Members of Generation Zero outside parliament (Photo: Supplied)

PoliticsNovember 12, 2019

The young climate activists who broke through to the halls of power

Guest writer

Members of Generation Zero outside parliament (Photo: Supplied)

As parliament voted all but unanimously to pass the Zero Carbon Bill into law last week, climate change minister James Shaw credited Generation Zero for its very existence. Here, Jenny Coatham explains how the youth-led climate action group pulled off such a monumental task.

Our generation has been described as having “climate anxiety” – a sense of dread over the clear evidence that the business-as-usual approach will damage our planet beyond repair. After years of denial, empty platitudes from our “leaders” and increasing emissions, the future looked pretty bleak. The fair, accessible, zero-emissions future we dreamed of seemed far away. But increasingly, there is hope.

Building the climate movement has been no mean feat. Globally, before we were born, a number of conscientious citizens and scientists raised concern over the future of our climate. Over the years campaigners tried to spread the word about the risk of climate change permanently destroying ecosystems and the need to systematically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Indigenous groups and frontline communities, in particular, were quick to identify the danger of unmitigated emissions. However, just as quickly these groups would be dismissed. In Aotearoa, the youth advocacy group Generation Zero was established eight years ago to campaign for climate solutions around the country.

Four years ago, a small group of young people from Generation Zero discussed campaigning for a climate law like the UK has to create a legally binding framework that would meaningfully reduce our emissions. A law that would compel our leaders to implement a clear plan to create a just, safe and thriving zero-carbon Aotearoa. To get Aotearoa New Zealand on the right track, we needed to form a consensus around the need to act on climate change. The goal of the campaign was therefore two-fold. Firstly, we wanted an ambitious new climate law that would establish a clear pathway toward a zero-carbon economy. Secondly, we wanted cross-party support for the new law. It would be our biggest campaign to date.

James Shaw speaks to media after the third reading and passing of the the Zero Carbon Bill (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

We quickly got to work. Our team consulted with farmers and academics, researched climate policies, discussed our findings, and developed a Zero Carbon Act blueprint. More than an idea, we developed a body of research that informed our drafting instructions. Our graphs and diagrams even made it into official reports. Around the country, we hosted community events, got endorsements from youth parties and businesses, and talked to elected representatives.

Hundreds of volunteers around the country undertook this campaign alongside work and studies because we believed that our country could power our lives with renewable energy and that New Zealanders could adapt to the impacts of climate change. We were heartened when some political parties picked up our blueprint and campaigned on it for the 2017 election.

We partnered early on with other organisations including WWF New Zealand, Oxfam New Zealand and Forest & Bird and together we collected more than 10,000 signatures in the first 18 months of the campaign, which we presented to MPs before the second reading of the bill.

Building upon the momentum of the climate strikes, we also teamed up with School Strike 4 Climate on our campaign tactic – “elbow your elders”. We encouraged rangatahi throughout Aotearoa to urge their older family members to directly lobby MPs. This campaign’s premise was to get the students talking about their concerns about the planet and the need for action to provide a hopeful future for their grandchildren. People from different generations came together with their common values to demand that leaders act on climate change. This display of intergenerational unity continued with the third climate strike on 27 September 2019, especially among our indigenous rangatahi, through groups such as Pacific Climate Warriors and Te Ara Whatu.

The third climate strike on 27 September (Photo: Sylvie Whinray)

The private sector plays a big role in catalysing change and holds a lot of power in urging MPs to act. It was integral that businesses take part in the climate action conversation because if they are part of the problem, they must be part of the solution. We created an open letter to get businesses, influential leaders and community organisations to collectively show solidarity behind the Zero Carbon Bill. Before the third reading of the Zero Carbon Bill, we drafted another open letter calling for cross-party support. Within a week we were able to get over 215 businesses, organisations and influential individuals to sign this. A clear demand from businesses was that they wanted certainty and clarity in adjusting to a zero-carbon future which our act provided.

One of the biggest successes of our campaign was seeing thousands of people from all backgrounds engaged in the political process in a meaningful way. Our Zero Carbon Act team led the “adopt an MP” tactic, which saw people around the country meeting with their elected representatives. Generation Zero developed guides to make submitting on the Zero Carbon Bill easier. The consultations attracted over 10,000 submissions each. The growing public pressure saw the national conversation switch from “should we act on climate change?” to “how do we act on climate change?”.

Last Thursday, parliament passed the Zero Carbon Act with near-unanimous support. When it was announced National would support the bill, it was a moment of pure joy. The Zero Carbon Bill as enacted falls short of the ambition we initially called for. But it is a good step forward. Now we need to implement an ambitious plan to ensure a just transition for all New Zealanders.

Overall this will be a massive undertaking. As said by one of our Gen Zero team members, Dewy Sacayan, “Activism never stops”, and we will continue doing what we think is right to hold those in power to account for providing an equitable, zero-carbon Aotearoa. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity for meaningful action is closing quickly. As the IPCC cautioned in 2018, the next decade is crucial to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. A better future is possible if we act now to start mitigating our emissions, rather than our ambitions. The Zero Carbon Act provides a path, but we must now lead with action.

Keep going!

Vernon Tava is taking aim at Green co-leader James Shaw.

PoliticsNovember 11, 2019

The new green party is still defined by the old Green party

Alex Braae

Staff Writer

Vernon Tava is taking aim at Green co-leader James Shaw.

Vernon Tava’s Sustainable NZ Party launched over the weekend, to media fanfare. But has their pitch for centrist environmentalist voters lost touch with the changes in political reality?

For a party that he criticises constantly, Vernon Tava will have a tough time escaping the shadow of the Greens.

It’s a curious position for the leader of Sustainable NZ – the party that launched over the weekend – to find himself in. People entering frontline politics generally need to have some sort of backstory that explains why they’ve decided to put themselves forward. The extent of Tava’s backstory that explains this current push appears to be failing to make headway in established parties.

Perhaps that is being too harsh. Tava has been a local board member, has had successes in both law and business, and is a widely used political commentator on commercial radio panel discussions especially.

But politically, his career has been defined by previous failed forays into national politics. When he ran for the Green co-leadership in 2015, 127 delegates cast a vote. One of them fell for Tava. When he went for the National nomination in the Northcote by-election not long after, he wasn’t among the five candidates who made the final shortlist.

The idea of “electability” is a common one in political coverage, particularly that coverage which is focused on who is up and who is down. On the evidence of those failed campaigns, it becomes extremely difficult to make the case that Tava personally is electable. If a benevolent major party were to attempt to stand aside in an electorate a la ACT in Epsom, would the voters play along?

The pitch of Sustainable NZ is a solid one. They would put environmentalism at the heart of any and all governments, by being willing to work with either major party, and being generally pro-business. There is almost certainly a constituency for it, and one that is almost certainly growing. People sometimes scoff at the idea of voters swinging between National and the Greens, but it is a real phenomenon. Sustainability NZ will argue that they can be the intermediary step in between.

It would have been a much more solid pitch as recently as the 2014 election, but now feels out of step with events. Among the current three-headed government, the Greens have been the party most willing to nuzzle up to National. They gave up an awful lot in other areas, in order to both get a few wins out of the other parties of government, and to get National’s agreement on climate change legislation.

By any objective measure, the Zero Carbon Bill has been the most consensus driven piece of legislation in this current term of parliament. The idea of “working with” a party being defined by simply putting them in government is an odd one, and not really reflective of how MMP now works.

Vernon Tava’s pitch is firmly rooted in the debates that swirled around the 2015 co-leadership race. But the problem for his new party is that his side of that debate did actually win that contest – it’s just that the candidate that benefitted was James Shaw.

The various candidates in the 2015 Green Party co-leadership race (via Twitter)

Speaking to Kim Hill on Morning Report today, Tava suggested that huge swathes of the Green party membership are unhappy with Shaw, because he has compromised too much with other parties. There is some compelling evidence that this is true – witness for example the recent departure of prominent activist Jack McDonald, who went out the door taking swings at Shaw the Sellout. This isn’t a new phenomenon – most of the radical left has been contemptuous of the Greens for decades now.

But if that is the case, it takes a huge leap of cognitive dissonance to then land on the need for a brand new party. Because what Tava is basically saying with his point about the unhappy Green left is that in parliamentary terms, the new party he wants to put into government already exists.

Instead, he is left arguing against a phantom version of the Greens. That version is a party of Morris Dancing and micro-aggressions, of socialism and hurling the economy back to the Stone Age. Incidentally, it is the version of the Greens that primarily exists in right wing media, on radio stations like Newstalk ZB and websites like Kiwiblog.

Even the policies being pushed most heavily by Sustainable NZ are typically defined in relation to the Greens. A billion dollar boost is promised for conservation, much more than what the Greens managed to get out of Labour and NZ First. Sustainable NZ are also promising to move on genetic engineering, a sticking point for the Greens which some argue is an anti-science position in contradiction to their insistence on following scientific evidence on climate change.

Among their other policies, many are aimed at the architecture of government itself. There is a promise to create a minister for water, and a pledge to “ask councils to work with each other to improve efficiency.” Sustainable NZ would also establish a Parliamentary Commissioner for Animals, and change the tax system so that pollution could be taxed more, and income taxed less. They might be good ideas, but they’re hardly solutions that will light a fire under the electorate.

There is one party that will be put in a hugely difficult position by the emergence of Sustainable NZ. That is The Opportunities Party, who have also been positioning themselves in the “pro-environment but not the Greens” space. TOP still probably have the advantage over Sustainable NZ in having an existing party infrastructure, and their leader Geoff Simmons is arguably more prominent than Tava. But their already difficult task of scrapping their way to 5% in the party vote just got a lot more difficult.

For Sustainable NZ, they will need to make real headway in the polls, and quickly, to have any chance of catching on ahead of the 2020 election. The declining vote share for minor parties in recent elections shows voters are tactical, and if a party looks like falling under 5% they ruthlessly abandon ship.

Last time an explicitly centrist environmental party stood in a general election – the Progressive Green party in 1996 – they picked up only about 5000 votes. Since 1990, the Greens have never fallen below 100,000 party votes while running under their own banner. No party should ever consider itself to have a lock on any group of voters, but it is incredibly hard to imagine Tava putting a dent in his former party’s share.