And it begins. TOP have released their environmental policy and it’s far more radical than what the Greens and Labour are suggesting…
Economic growth must not come at the expense of the environment
New Zealand’s natural environment is our #1 asset; it attracts tourists and skilled migrants, and earns an export premium. It is also a massive part of the Kiwi way of life.However, our precious environment is only in such good shape thanks to our low population. Establishment party governments have been running down our natural assets, thanks to a strategy of economic growth at any cost, and pursuit of volume over value. Growth that comes at the expense of our rivers, lakes, oceans, soils or unique native wildlife is dirty, dubious and downright dumb. We can and must get smarter. If we want to keep and capitalise on our clean green image, we need to start investing in our environment.
TOP’s position is that we should leave the environment for our descendants in no worse shape than we inherited it – and preferably in better shape. We will protect and enhance our natural environment, not just because we love it, but because it makes good business sense.
We want true prosperity – growth that improves our well-being including our environment, our social harmony and our health. To achieve the harmony between the economy and environment, our approach is for polluters to pay to clean up their mess. We do not subscribe to the view that it’s appropriate to degrade our environment or for taxpayers to pick up the tab.Land based industries are the backbone of New Zealand’s exports, and they also have the largest impact on our environment. In the past clearing hill country of forest led to massive erosion issues, and more recently intensive agriculture has added more nutrients to our waterways.
In many cases we have hit the limit for how much we can produce on our land. We have been using more fertiliser, more water and importing more palm kernel to feed ever more cows, which has led to further decline in the quality of our rivers and lakes in areas of intensive agriculture. Continuing to push for increased volume is not good for our land, our water, our wildlife, the cows or even our farmers. It is time to focus on profit growth from improving the value of our exports rather than increasing the volume of them.
Yet the Government is intent on doubling agricultural exports and increasing irrigation while leaving the taxpayer to foot the bill for cleaning up our rivers and lakes. The only reason increasing volume is viable is because the industry is not paying for the environmental damage it’s inflicting. TOP will ensure that polluters do pay for the damage they cause.
Our land-based industries face many risks; changes in consumer preferences, an increased demand for food with environmental integrity, and new technology. New Zealand agriculture can innovate to meet these challenges, as we have in the past and some small companies still do, but we have to think ahead and start preparing. Some farmers have already shown they can improve their environmental outcomes without hurting their bottom line. Charging polluters for their pollution will help prepare our businesses for the future and direct research funding away from the quest for volume to adding value.
New Zealand could be the world leader in producing high quality, sustainable food
We need businesses to provide income and jobs; enterprise and risk must be rewarded via profits as long as they are making us better off overall. Good regulation should support this by rewarding the environmentally best businesses and penalising the worst. Many farmers and other businesses care about their environmental impact and are already doing the right thing. But the time has come to lift the performance of many more of these businesses. The appropriate way is to ensure they pay for making good any environmental damage they cause.
TOP’s Plan for making growth Clean and Clever
The overarching issue is governance. Local authorities are making variable progress on environmental issues and there is a need for more independent coordination and oversight without resorting to legal action.
Swimmable rivers and lakes, sustainable farming. TOP’s default goal is for swimmable rivers, unless local communities decide otherwise. We want intensification of land use to cease unless the impacts can be offset. TOP will invest in monitoring, research, improving water quality and resolving Treaty claims. This will be paid for by a levy on commercial water users and polluters, paid into regional Nature Investment Funds (NIFs).
Protect and restore our oceans. TOP will use spatial planning to ensure all ocean users have fair access to the resources in our Exclusive Economic Zone. This would also ensure that at least 10% of all ecosystems is set aside as no-take reserves, with compensation for existing users where appropriate. This process would be funded by a resource rental on all commercial ocean resource users.
Enhancing our natural assets. TOP will impose a $20 levy on all tourists entering the country. This revenue will be used to improve local infrastructure and placed in an independently managed fund that can be invested with partners to get the best biodiversity return (which may include the Regional Council NIFs).
Resource Management – Less paperwork, more protection. TOP will ensure that development which delivers no net loss of natural capital can proceed in a timely fashion. Any use of biodiversity offsets will be quality assured. RMA fines will be directed to restoring the damage caused by the breach.
…this has always been the danger of Morgan. Labour and the Greens are so frightened of being seen as left wing they have done all they can to drag themselves to the middle and cloak themselves in the water down political language of the centre.
Gareth Morgan doesn’t give a toss about being seen as a centrist or not on the issues that most are passionate about so his policy comes across as far more radical than the Greens or Labour. I think many are underestimating the impact he will have in this election.
Educated male voters who feel unwelcome in the Greens and Labour and vote for National as a default position will rally to TOP. I don’t see Morgan robbing Labour of votes (too many cat lovers in Labour), I see him taking from the Greens (but they’ll make that up from an increased millennial vote) but I see him taking most from National’s urban vote and his strategy for the election to only run on the Party vote makes that an easy decision by those voters.
Labour and Green strategists must be praying to Gaia that Gareth Morgan doesn’t step into the Mt Albert by-election.
As a Marxist I never thought I would say it, but Morgan is to the left of Labour and the Greens on most things.
Not only that, so far he delivers on his promises, because he can.
Labour is the corpse of the First Labour Government.
It served a useful purpose for the City of London by herding workers and small farmers onto the Parliamentary road during the Depression.
It convinced the Bank of England that it could run the farm and deliver cheap food to Britain by adopting an economic protectionist stance decades before Muldoon came along with Think Big.
The Bank agreed because British finance capital profited.
Every Labour Govt since, and there have only been 5 all up, has accommodated to the demands of the dominant fraction of capitalists at the time including the Rogernomes.
From the London Bankers to the Wall St. Wankers, Labour has faithfully served finance capital.
Even Cunliffe before he was stabbed in the back failed to put up a fight to reject the policies of the 4th Labour Government. He has now gone back to a job serving finance capital.
Today Labour has outlived its use-by date which is why it repudiates working class politics for a ‘classless’ middle ground of petty bourgeois greed.
The Greens are a footnote to all this, arriving on the scene when capitalism had already polluted the planet. It advocates a timid utopia where capitalism can be saved by turning it green.
More like a brown sludge of rotting life.
Along comes the capitalist entrepreneur Morgan and shows that even to survive in Aotearoa, let alone the world, capitalism has to be sustainable.
He is bright enough to know that we are all doomed by the rip, shit, bust frontier politics of the Keyites.
We don’t have the time left to fuck about with a political establishment that serves up Pike Rivers, pollution, suicides, poverty, homelessness, and the destruction of nature.
I say it is better to support a capitalist who invests in saving the planet, than a bunch of fake lefts who are frightened to lose their jobs if they stand up for the working majority, not to mention humanity.
If TOP gets even one seat or over the MMP threshold, by vigorously promoting its policies it can make all the establishment time-servers look like total Wankers.
Most importantly, to implement his policies, it would be necessary to get rid of capitalism.
Maybe Morgan doesn’t believe it yet, so he will have to wake up too.
I suspect he already knows that capitalism and human survival are incompatible.
If he doesnt, he will soon find out and its up to revolutionaries to rub his nose in it.
Stand on firm principles of sustainable socialism, but be flexible in your tactics on how to get there.
We need a mass workers’ party to unite and mobilise the working majority to fight for sustainable socialism!
I totally agree this:
‘Today Labour has outlived its use-by date which is why it repudiates working class politics for a ‘classless’ middle ground of petty bourgeois greed.’
And this:
‘From the London Bankers to the Wall St. Wankers, Labour has faithfully served finance capital.’
And this:
‘The Greens are a footnote to all this, arriving on the scene when capitalism had already polluted the planet. It advocates a timid utopia where capitalism can be saved by turning it green.
More like a brown sludge of rotting life.’
And this:
‘If TOP gets even one seat or over the MMP threshold, by vigorously promoting its policies it can make all the establishment time-servers look like total Wankers.’
Indeed, pretty much everything you wrote except this:
‘I suspect he already knows that capitalism and human survival are incompatible.’
Capitalism and human survival ARE incompatible. But there are a lot of people who are in a state of denial of reality or just plain ignorant: the GOP environmental policy is riddled with mutually exclusive statements and mathematical or chemical impossibilities.
‘GOP’s position is that we should leave the environment for our descendants in no worse shape than we inherited it – and preferably in better shape.’
The ONLY way that can be achieved is by shutting down the industrial economy, i.e. no use of fossil fuels.
That will never happen voluntarily.
Mate, I know lots of people are in denial.
So we have to have tactics to force them to wake up.
Putting a TOP person in parliament is not the road to salvation its a step to wake people up.
The way to do that is cause the biggest public debate we can.
As part of the ferment what people can do ‘voluntarily’ is an open question.
No revolution in history has even happened without the oppressed waking up to that oppression and taking action.
‘Industrial society’ is not the problem ‘capitalism’ is.
If people do not ‘volunteer’ to smash capitalism, the alternative is capitalism smashes us as it implodes.
The logic of that we heard recently from the McPherson doomers.
We don’t have to sacrifice the advances in human and technical development to survive.
TOP can be challenged to beef up its program for Aotearoa.
It is already capable of switching to carbon free production.
And we can phaseout methane by substituting plants for meat.
When I say ‘we’, I mean the class conscious majority who are organised into a mass movement for survival socialism.
Not sure how you can be to the left of the Greens when you copy their environmental policy and add in “developments not affecting the environment will be allowed to proceed quickly” at the very end.
It’s hard argue against anything he’s saying in fact so far I like the policy’s he’s coming out with . only dairy nz would argue costs shouldn’t be accounted for, even his tax proposals are quit good and make a lot of sense we need to do something Morgan is right when we allow one special group Nats in gum boots to extract value from the environment and not account for the damage then walk off with the loot and society pays the bill that has to change.
TOP’s immigration policy is pathetic and is basically class-based immigration.
But his tax and environmental policies are quite good
Really been enjoying the TOP releases so far. He needs to throw in for Mt Albert!
I agree also with your argument here Martyn and the bloggers also because this policy plank will shake up the Greens and labour who are sitting back now not fighting for the environment.
NOR ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR THE AVERAGE MIDDLE CLASS WHO ARE SINKING INTO THE ABYSS WITH THE POOR!!!!
WE ARE SEEING A QUIET REVOLUTION BEGINNING HERE IN NZ LIKE WE SAW IN THE US AND THE UK WHO SIMILARLY FELT DISENGAGED FROM THE MAIN PARTIES WHO HAVE FORGOTTEN THEM.
Scan, look for triggers, fire!
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