National’s new agriculture and climate change spokesmen to ‘kick the tyres’ on emissions pricing proposals

Rotorua MP Todd McClay becomes National's agriculture spokesman. Photo / Andrew Warner

Simon Watts, Todd McClay, Joseph Mooney and Chris Penk have picked up portfolios in a small National Party reshuffle prompted by Todd Muller’s decision to retire at the election.

A first-term MP, Watts has taken on the climate change portfolio, while McClay gets agriculture. McClay will lose his tourism portfolio, which will be given to Mooney, another first-term MP.

Penk will become National’s Cyclone Recovery spokesman, a portfolio recently established by the Government, but which party leader Christopher Luxon had not yet created as a shadow portfolio.

Muller was the agriculture and climate change spokesman, picking up those two portfolios in Luxon’s January reshuffle - although he had held the agriculture portfolio on an acting basis after it was stripped from Barbara Kuriger in 2022 after she made what Luxon considered to be an inappropriate intervention on behalf of her son in an investigation by MPI.

Luxon and Muller had talked up the opportunity of combining the agriculture and climate change portfolios, which had butted heads in the past. The portfolios must currently navigate the vexed issue of pricing agricultural emissions.

McClay told the Herald he and Watts would take time to Watts to “kick the tyres” on where they would take the party’s agriculture and climate policies.

“We have a new climate change spokesman. We‘re going to take time to kick the tyres,” McClay said.

“My job is to be an advocate for the farming sector and see what will work well for them,” he said.

He criticised the Government for rejecting most of the emissions pricing proposals from the sector-led He Waka Eke Noa. The Government went in its own direction, believing the proposals did not meaningfully reduce agricultural emissions.

McClay is currently National’s trade spokesman - he was trade minister in the last National government. He said agriculture and trade were a crucial pairing.

Labour has also paired trade and agriculture, both held by minister Damien O’Connor.

“In every trade deal for New Zealand, agriculture - particularly beef and dairy - is the big win,” McClay said.

Beef and dairy, he said, were still the most protected sectors of the world economy and New Zealand needed to fight hard to liberalise.

McClay said that while he was supportive of the Government’s free trade agreement with the European Union, he thought the Government settled too early and got a bad deal for agriculture.

“I think they settled and let down New Zealand farmers,” he said.

“It’s as simple as this. It is always the primary sector that digs New Zealand out of economic holes that labour digs us into,” he said.

Luxon said his McClay would lead a team of MPs and candidates, “including Nicola Grigg, Joseph Mooney, Suze Redmayne, and Miles Anderson”.

“Agriculture does much of the heavy lifting in our economy – creating jobs, lifting incomes and feeding people all over the world. National will campaign up and down the country to stop Labour’s war on farmers,” Luxon said.