Christopher Luxon and Chloe Swarbrick - a tale of two speeches: Simon Wilson

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.

OPINION

Last week, Christopher Luxon made a big speech setting out his vision for this country in 2040. target="_blank">Chloe Swarbrick also made a major speech: her first “state of the planet” as Green Party co-leader gave us her own vision for the medium-term future.

Quite different, they were. Although, in one sense, not as different as you might think.

Luxon’s speech was to the Auckland Business Chamber and he set out three things he looked forward to calling “achievements”.

The first and second were not surprising: they concerned economic prosperity and social investment. I’ll return to both those in a future column.

But the third really was a surprise. The Prime Minister said that by 2040 he wants us to have in place “a comprehensive response to climate change, both on track to achieve our ambitious emissions targets, and resilient to the challenges of a more volatile world”.

Was that the first time Luxon has promoted climate change to the top of his talking points? It was certainly one of the only times. The topic sometimes makes it into the back end of his speeches; quite often, it’s not mentioned at all.

What’s going on?

At National’s Northern Regional Conference 10 days ago, he barely mentioned it. But there was an instructive moment when Climate Minister Simon Watts, newly promoted to Cabinet, was briefing the delegates.

One of them got up and declared himself “a total climate denier”. He got a bit of a laugh and some claps. But Watts was having none of it. “Yeah, well, we are a broad church, aren’t we?” he said, getting some laughs himself.

Watts described how water had poured through homes in his North Shore electorate during the 2023 summer storms. “You come and tell those people it’s a hoax,” he said.

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts.

When Luxon, accompanied by Watts, returned from his Asia trip in April, he made a point of saying climate change was high on every agenda.

Some of the businesspeople on the trip went further. They told Newsroom that Luxon and Watts “were surprised that emissions reductions and the green economy were the top focus in every country they visited”.

The top focus in every country.

Is National rethinking its approach to the climate crisis? If so, how does that square with the cancellation of subsidies for EVs and businesses moving from coal to renewables? With its eagerness to allow new mining for fossil fuels? With its mantra that more roads will fix our transport woes?

I have a theory about Luxon. He’s realised he got it wrong. He didn’t know how important climate change is in the rest of the world, but now he does.

He didn’t know what would happen when he allowed NZ First’s Shane Jones off the leash as minister of regional development and resources. Now he does.

Jones attacks green causes with a gleeful delight designed to entertain his own voter base. But it probably horrifies hundreds of thousands of others. Very few of the people who voted for this Government voted for boorish environmental vandalism. Luxon probably knows this, too.

Very few voted for cronyism, either. Jones dined with West Coast mining company bosses in February and told them how to exploit the proposed new fast-track regime. But as has been widely reported, he didn’t record the meeting in his ministerial diary and then fudged the facts with his explanation.

The Jones brand of politics is part of a larger pattern. Ministers in the minor parties know the Prime Minister can’t sack them, so it’s as if they’re competing to see how often they can make him look like a fool.

Perhaps Luxon is mounting a counter-offensive. If so, talking a big game on climate change is part of it.

The topic might not be a top concern for most voters, but that’s not the point. It’s likely most of us want to believe the Government understands what those floods, droughts and wildfires are telling us.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with my Luxon theory. It’s this: many of the populist policies that undermine his credibility do not come from the minor parties. They’re National’s own work.

Top of the list is the Fast-track Approvals Bill, which threatens both the environment and democratic processes in ways that would have been inconceivable to every National-led Government I can remember.

Even Robert Muldoon’s Think Big projects and Keith Holyoake’s power to raise the level of Lake Manapouri were not so unbridled. (If you’re sceptical about this, check out Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s view.)

The bill has been enthusiastically promoted by Jones, but it’s not his bill. The sponsor is the Minister for Infrastructure, National’s Chris Bishop.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (left) watches as Regional Development Minister Shane Jones makes a point while announcing the Fast-track Approvals Bill, flanked by Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown. Photo / Mark Mitchell

If passed as is, the bill will allow both Bishop and Jones to ignore court decisions and independent experts in granting fast-track approvals. It’s already clear that fossil-fuel exploration and mining will form a major part of the programme.

A third minister will share the approvals power: Transport Minister Simeon Brown. His spending plans, as outlined in his Government Policy Statement, will result in significantly higher carbon emissions. Brown, like Bishop, is National.

And Brown is a popular figure in the party. His complaints about “woke speed limits” and so on got some big cheers at the Northern Regional Conference. Luxon even called him “the great Simeon Brown”.

Chloe Swarbrick leaves rather less doubt in her pronouncements about the climate. “Any politician who pretends we can have a thriving economy on a burning planet is a liar,” she told her own party faithful in Auckland on Sunday.

Luxon might like us to think he believes that, too. And, denialists aside, who doesn’t?

But it’s not a thing he has ever said. Nor, in any material sense, does that insight guide him and his Government.

Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick. Photo / Alex Burton

Swarbrick talked about poverty being a choice. Failing to live within the bounds of the planet’s resources, she said, was also a choice. But her main message was not about the climate as such. It was about action.

“Power and politics belong to those who turn up,” she declared.

This builds on the ambition she revealed when elected co-leader in March. She wanted, she said then, to help build the largest green mass movement the country has ever seen.

How large would that be? It was estimated that 170,000 people, or nearly 3.5 per cent of the population, took part in the School Strike for Climate marches in September 2019. Then Covid came along and wrecked any chance of building that into something bigger.

Between 1969 and 1972, there were massive street marches against Holyoake’s plan to raise the level of Lake Manapouri by up to 30 metres, in order to supply power to the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.

And an extraordinary 264,907 people – almost 10 per cent of the population – signed the Save Manapouri petition. To do that today, a petition would need over half a million signatures.

Are we up for these things? Swarbrick says yes.

Save Manapouri is still a model for successful campaigning. The petition allowed organisers to engage with communities throughout the country. Mass marches turned a sentiment into a movement and provided tangible evidence of mass support for the cause. A range of scientific experts and engineers spoke out against the plans, and so did many public figures.

Norman Kirk’s Labour Party pledged its support and soon after they won the general election in 1972, they scrapped the plans and set up a body called Guardians of Lake Manapouri. It still manages lake levels today.

Popular action, underpinned by expert analysis and supported by a political party prepared to do the right thing – which then wins the power to do it and does not resile from that in office. It’s absolutely doable again.

There’s a March for Nature on June 8, organised by Greenpeace, Forest & Bird, WWF-New Zealand and other environmental groups. With the Fast-track Bill still before Parliament, will it jump-start something bigger?

And will Prime Minister Luxon understand that if he wants to be taken seriously on climate change and other environmental matters, talking up his goals for 2040 will not cut it? He has to stop the nonsense that will raise emissions now.