The decision by regional delegates of the New Zealand Green Party to endorse a coalition with the New Zealand Labour Party after the recent New Zealand elections, has resulted in the two co-leaders of the Green Party once again acquiring ministerial portfolios outside of Cabinet. Co-leader James Shaw is now ‘Minister of Climate’ and ‘Associate Minister for the Environment’, while Marama Davidson is now Minister for the ‘Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence’ and ‘Homelessness’.
In exchange for these small shiny baubles of power in a Labour dominated Parliament, the NZ Greens have sadly irrefutably demonstrated that they are more interested in holding on to ‘power’ rather than having a mission to save our environment.
The Greens would have been able to play a far stronger advocacy role for the natural world and a future for humanity if they had stayed out of Labour’s centrist and growth oriented government.
Labour’s election byline says it all- “Let’s Keep Moving”. One might be tempted to ask ‘what for?’ and ‘where to?” : and what happens when we , in the not so distant future, run out of those natural resources we have been so relentlessly exploiting in New Zealand for the past 200 years to ‘keep us moving’?
A Greens/Labour coalition is therefore an abomination for the natural world and for our futures in New Zealand. The coalition agreement puts a green-wash over the strategies and actions of this new government to ‘expand’ the economy, which will inevitably destroy more of our living world- more roads, more concrete, more houses, more agro-business …
It is not too late to construct a New Zealand political party that truly upholds sustainable environmental principles: a no-growth steady-state party. A party that acknowledges the realities of the limits to growth and the importance of restoring much of our living world.
It is simply not possible for N.Z. to continue to pursue a “growth” strategy for the human economy- for money. We urgently need a government that places a priority on protecting and expanding the living world, and which acknowledges the reality that humans are an intrinsic part of Nature- not something separate. Without a vibrant living world around us, we humans will inevitably perish.
We need a N.Z. ‘Steady-State’ party now!
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