In a typical Winston Peters move, the leader of New Zealand First is now opposed to the climate change legislation he voted for in 2019.
Facing lacklustre polling and the impact of Trump’s ideas on the party’s traditional populist base, Peters has decided to make New Zealand’s accession to the Paris Climate Change Agreement an issue.
That he is doing this while he is Foreign Minister will raise questions overseas about exactly what New Zealand’s climate change policy is.
But what Peters thinks about Paris was pretty clear in his State of the Nation speech in Christchurch yesterday.
He blamed National for signing up to the Paris Accord in 2016 under which New Zealand is obligated to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
“In October 2016, the National Party signed up to the Paris Accord setting targets that some of the world’s largest economies have no intention of honouring,” he said.
“That means that no matter what we do, our sacrifice will make no difference.”
But when the legislation to implement the Paris Accord was introduced into the New Zealand Parliament in 2019, New Zealand First supported it.
The party went further than that.
The 2017 New Zealand First – Labour coalition agreement had committed the two parties to introducing a Zero Carbon Act which would set out the obligations under the Paris Accord.
When the legislation did come before Parliament in November 2019, ther NZ First MP, who was the party’s climate change spokesperson, Jenny Marcroft, said climate change posed a very real and imminent threat to the survival of humankind.
“I know this, we all know this in this House, and New Zealand knows this,” she said.
“As the kaitiaki of this big, beautiful planet—the jewel in the cosmos—it is our responsibility to absolutely avoid a climate calamity.”
Peters claimed that New Zealand First was now leading the debate about whether to pull out of the Paris agreement.
“We were the first to call for the re-evaluation of our Paris commitments months ago,” he said.
“We were the first to call for that because we could see the frustration that was building.
“We need to stop this idealistic flight of futility.”
The first reference to NZ First wanting to pull out of Paris is on the party’s Facebook page on February 15.
In fact, Peters’s conversion to the anti-Paris cause came a fortnight after ACT leader David Seymour had already floated the idea of pulling out of Paris.
“There is a wider question of whether the Government of New Zealand should be committed to the Paris Accord when half of the world appears to be pulling out of it anyway — and that is a discussion for another time and perhaps another election,” Seymour said.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon now faces a reality where his two coalition partners are talking about pulling out of the Paris Agreement.
The two minor parties are picking up on a growing mood among farmers that opposes New Zealand staying with Paris.
In a recent interview with the right-wing Reality Check Radio, ACT’s agriculture spokesperson Mark Cameron said farmers had been telling him that National was out of touch on climate change, and he believed the party risked losing a substantial portion of the rural vote.
The Prime Minister disagreed.
“Oh, that’s rubbish; farmers tell me they do not want multi-national companies and countries that compete with New Zealand on dairy, kicking our products off the shelf,” said Christopher Luxon while he was in India last week.
“And I tell you, I act brutally in New Zealand’s national interests, and as a result, it is entirely appropriate that we are part of the Paris Agreement.”
Luxon was indirectly referring to Fonterra, who have made it very clear that their commercial arrangements with companies like Nestlé would require that the milk Fonterra supplies come from low-emission farms.
To assist that goal, Fonterra already pays a bonus to farmers who meet emissions reduction targets
Nestlé is striving towards net zero emissions by 2050.
By the end of 2025, the company aims to reduce emissions by 20% and by the end of 2030 by 50%.
With Seymour and Peters both winding up an anti-Paris agenda, Luxon might find himself having to rely on Labour to support any amendments to the Net Zero legislation that the Government might propose.
While Peters’s comments on climate change were pure Trump, he surprisingly had nothing to say about trump’s great cause, immigration, despite dining last week in Washington with the hard-line extreme right-wing anti-immigration Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka.
There are suspicions within New Zealand First that the Prime Minister may be ready to agree to immigration concessions to India to get his much-wanted free trade agreement over the line.
Questioned on TVOne’s “Q+A” yesterday by Maiki Sherman about whether any trade deal with India would mean more Indian migrants, Luxon ducked.
But he did concede that the recent deal between India and Australia which included immigration concessions meant visas would “be an interest”.
The importance of migration opportunities for India’s workforce is massive.
In 2022, overseas Indians remitted $US111 billion to their mother country.
Peters’ silence on immigration is almost certainly not because, as Luxon claimed on “Q+A”, he was working tightly with the Government on building relationships with Indo-Pacific countries to get economic growth back in New Zealand.
It looks much more likely that he is holding his fire until the outline of any Free Trade Agreement with India is more certain.
He and NZ First have a long track record of being critical of immigration.
The party’s origins were, among other things, in Peters’ attacks on Asian immigration in the early 90s.
NZ First Minister Shane Jones has previously called for a population policy.
It all fits with Peters own vision of taking the country back to the era he said yesterday were New Zealand’s great years, between 1935 and 1970.
In saying that, he is trying to appeal for votes to the right-wing Labour voters who are nostalgic for that same past before the country went “woke”.
“We have to arrest the last four decades of drift, where ideology overtook common sense and pragmatism,” Peters said.
In Peters’ utopian pre-1970 world, there was no debate about climate change, and immigrants came only from Britain or the Pacific Islands.
Back to the future.
