The government’s dismantling of climate laws breaks years of cross-party agreement

Just as world leaders gather for this year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil, the government’s announcement of its intention to significantly change New Zealand’s climate change law upends years of cross-party consensus.

All of the proposals pose serious problems, but the change to the zero-carbon provisions in the Climate Change Response Act 2002 runs counter to the underlying purpose of the act to provide accountability for climate change policy.

The government proposes to simplify emissions reduction plans, which are produced every five years to set out policies and strategies to decarbonise every sector of the economy.

It also wants to remove the Climate Change Commission’s role in providing independent advice on emissions reduction plans, and allow more frequent revisions of these plans without public consultation. The changes would also adjust timelines for emissions budgets and reports, and relax deadlines for the government’s response.

Removing the Climate Change Commission’s role and strangling public consultation all to suck up to Federated Farmers and corporate farming interests which National are beholden to is an obscenity.

The methane targets are a farce and yet NZ keeps getting pummled by more and more extreme weather events that are driven by climate change.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!

Climate change is real, it is here and it presents us with an existential crisis to our species, however the chokehold the polluters have over the right wing Political class stops any meaningful reform.

You silly sleepy hobbits, everyone who votes National, NZF and ACT are responsible for this abdication of responsibility.

What this extreme weather from climate change has taught us is how broken our resilience infrastructure is.

The disconnect between the Governments disastrous methane  policy and their constant cut backs on climate adaptation programmes vs the predicted extreme weather events we are seeing now is so enormous.

This is a climate denial Government!

The danger for the polluters and the alt-Right is that with every passing year, the scientific evidence for climate change only gets stronger and the extreme weather becomes impossible to ignore, what this will do is force the political class to take the issue seriously.

We need a massive upgrade of Civil Defence and far more resources spent on ensuring our infrastructure has the flexibility to withstand these types of extreme weather events.

We need RSAs and Maraes to be built up into Community civil Defence Hubs and we need a solar panel campaign to ensure a flexible electrical grid alongside better battery cell towers.

We need a Civil Defence that is far better resourced than they are now with permanent clean up crew staff on stand by because this doesn’t get better right?

The 230km hour winds we just experienced only get worse, as heat continues to pour into the atmosphere because of human made pollution, the extreme weather gets worse and worse, we need a new Civil Defence regime that reflects the reality of what we are seeing.

Dr Bryce Edwards highlights that the recent local council elections had lobby groups like ‘The Local Government Business Forum’ — a coalition including Business New Zealand, the New Zealand Initiative, and Federated Farmers — openly calling for voters to elect candidates with “commercial and financial acumen” and a “pro-growth and pro-development mindset”, part of the problem here in NZ is that business lobby groups can mask their polluter interests with dark Ag money that the wider electorate can’t see.

The reason the astro-turf alt-right are so focused on undermining local councils and Government is because the polluter interests that fund these groups want a Government so undermined that when the realities of climate change finally get into the heads of muddle NuZilind, there isn’t a Government with the capacity to do anything about the Polluters.

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Boom…

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders speak to media as Tākuta Ferris and Mariameno Kapa-Kingi expelled from party

Co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi announced the decision this morning, with Waititi saying it was part of the party “continuing to reset [its] waka”.

…it had to happen.

THIS IS SPARTA!

Welcome to the Bear Pit of politics.

Te Pati Māori promised a reset this year, moving the party away from being merely an activist party into being a credible and stable partner in replacing this Hard Right anti-Treaty, anti-Māori, anti-Beneficiary, anti-Disabled, anti-Renter, anti-Worker, anti-Environment Government.

Unbeknownst to most, Ferris and Mariameno had been plotting a coup against the leadership since July because they weren’t ‘Tikanga’ enough.

That level of putting ones own ego ahead of the waka, to attempt destabilisation when the political enemy is destroying so much was and is unforgivable.

Te Pati Māori had no choice but to expel those who would seek personal ambition above the collective needs of the community.

Eru’s attack on the leadership while glossing over his abuse of Parliamentary staff+ Mariameno’s over spending and plotting + Doc’s sectarian rhetoric were not Tikanga and using that as a reason to topple Debbie and Rawiri to advance their own agenda could only end in one outcome, expulsion.

That should be the end of the matter, they should simply seat warm until the election and allow others to get on with the mahi to topple this Government, but Eru, Doc and Mariameno have shown an inability to reflect on their leadership coup attempt and the damage that has caused meaning waka jumping legislation alongside the costs of 2 by-elections may have to be the outcome.

This ruthlessness on behalf of te Pati Māori however shows they are prepared to clean house to ensure Labour, the Greens and all left wing voters can rely on them for the stability to replace this terrible Government.

Eru, Doc and Mariameno seem to think the enemy was Debbie, Rawiri and John Tamihere when it was always ACT, National and NZF.

The needlessness of this reflects very poorly on Eru, Doc and Mariameno.

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I am deeply cynical of the COP now.

More consultants are there than activists.

It has been totally captured by the Oil Industry and Big Polluters.

Their interests are the only ones being implemented now.

Look at this image from the Tongariro National Park NZ…

…it is your future.

The small hope that there is…

The surprising countries pulling off stunningly fast clean energy transitions

…simply isn’t enough.

The disconnect between the extreme weather events we are seeing in NZ vs the bullshit Methane rules shows we have a climate denying Government empowered by Dark Ag money.

This Government are stripping the Climate Change Commission of its powers just as we need them most!

As for Bill Gates and his u turn on climate change, George Monbiot is scathing…

I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t

Let’s begin with the fundamental problem: Bill Gates is a politics denier. Though he came to it late, he now accepts the realities of climate science. But he lives in flat, embarrassing denial about political realities. His latest essay on climate, published last week, treats the issue as if it existed in a political vacuum. He writes as if there were no such thing as political power, and no such thing as billionaires.

His main contention is that funds are very limited, so the delegates at this month’s climate summit in Brazil should direct money away from “near-term emissions goals” towards climate “adaptation” and spending on poverty and disease.

There are truckloads of money available. Just after Gates published his new missive, Oxfam revealed that the net worth of the 10 richest US billionaires grew by $698bn in the past year. That money alone, the increment in the wealth of 10 people, is almost 10 times the annual amount required to end extreme poverty worldwide. How have they managed to channel so much of the world’s money into their pockets? And why can’t we get it back through effective taxation? The answer is their translation of economic power into political power. The richer they become, the more they can bend the state and economic system to their will, ensuring that they become richer still. But Bill Gates says nothing in his essay about how and where extra money for both climate action and poverty relief could be found.

There’s a direct link between the poverty Gates claims to care so much about and the wealth he fails to mention. In the US, homelessness is breaking records, and so is the share of assets owned by the top 0.1%. While this might not be Gates’s own business model, by holding down wages, racking up rents, busting trade unions and winning tax and spending cuts, the ultra-rich thrive on impoverishing other people.

A remarkable study in Perspectives on Politics, among the very few to have penetrated this secretive world, found that the ultra-rich have radically different political views from the great majority. The multimillionaires it interviewed, in stark contrast to mere earthlings, saw budget deficits as the most important of the issues it listed, and climate breakdown as the least. They were far more likely to insist that social security and federal healthcare should be cut, and far less likely to believe that the unemployed should have a “decent standard of living”, or that there should be more regulation of oil companies, banks and health insurers. They were fiercely opposed to redistribution.

So whose views prevail? The tiny minority or the great majority? Though the study was conducted in the Obama years, it found that the very rich had far more access to politicians and officials than average citizens. And now? I scarcely think I need to spell it out.

That’s another telling absence in Bill Gates’s essay: at no point in its 5,000 words does it mention Donald Trump. Were Gates to do so, he’d have to acknowledge that the second of his major assumptions is shaky: reductions in the cost of new green technologies lead inexorably to environmental progress. Of course it helps that wind, solar and other green technologies are becoming radically cheaper than fossil fuels. But Trump and similar demagogues are doing everything they can to impede the transition.

Partly as a result, fossil fuels remain highly lucrative. This could be why, despite Gates’s claim that his foundation had divested all its “direct holdings in oil and gas companies” in 2019, its fossil fuel stock and bond holdingshave, in fact, increased.

To Gates, overthrowing the power of the ultra-wealthy may be unthinkable. I don’t mean only that it clashes with his worldview. I mean that, judging by his remarkable silences on the issue, he might be literally incapable of thinking about it. Perhaps this is a symptom of “billionaire brain”: a profound incapacity to see the world from other people’s point of view. While the ultra-rich are notoriously hard to study, extrapolating from research into how gaining wealth and status affects cognition could suggest that acquiring huge amounts of money is like taking a blow to the head. Wealth seems to scramble certain cognitive functions, particularly those related to empathy and perspective.

But perhaps there’s also calculation here: his essay reads like nothing so much as a peace offering to Donald Trump. Trump certainly took it that way: “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

Gates has always been completely WRONG on the issue, though not for the reasons Trump imagines. He has consistently lagged behind the curve, reciting fossil fuel claims (green technologies could reduce global CO2 emissions only at a “beyond astronomical” cost) long after they’ve been discredited. He has spread confusion and misinformation, such as the groundless assertion in his new essay that the purpose of Sri Lanka’s disastrous ban on synthetic fertilisers was “to cut emissions”.

Gates calls his essay Three Tough Truths About Climate. So here’s another tough truth he studiously ignores. If, as now seems likely, crucial Earth systems cross tipping points and suddenly collapse, the effects on human life, let alone the survival of other life forms (a topic he fails, as usual, to mention), would destroy the smooth and steady progress he foresees. Because environmental change is likely to proceed not in gradual and linear ways, but through sudden changes of state, the possible impacts on human wellbeing are extremely hard to predict. His argument that we should align all funding to current “data-based analysis” of improvements in human welfare, while it might sound rational, introduces in the face of systemic change a profound irrationality, prompting us to ignore the greatest threats.

Yes, the funds available for any good cause are scarce, but that’s not because of some natural law, some implacable truth about human society. It’s because oligarchic power has waged war on benign state spending, leading to the destruction of USAID and drastic cuts to the aid budgets of other countries, including the UK. Austerity is a political choice. The decision to impose it is driven by governments bowing to the wishes of the ultra-rich.

…the truth is that the tipping points of no return are upon us.

There is an inevitability we face now and I believe Fortress Aotearoa is the last remaining strategy because nothing will change.

Apparently bringing your own bags to the Supermarket isn’t enough.

The naked truth is that Fortress Aotearoa will be forced upon us whether we are willing or not.

The catastrophic heat via pollution locked into our system goes so beyond what the ice core samples tell us that we are in uncharted territory.

Normally heat like this occurs over hundreds of thousands of years thanks to the angle of the Earth on its axis but we have done that in less than 3 centuries!

When the process occurs naturally over hundreds of thousands of years, the sudden and dramatic flip from burning hot to ice age can occur within decades. Create all that power within centuries and we turbo charge those flipping points in ways far more abrupt and damaging.

The rapid melting of the doomsday glacier in Antarctica and the shut down of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will trigger irreversible environmental collapse within  decades, not the end of the century.

There is no optimism on the climate front, just consequences now.

With such significant weather catastrophes occurring with ever more whithering destruction, other country’s will move to Autarky, will NZers cheers those planes landing with tourists while burning more climate gases or will they attack the Airports to shut them down?

Look at how every poll in NZ shows over 50% support for a total close of the border from a virus with the low mortality rate of Covid?

The climate crisis destroys environments and makes it more likely and probable that an Alpha virus far more lethal than Covid-19 will emerge – you think Kiwis will

While the globalists infect every political party in NZ, all it takes is one populist spark to breath Fortress NZ into life.

Post growth capitalism with true sustainability calls for Autarky on a burning planet than can’t take anymore globalism.

Muldoon thought big because he believed the oil shocks of the 70s was the future. He was wrong then but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong now.

The US Military Industrial complex simply solved the problem of an Oligopoly by seeding and backing harsh authoritarian regimes with lots of oil so that they could always access cheap petrol making Muldoon’s investment meaningless but The Military Industrial Complex can’t negotiate with the planet as we make it sicker and sicker!

As the reality of the enormity of climate change starts to dawn, people will be looking for ‘lifeboats’, NZ is one of these ‘lifeboats’…

Why NZ could be humanity’s ‘lifeboat’ in an extinction

Scientists have singled out New Zealand as a potential “ark” to reboot civilisation if a deadly pandemic swept the planet.

In a study just published in the international journal Risk Analysis , researchers found that New Zealand, along with Australia and Iceland, could serve as “lifeboats” to help humanity recover from a full-scale extinction event.

…while the focus here is on a pandemic, the same is true of NZ being a lifeboat for climate change.

The current political spectrum in New Zealand can not radically adapt fast enough to adopt the changes we must make if we are to survive the climate crisis. It will require a radical Political Movement that elects a Party to implement Fortress Aotearoa…

• • Move away from intensive farming and look to become domestically self sustainable in terms of food.
  • Immediately ban all water exports
  • 5 year Parliamentary term.
  • Upper and Lower House (Upper House 50-50 split between Māori & Pakeha that can hold up legislation if unhappy about Treaty issues)
  • Massive investment into R&D from Government with the understanding research is to benefit NZ first before sold offshore.
  • Large scale increase in Navy, Army & Airforce.
  • Mass limiting of tourism numbers with increased tourist taxes.
  • Only citizens can vote.
  • Sustainable immigration and an end to exploitative migrant workers.
  • Resettlement Programms for all pacific island neighbours.
  • Increase refugee in take to 10000 per year
  • Fully funded public services.
  • Mass Green housing rebuild.
  • 100% renewable energy for entire country.
  • Massive native tree planting across previous farming land.
  • Wholesale re-write of state services act to end commercial values.
  • Investment into basic pharmaceutical production.
  • Financial transaction tax
  • Wealth tax
  • Multinational tax
  • Inheritance tax

As the climate crisis unfolds more and more people in fury will turn against the current political system too wedded to the economic profits margins of the polluters. It is just a matter of time before the NZ electorate rejects the limitations of the current political spectrum.

The climate crisis will demand we have the military engineering capacity to rebuild from extreme weather events; have the military power to project across the Pacific in response to climate crisis civil disruption or extreme weather events; protection of fishing stock.

To ignore the real need for us to invest far larger amounts into the Defence force and to build a bigger Air, Land and Sea service as a response to the crisis emergency is as unacceptable as climate denial is.

And while we are talking about the consequences of the climate crisis, Australia wants passport free travel…

Australia and New Zealand citizens could have passport-free travel if security talks successful

…we should only agree on this for very specific wins like a shared pharmaceutical industry because as the climate crisis overwhelms Australia’s ability to survive at certain temperatures, NZ will be flooded with Australian climate refugees.

There’s barely 5million of us and 26million of them. Let’s keep our distance.

The tyranny of distance has always been our malaise but on a burning planet of constant external shocks the Shire of NZ is looking very good right now.

‘Build that wall’ will soon become ‘defend that moat’.

In 1980, the time between billion dollar climate destruction events was 3 months.

It’s now 18 days.

There is a point where the next destructive weather event strikes before you can rebuild from the last one.

Fortress Aotearoa is coming whether we want it or not.

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Implementation of boot camp rushed, report concludes

The final evaluation for the government’s military-style boot camps found it was too small to provide any meaningful data, and its implementation was rushed.

The 82-page independent report says the pilot contributed to “meaningful and positive change” for the young people involved, while acknowledging the cohort was too small to draw firm conclusions. It also highlighted a range of barriers and challenges to achieving outcomes.

Those barriers included rushed implementation, challenging transitions, a lack of continuity around therapeutic support, a lack of capacity in the residential phase, and support for whānau began too late before the rangatahi returned home.

It also noted the efforts to include te ao Māori and te reo Māori were valued but “didn’t go far enough” given” all the MSA pilot participants were rangatahi Māori and several were fluent te reo Māori speakers.”

It wouldn’t publish the overall reoffending rate, but said the majority of the MSA cohort reoffended within two months of release into the community.

Silly sleepy Hobbits!

The Military Boot Camps were never supposed to ‘succeed’.

The reason National/ACT and NZF insist on calling them Military Boot Camps is because National, ACT and NZF voters hate young people and they want those who cause crime to be punished and made to suffer.

They vote to ensure young people they hate are given the bash.

THAT is the win for National, ACT and NZF

Nothing excites their reactionary voter base more than the thought of kids they are fearful of being punished in a Military Boot Camp.

Oranga Tamariki don’t like the term because after the Royal Inquiry into Historic Abuse, the previous Military Boot Camps were full of kids who were being abused and they don’t want to be tainted with their resurrection (and they don’t want to the held legally culpable).

So you see, ‘succeeding’ or ‘failing’ isn’t the point of the Military Boot Camps, they make right wing redneck voters slather with glee and for National/ACT and NZF that is the win.

Welcome to Old Zealand, this is what we is now, this is who we are.

Burn those crosses with pride.

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Compass Group excluded from next round of school lunch scheme

Global catering giant Compass Group will not be a supplier in the next round of the Government’s school lunch programme, with new regional providers set to charge up to $5 a meal for participating primary schools.

So ACT’s ‘3 Buck Chuck’ school lunches were crap then?

So we destroyed 2000 jobs for shits and giggles did we?

Up to 2000 people could lose jobs over school lunch changes

Up to 2000 people could lose their jobs as a result of the government’s change to the school lunchesfunding model.

Currently up to 156 school lunch suppliers made up of businesses and local trusts feed their school communities under the Ka Ora, Ka Ako healthy lunches programme.

The Ministry of Education says 75 of those provider contracts will end on 24 December after a decision to partner with the School Lunch Collective – run by international company Compass Group.

One supplier, Trust House, will have to let go all 47 people employed to run the programme because it was blindsided by the decision and thought its contracts had been extended to 2026.

As The Daily Blog pointed out right from the beginning, the real story here was always the corporate welfare ACT was prepared to give Compass with a terrible reputation for food quality at the cost of local suppliers…

Exactly.

David Seymour has managed to take a great policy and fuck it up.

The audacity here?

We’ve had to cut these food programmes because this Government needed $2.9billion for Landlords tax loopholes, $300million for Big Tobacco and $200million for Gas and Oil.

We took out of the mouth of children to put into the pockets of the rich.

The greatest irony is Seymour is quietly dumping Compass while the Government gives the French $6.3 million for Michelin Star ratings.

How many Michelin stars would this shit get…

…Our children, living in a land of milk and honey, deserve better than this!

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