National is extraordinarily good with its rhetoric. It could be said that its rhetoric is the best that money can buy. And it has a lot of money …
I am sure we can all remember from earlier in the yeas what Christopher Luxon said about living standards and how there was a squeezed middle. Or how he confirmed that under National New Zealand would meet all of its climate change targets.
It is telling what National has chosen to do first now that it is in Government.
During this week in Parliament it has chosen to smash through under urgency three changes, removing the effects of unemployment as one of the things the Reserve Bank has to consider, repealing the Fair Pay legislation, and getting rid of the clean car discount.
If this Government was determined to do something about the cost of living then making the Reserve Bank’s sole focus on this is the worst possible thing it could do.
The result of any change will be to increase unemployment and also increase interest rates as the Reserve Bank operates single mindedly to decrease inflation.
Both of these things will make matters worse for ordinary Kiwis.
For those who are made unemployed their quality of life will be dramatically affected. For those businesses who depend on their clientele having jobs so that they can continue to buy things from those businesses their profitability will be affected. And for those of us who have mortgages we will need to pay more to predominately overseas owned banks as interest rates increase.
And the change was pure theatrics. The Minister already has the power by regulation to make proposed change although the effects are only for up to 12 months. But it would removed the use of urgency and a more settled and informed reform process could have been taken.
Repealing the Fair Pay legislation was an act of pure spite. How National can claim to be concerned about the squeezed middle when it attacks the one measure that would improve wages for poorly paid yet skilled workers. The repeal reignites the race to the bottom that too many firms engage in where profitability is improved by attacking already poor working conditions.
And the clean car discount has been an outstanding success but something that National has engaged in a tacky little culture war for some time. As said by Michael Wood:
I recognise that the National Party and the member opposite wish to turn every policy that is about addressing climate change into a tacky little culture war, but our Government is actually focused on practical measures that reduce emissions across our transport sector. Of course, what the member is trying to do here is present the Clean Car Discount as a policy that only applies to those purchasing a vehicle like a Tesla, and that is completely wrong. For example, the biggest make of vehicles that has attracted both the largest number of discounts and the highest total value of discounts have in fact been Toyotas. The two most commonly sold vehicles that have attracted a discount under the Clean Car Discount have been Toyota models that sell for under $20,000. Ours is a Government which is getting on with reducing transport sector emissions. We will keep doing that while the National Party continues to wallow in their lazy climate change denialism.
This policy displays some pretty rank behaviour from Christopher Luxon, whose household apparently used the scheme when buying a Tesla while at the same time railing against the scheme because too many rich people were using it to buy Teslas.
And Luxon tried to blame his wife.
It shows how indifferent the Government is to Climate change. I guess this is not surprising when you think that the Cabinet contains a Minister who talks about the “hysteria surrounding climate change”, and who wants to ignore the previous Government’s clean energy goals. And restarting gas and oil exploration is not the action of a Government that is serious about addressing climate change should take.
Simeon Brown has repeatedly said that the Government would use the ETS to reach its climate goals. The problem with that is this will cost the country an enormous amount of money.
And the Government has been warned about this in the Departmental Disclosure that Simeon Brown has refused to release. From Emma Hatton at Newsroom:
A report by Concept Consulting finds repealing the scheme would mean about 100,000 fewer electric vehicles on the road by 2030.
That reduced uptake would add at least $900 million in costs, mostly because of the import of petrol and diesel, and increase carbon emissions by about 900,000 tonnes.
The costs and emissions increase further if changes to the Clean Car Standard are factored in, although the Government has yet to make decisions on whether changes will occur.
The report, commissioned by lobby group Drive Electric, finds if both the Clean Car Discount and the Standard are removed it will result in up to 3 million tonnes of emissions. If these have to be paid for with carbon credits, this could cost anywhere from $125m to $680m.
“If (as is almost certainly likely to be the case) New Zealand doesn’t meet its emissions reduction target, it will need to purchase offshore mitigation measures.
“Given that international efforts to reduce emissions are generally progressing at a materially slower rate than required to meet individual countries’ [targets], it is likely that there will be significant international demand for purchasing offshore mitigation credits. This suggests that the price of offshore measures which New Zealand will need to pay to meet its liability is likely to be at the upper end of the Treasury’s estimate – and potentially even higher.”
National’s indifference is not surprising. They seem to be against the Government doing anything proactive to reduce CO2 emissions and want the dead hand of the market to do all the heavy lifting instead. This is the only way to explain their criticism of the last Government’s deal with NZ Steel which anticipates reductions in greenhouse gas emissions which are the equivalent of taking 300,000 cars off the road. The project is forecast to have an abatement cost of $16.20 per tonne of CO2. The current spot market for carbon is in the vicinity of $70.
Doing nothing is an option. But it will make it way more expensive in the future to cope if the ETS is to actually function. And in the meantime the country will be burning up the remaining carbon budget far too quickly. If only the Government could think of the remaining environment in the same way that it thinks of money.
These three changes were rammed through with the use of heated rhetoric and complete indifference to the problems the original reforms were addressing. I expect that we will see more of these sorts of retrograde steps in the coming months as this Government tries to take us back to an imagined paradise that never actually existed.
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