Todd Muller is National's Climate Change and Agriculture spokesman. Photo / Andrew Warner
This weekend National’s Blue-Green environmental wing will meet in Blenheim to discuss how the party will tackle everything from climate change to the conversion of productive land to forestry and housing.
Among them is someone who has an interest in both: Todd Muller, who holds both the climate change and agriculture portfolios for the party.
He was given both jobs in leader Christopher Luxon’s January reshuffle. Muller rocketed up National’s rankings, from a previously unranked position to number 12 in the shadow Cabinet.
As well as being a former leader of the party, Muller has held both climate change and agriculture portfolios - though never at the same time.
It’s been quite a journey back to the front line. After leaving the leadership, opening up about his mental health, announcing his intention to retire under the leadership of Judith Collins, and his intention to un-retire under Luxon, he’s finally back on the front line with two significant portfolios.
Agriculture has always been an important portfolio for National, particularly to keep heartland voters happy. Climate change is becoming more important, as Luxon tries to reassure voters that National needs to win, that the party is not a laggard.
Muller acknowledges that the arc of his political career is “certainly lumpy”.
“It’s certainly had its highs and lows which are very well documented,” Muller said, chuckling - he’s able to laugh about it now.
“I’ve had some highs and some pretty low lows and I think having looked through those and coming out the other side, it certainly changed me,” Muller said.
“I’m circumspect, I reflect more, I am very conscious - probably far more conscious - of other people, people who perhaps have gone through more challenging circumstances than I have.
“I would like to think far more relaxed in my skin than perhaps I might have been in some of those earlier iterations,” he said.
Muller said he’s enjoying being “part of a team” that was now “working really well”.
“The credit for that is very much Christopher and Nicola - they’re working well together,” he said.
It was Simon Bridges, the leader Muller later rolled, who first gave Muller the climate change portfolio in March 2018. Muller was tasked with negotiating National’s support of what is now the Zero Carbon Act.
National might have created a similar institution itself. There was talk of a Climate Change Commission-style arrangement going into the party’s 2017 manifesto (it did not).
Muller managed to negotiate National’s support for the bill, arguably the most significant step the party has made to improve its standing on climate change issues.
“I really enjoyed getting to grips with the climate portfolio the first time under Simon and he gave me a fair amount of room to sort of move within it, which I really appreciated,” Muller said of the experience.
He was no longer climate change spokesman when the Zero Carbon Bill passed its Third Reading.
By then, he’d moved on to agriculture, being reshuffled into that role soon after negotiations on the bill concluded in 2019.
That job is tougher than it used to be. Muller has to manage the expectations of some in the sector who think it’s plausible to do nothing on climate.
It’s a difficult balance. Act and NZ First are fishing for votes in the sector and Muller has to remember that while National has rural roots, its support is now largely urban.
There’s an obvious tension in these portfolios. New Zealand’s largest greenhouse gas emitter is the agriculture sector and it’s incredibly resistant to change.
Success in the climate change portfolio must surely come with some pain to the agriculture portfolio - or success in the agriculture portfolio must come with failure in the climate change portfolio.
Muller was not sure about that.
He said recent governments have earnestly tried to get the country in the right place, with respect to emissions reduction targets, but acknowledged that actually reducing emissions had proved elusive.
“I don’t think the inherent tension is as acute as people make it out to be,” he said.
“I think as a country we have had a collective challenge around how we actually reduce emissions as opposed to just talking about it - that’s a difficult thing.
“I’m not going to spend my time attacking the Labour guys - although I certainly could in terms of their track record around emissions reduction.
“It’s been really difficult and I think both governments, National under Key and English and then this Government, have genuinely worked towards trying to get New Zealand in the right place with respect to climate change targets and commitments and then to get the changes necessary, and as part of that,” Muller said.
Muller said New Zealand’s challenge was that with “very high renewable electricity and energy generally relative to many other countries” and an export-oriented agriculture sector: “We have a higher weighting in terms of agricultural emissions”.
“We’ve also got high transport and industrial heat, both of which are not easily able to be quickly transformed to other energy sources to drive those two sectors,” he said.
Muller thinks technology can begin to drive some of that change.
“I think that the better conversation for me is, you know, how each one of the sectors can best use available technology to start that journey,” Muller said.
Muller supports the He Waka Eke Noa proposal for agricultural emissions pricing. The Greens are critical of such a plan with agriculture spokesman Teanau Tuiono describing it as a “hallway pass”.
Muller said it was important to help farmers to begin measuring their farm emissions, even if it came at a cost.
“We’ve got to really turn our focus on measurement and then managing that through the application of tools.
“And that’s going to cost some money and we’ve got to front with that money and I think that makes sense and we support it, and we will continue to support it if we’re in government,” he said.
Muller was philosophical on the vexed issue of herd reduction and whether that was needed to hit climate goals.
“Land use has continued to change. One of the strategic underpinnings of the New Zealand agriculture story is land use flexibility, of course, that has to be within a sensible regulatory framework where you are required to be able to report on and demonstrate improvement in terms of your environmental impacts,” he said.
This is likely to come up at the Blue Greens conference as MPs discuss the traumatic issue of converting productive land into carbon forestry or housing.
The current Government has looked to stop some of this occurring on city fringes, and National members are divided on the idea, with an extended debate on it at the last party AGM in August.
It’s likely to come up as the party’s Resource Management Act (RMA) spokesman Chris Bishop leads a panel on RMA reform with former MP Nick Smith, Gary Taylor of the Environmental Defence Society and former Act MP Stephen Franks.
Muller said he was less keen on “blanket bans” on certain kinds of land use, but was “concerned” that if left “unfettered you could end up with you know, a whole lot of very productive land ending up being covered in concrete and one story houses, which I think is sub-optimal for New Zealand”.
But that’s for the future - possibly after the election if National becomes the government.
For now, a far more pressing issue: Managed retreat and adaptation.
Muller finds himself one of the few opposition spokespeople with any input into Government policy. He’s once again around the negotiating table with Climate Change Minister James Shaw trying to hammer out a bipartisan approach to the vexed issue of retreating from unlivable land.
That issue will need to be resolved shortly, with legislation due before the election and urgent post-cyclone work to begin in the weeks before that.
As ever in the climate change portfolio, time is running out.
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