Image: Archi Banal

OPINIONPoliticsOctober 8, 2023

An election reality sandwich

Guest writer

Image: Archi Banal

There are no bigger ‘bread and butter’ issues than the health of our environment and future of our climate, argues Nicola Toki.

I’m a proud Kiwi, and especially a proud Mainlander. A big chunk of that pride comes from a collective national identity that has a history of stepping up and taking on big challenges: holding our ground and going nuclear free, giving women the vote before any other country, getting to the top of Everest, being quite good at rugby (here’s looking at you, Black Ferns).

Yet, amid the endless election debates, I’m hearing a worrying lack of determination to protect our natural environment – which is, of course, intrinsically linked to our national identity. That silence is not just disappointing. It’s downright scary.

Climate change impacts are no longer hovering on some distant horizon. The accelerated effects of major weather events are destroying homes, coastlines, communities, farms, livelihoods, and lives.

A washed out bridge in the Hawke’s Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle (Photo: Tom Kay)

Compounding the impacts of a changing climate, the DNA pool of the planet and our country is shrinking. Biodiversity – the building blocks of life – is in decline. New Zealand, a country that loves to be number one, has the dubious honour of having the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

Sure, we’ve saved the black robin, bred some more takahē, and are slowly bringing kākāpō (once so common you could shake a bush and have them fall down like apples) back to the mainland, but guess what? Over 4,000 of our native species are slipping towards extinction. As they decline or die out there is a ripple effect across the interconnected ecosystem that we humans are part of, reducing the resilience we need to survive.

That’s why conversations about nature-based solutions are crucial. Conservation shouldn’t just be a low-priority budget line item based on the premise of people in Gore-Tex wandering about in the bush. Real money needs to be dedicated to things like healthy forests, which protect entire catchments from the impacts of extreme weather, floods and droughts. Forests could be the key to solving our carbon sequestration issues, given how much money we’ll have to front up in a few years to fulfil our international commitments to the Paris Accord. Wouldn’t it be better to invest in our natural assets – ones that provide crucial resilience against flooding, protect communities and farms downstream, and could be our home-grown carbon bank balance – instead of the billions of dollars we’re now predicted to have to find from elsewhere?

Biking through Whakarewarewa Forest (Image: Mountain Bike Rotorua)

You’d think this would be front of mind for our political leaders, especially going into an election. That they’d be clamouring for votes based on the scale of their ambition and promises of action. Instead, there is tumbleweed rolling across the political landscape. Instead, National and Labour are trying to outdo each other over who can cut more from DOC’s already meagre budget.

It’s frankly appalling that at this critical juncture, a tipping point, there is such a dearth of leadership on the climate and biodiversity. “We are going to focus on bread and butter issues,” they say. But what could be more “bread and butter” than the very foundation of the system that gives us bread and butter – nature? “We are going to protect frontline services.” What could be more frontline that the very things that underpin our entire society and economy and provide us with food, water, fresh air?

It’s time for decision makers to take their bread and butter and eat the reality sandwich. We can’t just saunter through a planet on fire like it’s business as usual. And it’s no longer enough to just say “the house is on fire”. An emergency doesn’t call for a plan for someone to do something at some point in the future. It calls for action. Someone has to grab the fire extinguisher and start putting out the fire.

This needs to be a Climate Action election (Image: Archi Banal)

A call for this to be a Climate Action election has been issued by Forest & Bird, along with a number of other organisations representing a huge chunk of the New Zealand public. It’s now or never.

There’s a quote by Sir David Attenborough that I keep coming back to. “Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.”

So, if our politicians have lost their nerve, and leadership is wanting, what can we do? Vote – and really think about what you are voting for. Think beyond the here and now because this cost of living crisis, as genuinely painful as it is for so many, will pass. Our vulnerability to the forces of nature, to te Taiao, will not.

Which party you vote for is your choice. But the polls tell us that there are tens of thousands of people who are so confused, apathetic or disenchanted that they will not vote at all.

Voting is one of the most powerful collective actions we can take. This year I am voting with my heart – for my awa, my maunga, my community, my mokopuna (yep I’m a nana these days) and those to come. For all of our sakes, I hope you do too.

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Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter

Keep going!

David Seymour and Winston Peters. (Image: Tina Tiller)

OPINIONPoliticsOctober 7, 2023

Act and the nightmare scenario

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

David Seymour and Winston Peters. (Image: Tina Tiller)

NZ First is surging. David Seymour’s party is slipping. And you’d forgive him for being furious.

“This,” David Seymour told a delirious crowd at his election night party three years ago, “is our 2023 election campaign launch.” It wasn’t just a rhetorical flourish. The Act Party has largely been in campaign mode since: developing policy, sharpening the message, tirelessly blatting out press releases, travelling the country under the “Real Change” banner.

It is hard to imagine, therefore, how infuriating it must be aboard the Act bus to watch New Zealand First mount a comparatively fleeting, dramatically less substantial campaign and, in the home stretch of the campaign, lurch suddenly, terrifyingly into their rear view mirror.

Just a few weeks ago, Seymour was lambasting the media for asking about the prospect of a National-Act-NZ-First government. “In this interview and so many others, the press are so keen to fixate on one hypothetical,” the Act leader told The Spinoff in the middle of September. “People spend far too much time over-egging it. And I find that in itself quite sad.”

Today, that hypothetical is a likelihood, at least if the polls are right. Poll after poll after poll – the last five made public, from four different pollsters – would deal out the seats in parliament such that, yes, National will be in a position to form a government. They’re unanimous in leaving Labour floundering in the 20s. But National, all agree, would need both Act and NZ First to govern.

That polling reality informed the decision by National to release a video last Monday morning – almost exactly one week before polls opened for all in advance voting – saying they’d work with New Zealand First if they needed to. That announcement, in turn, cemented the polling reality. What it certainly did was catapult Winston Peters and his beaming, blustering, bombastic, belligerent spectacle into the headlines, right at the very moment that hundreds of thousands of people were beginning to pay attention to the election.

Seymour was phlegmatic about that announcement. If he was furious, and he is entitled to be, probably he’d processed that in the many months before in which Christopher Luxon neither ruled NZ First in nor out but instead delayed and equivocated, intoning – that term, again – “hypothetical” over and over again. Instead of making Winston go away, however, the incantation seemed to summon him.

It wasn’t just that Luxon missed the opportunity to rule NZ First out. Instead of following the lead of 2011 (and 2008) John Key, he could have followed the lead of 2014 John Key and said, as the National leader did then: “New Zealand First is an unlikely partner. However, unlike the previous two elections, I’m not prepared to totally rule them out today.”

That might sound a lot like what Luxon just did. The difference – a very big difference – is timing. Key made the announcement, as he had in the previous election when he ruled NZ First out, in the first few weeks of the election year. NZ First did make it back in 2014, but Key didn’t need them, instead forming a minority government with three small support parties. What he hadn’t done, critically, is give Winston Peters a massive promotional leg-up in the peak attention period of the campaign – the issue had been dealt with long before.

Google reports that Winston Peters attracted the most search interest among New Zealand party leaders in the last 14 days, with 36% of searches, compared with 20% for Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon and 14% for David Seymour.

The chart below shows the boost in interest that came with National’s ruling-in of NZ First on September 25. The earlier peak for Peters, depressingly, came after he asserted that Māori are “not indigenous”. (The steeple for Luxon and Hipkins is the first leaders’ debate.)

Quite apart from the personal odium that radiates between Seymour and Peters, there is plenty that sets their two parties apart. NZ First is in many ways born out of disgust at the ideas of people like Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble; Act is their offspring. And yet, as far as appealing to the electorate is concerned, they are fishing in the same pond. The frustrated rural voter. The one-law-for-all voter. And, in the current circumstances, the right-inclined voter who is unpersuaded by the National Party and its leadership.

Having taken the pulse of the electorate last year, Peters resolved that there was very much a change election coming, and in November he made a more emphatic declaration than ever before: he would not work with the Labour Party after the election.

Thanks to Luxon’s announcement on NZ First and the attendant media coverage, Winston Peters’ party popularity is growing and growing. Act is sliding. In the latest poll by Curia – also the National Party’s pollster – for the Taxpayers’ Union, published yesterday, NZ First and Act were separated by just 2.2 percentage points. For much of the year that gap was more like 10.

Which presents for Act the nightmare scenario: after spending many months musing on the shape and focus of a coalition with National, there is a possibility – however unlikely that might remain – of Act witnessing NZ First nibble further into its vote, while hoovering up more of the fragmented far right, and even overtaking it.

In such a situation, Peters could be expected to demand, as he did in 2017, that he – a man about whom Luxon was continuing to insist as of yesterday “I don’t know him” – move to the front of the negotiating queue, and that NZ First secure a coalition agreement with the major party while the third component party – in 2017 the Greens – hammer out their own confidence and supply arrangement and stay out of cabinet. Such a setup would be agonising to stomach for Seymour and his team.

It is a long way from likely. Act is not freaking out. It is confident in internal polling which suggests that enough of its support is locked in, invulnerable to the NZ First invasion. It could be, even, that a series of pleas from senior National MPs and the 11th-hour deployment of Sir John Key to warn against a three-way governing arrangement and a post-election “limbo land” sees NZ First fall away.

What is remarkable, however, is that at this point such an outcome, one in which NZ First comes close or even outpolls Act, is not a completely unimaginable – what’s the word? – hypothetical.