Greens go lime on farmers

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Shaw has certainly stamped his authority onto the Green Party. His desire to over ride the Greens original position against passing laws to allow pubs to remain open was an attempt at dropping the pious principles of the Party so they weren’t seen as killjoys. The backlash by the other MPs who decided it was important added up looking flipping while flopping only to flip again.

Shaw has made sure that hasn’t happened with his climate policy.

By allowing Farmers an out of 5 years the Greens have gone from demanding immediate action on climate change to being content enough to let the ice caps melt first and then do something about it.

This shift to give farmers an easy ride is pragmatism 101 for Shaw. During the Leadership he kept misquoting an internal review into why NZers didn’t vote Green by claiming the research said voters were scared off by the economic policy. The research didn’t say that and when challenged on why he was misinterpreting it by other Green MPs, it’s claimed by a source that Shaw shrugged and argued that one of the reasons Key is popular is because he never backs down so Shaw wouldn’t back down over this claim.

That level of pragmatism is a very new and raw experience for some in the Greens.

Shaw is chasing blue green voters, giving Farmers an easier ride will be but one of many steps to the centre he undertakes as the Party gets remodelled for the 2017 election.

 

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23 COMMENTS

  1. I wouldnt mind if the Greens took farmer and rural votes from jonkey Nactional ( who have done a piss poor job for farmers long term especially with trade)…however the Greens cant compromise their values ….and they can not support Nactional ( on social welfare issues….they seem at least as left as the Labour Party)

    areas of agreement

    1.) anti foreign buy up of NZ land and farming assets

    2.) incentives for diversification of agricultural/hort/ land use …R@ D

    3.) trade opportunities away from China …which is on a big rort and buy up of New Zealand…eg explore trade maximisation with Russia which is open to NZ agricultuure and dairy trade ( John key discourages this)

    4.) work with farmer to minimise depletion and degradation of waterways …( many small intergenerational NZ farmers are environmentalists…but big farming corporations are not …and nor are some newcomers to farming who are in it for the money)

  2. This is a very disappointing move by the Greens. Mainly because it benefits farmers who are high carbon emitters, and effectively penalises one of the Greens major constituencies, sustainable, organic growers.

    The prices of industrially farmed food could have been forced to rise to reflect its full social and environmental costs, bringing them level with (or even higher than) the prices of local, organically farmed food, instead organic growers will have to compete with this subsidy to industrial farmers for another 5 years. This hurts us as food buyers too, because until more people can afford to buy organic, the growers and suppliers can’t get the economies of scale to bring prices down while still paying their workers properly.

    • There are food additives being developed such as NOS that have been shown to lower methane from cows by ~30%. Estimated time to market is about 5 years.

      Plus even if they can’t reduce it, that isn’t a good reason for refusing to tax them. Environmental costs including the effect on climate change is still a cost.

  3. Compromising principles? How many parties have put forward a plan to reduce emissions 40% by 2030? By deferring the impact on farmers slightly in the middle of a milk price crisis, they are just trying to make their proposal a bit harder to summarily dismiss by the big parties. This sort of pragmatism is good.

    • Except that it sends a message that dealing with global warming (and I’d like the Greens to use that name not the PR-recommended soft term “climate change”) isn’t urgent, and it is!
      Also, the farmers will take the concession and then argue for its continuation when the 5 years is up.
      Global warming needs to be dealt with asap – regardless of whether the Greens have more seats or not. They never pandered to the big parties in the early days and shouldn’t do so now.

  4. Yes the greens have been moving away from the Clean green principals for some time, albeit slowly most haven’t seen it.

    Case is with transport, while NZ First have been taking the emissions of greenhouse gasses more on-board.

    The NZ Greens have only a small reference on one page of their transport policy that relates to rail now, much reduced from the Rod Donald/Jeanette Fitzsimons era.

    NZ First have an amazing section on rail in fact better than UK Green Party which although not as large as NZ First UK Green Transport on rail make NZ Green Party transport manifesto look very lacking indeed.

    • Imagine what the Greens and NZF might achieve working together, if only Winston would stop playing a zero-sum game.

  5. Speaking of principles – does anyone remember when the Greens advocated legalizing cannabis? It got them elected in the first place, and now they have pathetically wimped out over the issue in an effort to suck up to people who would never vote for them anyway.

  6. The leaders of the Greens have done the numbers and realised the following:

    > As things stand Labour stands no chance of getting elected.

    > If in the future Labour did get the numbers it most likely would be with the support of Winston and I really doubt a Green/Labour /NZ First government is viable, do you?

    > So in order to get ANY of their policies implemented they need to moderate their crazier ideas and do a deal with National.

    Before you deny that could happen, who’d have thought the Maori Party would join National before they actually did?

    National and Green policies are surprisingly close in some areas. All the Greens have to do is mature into a Green/Blue party rather than a Green/Red party.

    • Your points about Labour are fair enough, but the rest is crap. The huge difference between the Greens and the Maori Party is that the MP are willing to compromise in fundamental ways on environmental policy, which means they are willing to compromise on economic policy. This is what enables them to work in govt with National. National are happy to allow them some social policy wins within their economic paradigm, but have crushed every attempt at supporting enviro/economic policies against the govt’s intentions. See how they had to swallow their publicly stated position against the several guttings of the ETS for a case in point.

      This is not an option for the Greens, because their raison d’etre is to establish a different economic paradigm within which the current environmental destruction is halted and reversed. It is why the mythical Blue/Greens don’t and can’t exist; they are antithetical to each other. For the Greens, supporting the Nats would not be “maturing”, it would be a fundamental selling out of their principles for very limited power indeed, and political oblivion at the next election.

    • > So in order to get ANY of their policies implemented they need to moderate their crazier ideas and do a deal with National.

      So I popped over to the Greens website and had a squiz at their policies – most looked pretty sensible to me. What exactly are their crazier ideas?

      • Try these:

        Not drilling for oil when in fact they all own cars

        Wanting renewable energy but not wanting to dam rivers

        Wanting to cut carbon emissions but being anti-nuclear

        A top tax rate of 40% which would actually reduce revenue because it will chase taxable income away from NZ

        Wanting to swim in all our rivers but not saying how they’re going to achieve that, exactly what water quality standards they want to meet nor how much all this will cost

        It’s mostly just emotive clap-trap.

        • Half of what you say above doesn’t even make sense, but let’s face it, you’re not arguing for “sensible” green policies anyway; what you want is greenwash.

  7. If they keep this up they’ll have to rebrand as the Brown Party…
    Is there noone left (Ho! Ho!) who takes climate change seriously?

    • The problem isn’t that the Green Party aren’t going hard enough, it’s that even adopting 50% of their programme on emissions reductions would amount to huge paradigm shift that neither the Nats nor Labour are likely to support for decades yet. So calling the Greens names like it’s all their fault we’re making no progress is misdirected to say the least.

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