If you don’t read Pundit you should. This article by Claire Browning, for example, is excellent. Claire points out that National is trying to get away with a huge con…
John Key’s broken promise, on National’s parks
Key promised no state assets would be sold or partly sold in the first term of his government. But that’s in effect what’s happening, to our biggest state asset of them all
…We know now what it means, to balance the economy and the environment. It’s a zero-sum game: to make economic progress by sacrificing a bit more nature, and then another bit, and then perhaps another
Here are four examples, which are all about conservation and Crown pastoral lands collectively, our biggest state asset. Around a third of the country is protected or partly protected. For most of the last decade, until late last year, tourism was New Zealand’s biggest foreign exchange earner.
1. Mining Schedule 4 protected areas…
2. Commercial concessions on conservation land…
3. Tenure review in the McKenzie country…
4. Irrigating Crown pastoral land for dairy conversion…The tenor of all these discussions shows money talking. Key misled his voters, when he undertook not to sell state assets in whole or part this term. Indirectly, this is exactly what he’s doing, exposing our biggest asset of all to the risk the highest bidder will win. Next time we all get antsy about privatizing some lesser SOE, I would just say, fuck the SOE, frankly, because we’re doing it to something far more valuable.
He’s dressing up 19th century colonial thinking in the 21st century language of ‘step change’. This is not ‘step change’ (whatever that may be), it’s the old paradigm on which this country was built, about exploiting finite resources to maximum effect, and the dusty mantras of ‘growth’ and ‘catching Australia’.
It’s been framed in terms of spending political capital. It’s our capital being spent, undermining the very assets that make us rich. As I found here, when the World Bank ranked New Zealand second to Saudi Arabia, in terms of natural wealth per capita, 19% of that wealth was attributable to protected areas, only 3% to subsoil assets. And in fact, it’s not even ‘ours’, but another inter-generational wealth transfer. Mining or dairy might give us a bounce now, by pillaging finite resources. What happens when they run out?
And I keep thinking about something else Nick Smith said a lot during the election campaign. ‘It’s not National Party policy to dam the last river,’ he kept saying, ‘of course we won’t dam the last river’. What I’m wondering is: where, short of that, will it stop?
Powerful stuff from Claire. Read the whole article on Pundit.
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