs to step up. It’s time to stop thinking about our environment, conservation, and climate change as a nice to have. It is our number one priority. It’s time for a fundamental rethink:...But most of all we deserve political leaders to give us, and Aotearoa, a future.'

The authors are, rightly, of the view that the choice is between the climate and the economy. But as far back as 2014 author and activist Naomi Klein was pointing out that to aid the latter, the government and the business sector would have to radically change the former - and they won't do it. 

She observed: 'If you look at the pillars of neoliberalism — privatisation, deregulation, cutting public programs to pay for tax cuts — what you see is that it’s impossible to reconcile climate action with that worldview.'

Klein said that those concerned about climate change need to transform the building blocks of the economy and this cannot be achieved through small remedies such as carbon taxes - an approach she described as marginal but which our Labour Government continues to favour.

The authors of the Newsroom column might say we deserve political leaders that will give us a future but the ugly truth is that those leaders won't come from our present crop of parliamentary parties. That's because they all remain loyal to the vested interests of 'the market.' Little dissent is ever heard with the notable exception being Green MP Chloe Swarbrick. But her criticisms of our present economic system have largely been confined to her columns in the NZ Herald and she has declined to take the battle into the Green Party itself even though she has not been without support. Still at least she has asked the question, writing 'Do we want to keep tinkering, or do we want a brand new deal?'

But the disastrous consequences of Cyclone Gabrielle will not be enough to budge our Government, whether Labour or National-led, from continuing to defend the neoliberal orthodoxy. And, while the impact of Gabrielle will loom large into the foreseeable future, it will slowly recede from the collective consciousness of our parliamentary politicians. They will begin to focus on issues of more 'immediate' concern - like a looming general election.