Speaking to a room full of supporters in downtown Auckland on Sunday, New Zealand climate minister James Shaw’s frustration had reached a steady simmer.
“You’re fed up,” he tells the room. “So am I.”
Travelling around the country and speaking to constituents, he says. “I hear the same thing – a genuine and legitimate frustration with the pace of change. And I’ve gotta tell you, it sure frustrates the heck out of me.”
Despite New Zealand formally announcing a climate emergency in 2020, and previous prime minister Jacinda Ardern calling the climate crisis a matter of “life or death”, the country’s progress on substantially reducing its emissions has been limited. Since new leader Chris Hipkins took the helm from Jacinda Ardern at the start of the year, he has angled policy relentlessly toward cost of living pressures, scrapping a wide array of reforms and legislative efforts in order to free up “bandwidth” and budgets to focus on economic concerns.
Those reforms have come with costs – most recently to an array of legislation and reform projects designed to counter the climate crisis. In the latest two swathes of announcements, policies dumped or delayed included a biofuel mandate, a “cash for clunkers” scheme that allowed people to trade in old, high-emissions vehicles for cleaner alternatives, the expansion of many regional public transport networks, and light rail plans for Auckland. Simultaneously, the government has extended tax cuts on petrol – subsidising fossil fuel consumption to keep petrol prices low. For Labour’s coalition partners, the Greens, the re-orientation is a source of strain and frustration, as the party struggles to achieve the level of climate action it desires as a coalition partner.
“Five years on, we still don’t have an agricultural emissions pricing proposal worthy of the paper it’s written on – that even some of the industry players who came up with it are threatening to walk away from,” Shaw says. “That does my head in.”
While none of the cut policies alone were expected to make an enormous dent in New Zealand’s emissions profile – Hipkins has called them “a very, very small contribution to our overall emissions reduction targets” – their collective scrapping contributed a picture of a government closing down some of its low emissions pathways to focus its energies on paving a highway to re-election. “There have been a number of moves, like the extension of the fossil fuel subsidy, and those other moves earlier this week, that do add up to a situation where we don’t have very many easy options left,” Shaw says, speaking to the Guardian after his speech on Sunday. “We are going to have to bring something new to the table that brings down emissions by more than the sum total of the policies that were cut.”
So far, he says, he has had no substantive discussions with the government about what those replacement policies would be.
“It is a new administration, essentially,” he says, comparing Hipkins’ government with Ardern’s, but says the relationship is still strong.
“There’s a lot that we agree on. But there are also things where we disagree, or we would prioritise things differently. And so you would expect a bit of friction around those things. That’s not unusual.”
With the election less than seven months away, the Green party is tasked with a difficult juggling act: persuading voters that it can make substantive, transformative changes in government, while harnessing and channelling growing frustration at New Zealand’s glacial climate progress. After years of cheerleading government reforms, Shaw has swung more firmly toward the latter.
“We have done a pretty good job of the governments that we’ve been given. But with only two ministers, both outside cabinet, we don’t always get what we want.”
Going into the October election, Shaw has promised that the Greens “will not accept anything less than the strongest possible climate action” – but what that non-acceptance would look like in practice is less clear. In the coming election, Labour will require the Green party’s support to form a government. While this should place the party in a strong position to bargain for policy gains, the Greens have effectively ruled out working with the opposition. “If they want to form a government with us after the election, then what we’re proposing will be very strong action on climate change.”
If Labour enters coalition negotiations with a milquetoast set of climate policies, says co-leader Marama Davidson, “they can’t take our support for granted”.
