OPINION
The Prime Minister’s rationale for scrapping the Clean Car Upgrade raises serious questions about the integrity of his Government and that of its policy-making and PR processes.
According to Chris Hipkins, the $568 million policy — plus the cheaper $19m social leasing car scheme he also abandoned — would have reduced carbon-equivalent emissions by just 7000 tonnes during the Government’s first emissions budget period.
That’s just 0.06 per cent of the extra 11.5 million tonnes in reductions the Government said 10 months ago was needed to meet its 2022-25 emissions budget, compared with forecasts.
As Hipkins rightly said, “these were relatively small contributions”.
He went on to say that, compared with the $587m that would have been spent on the aborted programmes, “there are actually better ways of achieving emissions reductions”.
This wasn’t what Transport Minister Michael Wood and Climate Change Minister James Shaw said when announcing the policies less than a year ago.
Then, according to Shaw, the policies were “a critical part of the Emissions Reduction Plan that will put Aotearoa on the path to net zero” and “a huge step in making sure people have clean, green, affordable ways of getting about”.
Wood was just as effusive. “Through supporting the uptake of cleaner vehicles,” he said, “we are not only helping families do their bit for our planet, but also protecting them and our economy from future economic shocks and high fuel prices.”
This would do no less than “help safeguard New Zealand” by reducing dependency on fossil fuels.
This raises the question: were the ministers spreading disinformation 10 months ago? Or was it the Prime Minister from the Government’s “podium of truth” on Monday?
My bet is on Wood and Shaw talking up the policies well beyond what could be justified. They apparently forgot to mention that the $587m would reduce emissions by just 7000 tonnes. That’s nearly $85,000 of taxpayers’ money per tonne - a scandalous cost with a prevailing carbon price of just $68 per tonne.
Even Hipkins risked being disingenuous, merely saying there are “better ways of achieving emissions reductions”.
The money could have reduced emissions more than a 1000 times what Shaw’s “huge step” promised to deliver.
Serious questions need to be asked not just of Wood and Shaw but of Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Treasury Secretary Caralee McLiesh about how over half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ funds was allocated to programmes that the Prime Minister has revealed would have been so shockingly ineffective.
Did McLiesh advise Robertson that the $587m may as well have just been burned to help the homeless keep warm? Did Robertson make it clear to the Cabinet that the reductions would be just 7000 tonnes?
If not, this suggests such an appallingly lax attitude to spending public money, by those charged with policing it, that Controller and Auditor-General John Ryan might be best placed to investigate.
Others who should take an interest are those who profess to be concerned about disinformation.
That includes the National Security Group in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), which has been working on “policy levers for addressing mis/disinformation” with former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and NGOs like the Disinformation Project, established by the University of Auckland’s Te Pūnaha Matatini, famous for its Covid-19 models.
Disinformation is usually seen as a problem of the far-right, including the criminals, lunatics and others who occupied Parliament last February. The Disinformation Project’s director, Kate Hannah, of Victoria University of Wellington, identifies “Māori, Pasifika diaspora communities, the Muslim community, Chinese diaspora communities, refugee and migrant communities, LGBTQIA+ communities — in particular, trans communities — and peoples living with the experience of disabilities” as victims.
This is important work, which could be expanded to consider disinformation targeted at the community as a whole, including press statements like Wood and Shaw’s and relentless scaremongering from environmental organisations including Greenpeace.
Two issues stand out over recent decades: the relentlessly false political narratives from the far-left about nuclear power and gene science. This disinformation has had monumental implications for New Zealand — far beyond the disruption, violence and idiocy of the Wellington occupiers — and has adversely affected New Zealand’s climate-change mitigation efforts, defence arrangements, productivity and natural environment, including polluted rivers and lakes.
Decades of scaremongering by the political left led to New Zealanders’ inaccurate attitude to nuclear power, which caused us to betray our allies on the cusp of the Cold War being won, and which has compromised our ability to defend New Zealand’s territorial integrity and offshore interests ever since.
Our last remaining ally, Australia, has now chosen nuclear propulsion for its key naval assets, so that we risk shunning even them, based on a completely false far-left narrative of the dangers.
While perhaps not economic for New Zealand, we have also refused even to consider whether nuclear energy might be better than damming more rivers, burning more coal and despoiling the aesthetic environment with windfarms.
On gene science, the same far-left activists convinced New Zealanders that biotechnology risked some kind of Day of the Triffids scenario.
That disinformation has prevented us from potentially improving agricultural productivity, reducing methane emissions and limiting industrial and agricultural pollution of lakes and rivers.
Disinformation on both nuclear power and biotechnology was not motivated by science, but by far-left activists’ opposition to the western defence network, capitalism and farming.
For decades, their nonsense was reported, usually unchallenged, even by the state broadcasters, RNZ and TVNZ.
DPMC and the Disinformation Project must keep up their work to combat those who deliberately use disinformation to incite violence and hatred against the groups Hannah identifies, and those who inspired the madness of the Wellington occupation. In some cases, prison or medical intervention is justified.
At the same time, New Zealand needs a serious discussion this election year about how to use gene science to reduce agricultural emissions and how to defend our territorial land and sea, and our wider interests, from totalitarian and belligerent states who are averse to our values.
To prevent that, extreme-left activists will seek to subvert any serious discussion with disinformation and false narratives, just as they did in previous decades. We would also be well served if the likes of Wood and Shaw were challenged for making implausible claims about the environmental impacts of their policies, which even their own Prime Minister has now called out.
In recent weeks, the Government has also released health statistics and crime briefings that have turned out to be misinformation, yet DPMC and the Disinformation Project have been curiously silent.
If they are genuinely committed to fighting disinformation that harms New Zealand’s interests, they may need to widen their scope.
· Matthew Hooton is an Auckland-based political and public affairs strategist. His clients have included the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
The jury's marathon deliberations ran for two weeks.