Don’t get too excited though. This is a National-New Zealand First-Act New Zealand government, so progressive environmental policies are highly unlikely. It has been a big week for those politicians striving to give the government some kind of green conscience and street-cred.
On Wednesday, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts unveiled a climate-change strategy, based on five pillars. Mr Watts called the strategy ambitious and comprehensive, and said it delivered on the government’s commitments to climate-change mitigation. Each of the core-goal pillars — covering resilient infrastructure and community preparedness, credible markets, clean energy, climate innovation, and nature-based solutions — was accompanied by three bullet points to expand on the aspirations.
Needless to say, the pillars were pilloried for their lack of policy detail, which the government said was coming in the next fortnight. We await that eagerly. Greenpeace dug deep into its criticism bag and came up with the delightfully old-fashioned phrase, "about as useful as teats on a bull".
The strategy contained nothing which would help combat global warming and was predicated on "unproven and unreliable technofixes", spokeswoman Sinead Deighton-O’Flynn said. Greenpeace also called out the incongruence of announcing the strategy when the government had been far more focused on overturning the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration, and doing everything it can to increase mining, some of it on conserva.