KEY POINTS:
There was an odd blurring of terminology in the Prime Minister's address to Parliament last week in which she set out to establish the political agenda for the year. Odd because the meaning of the word "sustainable" was expanded from its common usage in public discourse - as a desirable objective of environmental economics - to include such sweeping concepts as family, community living standards, culture, values and national identity.
All of these, suddenly, were to become sustainable too. Just like industry, business and government. The incongruity of it was especially noticeable coming as it did immediately after Helen Clark had declared that the challenges of the 21st century required substance and not slogans.
By turning a specific term into a catchall buzzword she excited the suspicion that slogans were what it was really all about. Which is a pity given that this keynote speech was supposed to set the agenda and vision for the political year ahead.
Certainly, it must be said, there was no lack of rhetoric to make people sit up and take notice. Sustainability and climate change, the Prime Minister argued, were the compelling issues of our times, comparable to the nuclear threat to destroy the world in the late 20th century and requiring an equally decisive response from the Government.
In one sense the comparison is not strictly valid because, unlike the nuclear issue, sustainability has broad implications for all parts of the economy from big industries to household recycling. Thus dealing with it will require a far wider and more complex range of Government measures than the nuclear legislation.
It is true that during her speech the Prime Minister mentioned numerous sustainability initiatives, but many of these were old news. These old programmes, included with various new initiatives and draft strategies already in train, contrived to create an impression not of a coherent strategy to an urgent problem but something cobbled together for the occasion.
The long-term nature of some of these projects only added to that impression. It is no wonder that the Greens bridle at the delays. For instance, just the day before the Prime Minister's speech, they welcomed proposals to impose a charge on power generators for carbon dioxide emissions but insisted that, in the short term, the Government should regulate.
However, a more important consideration than the lack of urgency was the Prime Minister's failure to define the problem by anything more than portentous rhetoric. She stated that traditional patterns of development and fast-growing populations had put an intolerable strain on the planet. "The future economic costs of doing nothing are dire. That's why issues around sustainability and climate change have become the compelling issues of our times, dominating international forums and agendas."
This is all very well, but there was nothing in the speech to give a precise yardstick by which to measure the contribution the Government's various proposals would make to avert this, apparently, looming catastrophe.
The Prime Minister promised a bold approach but in the wider scheme of things, how important is it that biofuels should constitute 3.4 per cent of all petrol and diesel sales by 2012? And how significant is the Government's decision that the VIP fleet is to be replaced by cars that are more efficient and have lower emissions?
The solutions proposed scarcely match the statement of the problem which seems to call for nothing less than a complete re-engineering of the economy. This mis-match serves only to emphasise what appears so obvious from the Prime Minister's grab-all usage of the term "sustainable". Unhappily for the political debate ahead, it seems less substance and more slogan.
