At one level I think this is smart politics.
The Government’s budget changes, designed to deal with a reduction in the tax intake and remove discretionary spending areas for National to cut is, politically, very smart.
Over the past two election campaigns National has shown that it could not put a budget together to save itself.
And it now has a mammoth task to come up with something coherent that adjusts for the Government’s latest changed.
Good luck with the calculator boys.
But Labour’s choice of where to cut leaves me somewhat cold. It has cut funding from the Climate Emergency Response Fund on the basis that the money would not be spent.
From Radio New Zealand:
Finance Minister Grant Robertson says he will apologise to the Climate Change Minister over cuts to climate spending announced without James Shaw being informed.
On Monday, the government announced $4 billion will be freed up through cuts, savings, delays, and reprioritisations. It will not be made available for new spending, and will be treated as savings.
While some of the money will come from trimming future Budget operating allowances, as well as a directive to public sector agencies to cut their baseline spending and reduce their use in consultants and contractors, $1.018b will come from immediate savings.
Some $236m will come from the Climate Emergency Response Fund, which is supposed to be ring-fenced for climate spending, but instead will be returned to the general savings pool.
According to Newsroom, James Shaw knew the government was doing a savings exercise and was briefed on a $10m cut to a waste priority – but only found out about the remaining $226m at the same time the public did.
Robertson admitted Shaw was supposed to be informed.
“Yes, he should have,” Robertson said.
“It appears there was a communication breakdown around that, and so I’ll have a chat with James and apologise to him for that. He definitely should have known about it.”
But Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said there was no need for Shaw to be informed as much of the climate savings came from programmes and portfolios Shaw was not responsible for, such as transport, agriculture, and forestry.
“These were savings that were identified by the ministers concerned. I wouldn’t have expected necessarily, if they weren’t in his portfolio area, I wouldn’t have necessarily expected that he would be,” Hipkins said.
Robertson was right to apologise. A mea culpa was well and truly deserved.
Hipkins’ response was not so good. You do not form a deep meaningful relationship by offering technical defences to budget cuts in an area of utmost importance to your most closely aligned policy.
And now is not the time to make cuts to measures designed to address climate change. The fund has already had significant benefits including one project that will cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking 300,000 cars off the road. A further investment will cut coal use by Fonterra significantly.
And although gross emissions are now falling a great deal more has to be done for New Zealand to meet our international obligations.
From Stuff:
New Zealand remains significantly off track to meet a promise it made to the United Nations to reduce its net carbon emissions to half of its 2005 gross emissions by 2030, the International Monetary Fund says.
But it says doubling the real price of carbon credits by 2030, while “politically difficult”, could largely close gap.
The Washington-based financial institution said that New Zealand had made progress in narrowing the gap between its projected emissions in 2030 and the commitment it made to the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021.
The IMF expected the country’s net emissions would peak next year and decline sharply from 2030 as recently-planted forests matured and started to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.
But it estimated the country would miss its 2030 commitment by emitting 17 million tonnes of net emissions more than it had agreed to emit that year.
That was an improvement on the 24 million-tonne miss that was projected last year, it said.
Using fiscal pressures to reduce action on climate change sets the wrong priority. It is almost inevitable that the cost of responding to climate change will mean that there are permanent fiscal pressures to deal with. But if we are going to play our role in reducing emissions we have to to make the resources available.
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