Audrey Young: Simon Bridges enhances his leadership over climate change shift

Illustration / Guy Body

COMMENT:

The selection of Christopher Luxon as Botany candidate may have renewed talk about leadership in the National Party.

But of all the times such talk could have been revived, this week has been the least relevant.

Simon Bridges has just had the best week of his leadership and enhanced his credentials as leader for his management of the party's shift on climate change.

The eventual support of the National Party for the Zero Carbon Bill has been the culmination of a carefully planned executed shift over 18 months that has been fraught with danger and difficulty.

Bridges may not have done anything to particularly impress the public, but his stewardship of the issue to its conclusion this week gives reason for the caucus and party to have confidence in him.

This was never just a matter of National deciding whether or not to support the third reading of the Government's bill (the bill sets up targets and structure to develop policies to meet the Paris Agreement commitments).

It was not the one-dimensional issue for National that it is for many.

Bridges had to be mindful of a policy shift that could alienate the rural sector, alienate the urban vote by looking too much like a farmers' party, give New Zealand First a weapon by botching the arguments, cause strife within his party, and all about an issue which gave leadership rival Judith Collins an opportunity to seek support.

In August, Collins told the caucus she was going to vote against the bill. It did not impress her colleagues, who had yet to reach a position on the bill.

On Wednesday, she voted for the bill – along with the rest of the caucus who vowed to improve it if they get back into Government.

She made it clear in her speech that she still opposed the bill. But the reality was that such is the shift in the party that had she carried out her threat, she would have isolated herself from the caucus.

She would have destroyed party unity at a time when the party is polling well and the caucus would not have forgiven her.

National leader Simon Bridges in an earlier parliamentary debate. Photo / Mark Mitchell

There may be a small group in the farming community who believe Collins is the only one going into bat for them, but it is a fringe group and she cannot afford to be seen as fringe. Ultimately it was in her own interests, not just the party's, to vote for the bill.

Bridges has managed a complex issues well, not least the potential Collins-led rebellion. When first questioned by reporters about the Collins threat to cross the floor, he quipped that we would read about it in the memoir she is writing.

It may not always have been clear that Bridges' election as leader represented not only a generation shift but a modernisation of climate change policy.

The public hears more about his conservative values on law and order as a former prosecutor than his enthusiasm he had as Associate Climate Change Minister attending the Paris summit in 2015 or his passion for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

But in his speech in Parliament on Thursday, Bridges referenced his blueprint - a speech to the Fieldays in June last year in which he laid out his ambition to modernise National's approach.

It was underpinned by a set of principles that he wanted reflected in the Carbon Zero Bill, and offered to work with Jacinda Ardern and Climate Change Minister James Shaw on a bipartisan basis.

Working with Bridges in his environment team he has had the modern face of National: Todd Muller, Scott Simpson, Sarah Dowie and Erica Stanford.

They deserved to have a sense of ownership of the bill.

The bill as it emerged was designed with large input from National, all except the biogenic methane targets of 24 per cent to 47 per cent.

That highly contentious target was put in at the insistence of New Zealand First, at the same time as New Zealand First insisted negotiations with National cease.

New Zealand First has been the rogue player in all of this.

Former Air NZ chief Christopher Luxon greets MP Judith Collins after his selection for National in Botany this week. Photo / Jason Oxenham

But New Zealand First badly miscalculated opposition to the targets from farmers, the group it seeks to represent.

National wanted the targets set by the Climate Change Commission, based on science and economics.

It put a series of seven amendments to the bill during the committee stages on Wednesday, all perfectly reasonable but blocked by the Government at the insistence of New Zealand First.

Now National can legitimately claim to farmers that New Zealand First opposed National's ameliorating amendments, and that it insisted on the methane targets being put into the bill rather than left to the Climate Change Commission.

National kept its counsel. In trying to get changes to the bill during select committee and at the committee stages of the whole House, it would have done its own negotiating power no good by saying it planned to support it anyway.

Besides which it had not yet decided to support it anyway.

That was done at a 9pm caucus on Wednesday, after a recommendation from the leadership team. There was not a huge debate and it was agreed fairly quickly to support it.

Bridges could have easily found a way to oppose it, saying the bill did not reflect the five principles set out in the Fieldays speech.

The decision, however, was less about the bill, which was going to pass anyway, and more about National's future and how it wanted to be seen.

Had the party voted against the bill, it would have been seen as climate deniers, not reflecting mainstream New Zealand which is caring more and more about climate change, and of being the party of only farmers, not urban liberals.

Credit must be given to Climate Change Minister James Shaw for his ambition of bipartisan support and he certainly made it easier for National to sign up, but in the end, it was National's self-interest that drove its decision.

The fact that leading farming organisations had just done a deal with the Government over the Emissions Trading Scheme also changed the political imperatives of National's relationship with the rural sector.

Bridges and his team may still have some explaining to do in the agriculture sector but Bridges has shown he is up to the task.

Whether Christopher Luxon would have had the political finesse to take on such a task is debatable.