What is the government hiding from?

Here we are in the middle of a worldwide Covid 19 pandemic and the New Zealand Government seems to be focussing on Climate Change as the big issue; yeah right.

The big issue focus should be the Covid 19 pandemic. The government should be making sure New Zealand first is being protected from Covid 19 so we don’t have to go back into lock down, as we are seeing with other countries that thought were doing well but have had to go back into lock down.

The government should be focussing on strategies to solve the problems around the homeless, housing, health, food security, our aging infrastructure, and the local environment for our own communities first.

The money that is being spent on Climate Change and the bureaucracy that goes with that could and would go along way to fixing up our own country first and making sure New Zealanders are looked after and have services that they need first.

If we get our position right that will go along way to meeting our targets for climate change. Under the Emissions Trading Scheme we are currently on track to meet our targets as set out under the Paris Accord and yet the government is still spending huge amounts extra and taking actions that are going to impact on both our national economy and also on the security of food supply for the country.

Yes, we should be worried about climate change but not to the total detriment of our New Zealand population and our way of life.

The New Zealand government seems to be promoting us as a leading nation in the global Climate Change debate yet when you take a wider global viewpoint you very rapidly see that a lot of the proposed actions whilst they may look like good affirmative actions in a New Zealand context alone, in a global sense they are actually counter-productive to the global climate change targets.

By constraining our agricultural sector outputs we are actually just exporting the detrimental effects to other countries that will make up the shortfall through agricultural production from environmentally poorer farming methods.

Given that most of our agricultural production is for export markets and that our production methods are acknowledged as being some of the best in the world environmentally, any shortfall in our exports will be taken up by other countries with lesser environmental standards therefore resulting in an increase in carbon emissions.

So we have a government that is standing up and trumpeting to the world about how their policies are going to reduce our emissions profile on the global environment yet they are failing their own population in Housing, Homelessness, Child Poverty, Health, Water Quality, Food Security, etc.

Could our government be trying to hide from their failings, behind the rhetoric around Climate Change and Global Warming?

Peter Buckley, Board Member, P.L.U.G.
Primary land Users Group

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