Rod Oram: Ardern’s Plan Is Not The Urgent Strategy We Need

Comment

The government’s plans are woefully generic, worthy but geared to incremental improvement. They will ease the pain of Covid and help us achieve a modest recovery. But they won’t build our prosperous and sustainable future.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern laid out some of her ambitions for her second term of government in two announcements this week. Both were competent and confident, replete with some short-term objectives and vague hopes for the future.But both kept us guessing about her long term goals, or even what she thinks we voters want to work on with her government. Sure, she says we want a prosperous and sustainable future. But what does she mean by that? And how is her government going to help us create it?

Last term, the government created the Infrastructure Commission to provide long-term strategy and planning for infrastructure, as well as procurement and delivery advice and support for major projects. But Infracom is working on its strategy at a remarkably leisurely pace.

Her first announcement was of her new cabinet on Monday. It’s better on paper than her first cabinet, with greater logic to and connection between portfolios. Let’s hope she’s learnt from her first term so will performance-manage ministers better this term.

Moreover, she has better assigned roles by competence and interest, rather than having to concede some posts to a demanding coalition partner, as she did to New Zealand First last time, resulting in some inadequate appointees.

Many ministers are grouped in two new committees, one to drive our health response to Covid-19 and the other to drive our economic recovery from it, which Ardern said were her top two priorities in this term.

It makes good sense that Finance Minister Grant Robertson adds deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure to his roles. Hopefully, his political clout and managerial skills will ensure our massive infrastructure investments are delivered efficiently, on time and fit for future climate, economy and social purposes.

There’s serious strategy work to do on future suitability, and much faster. Last term, the government created the Infrastructure Commission, a Crown entity to provide long-term strategy and planning for infrastructure, as well as procurement and delivery advice and support for major projects. Those were previously Treasury’s tasks.

But Infracom is working on its strategy at a remarkably leisurely pace. It will present a draft to Robertson next September before presenting the final version to parliament by April 2022, two and a half years after it was established. Meanwhile it’s unclear how central climate is to its work.

In contrast, the UK government legislated in June 2019 a target of net zero emissions by 2050, five months before our government did so here. Within a year, the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission had reviewed its strategy and work programme and concluded they were consistent with the new target.

Its report lays out exactly the type of framework we urgently need here to ensure all our new infrastructure investments will help deliver a low emissions future. Currently, far too many of our Covid-recovery, hastily committed, shovel-ready projects are propping up our fossil-fuelled past rather than building our climate-compatible future.

Likewise, David Parker is by far the best person for Minister for the Environment and the new post of Minister for Oceans and Fisheries. In the first, one major task is to lead the development of two new Acts to replace the RMA along the lines proposed by the Randerson Report. He is confident this can be done this term, along with progressing water reforms and other crucial environmental issues.

His newly created post is very long overdue. We are responsible for the ninth largest Exclusive Economic Zone in the world’s oceans, an area 15 times our land. Yet our fisheries regulation needs urgent reform, and our ocean policies are rudimentary.

“Oceans are the last frontier with very much first-generation law and policy governing their use. Deployment of less harmful fishing methods and ecosystem-based management together with marine spatial planning and marine protected areas reform would be a big improvement,” says Gary Taylor, chief executive and chair of the Environmental Defence Society. EDS is part-way through a major oceans reform project, which will help inform the new ministry’s work.

The government should have begun a long time ago a national conversation about the climate goals we have and how we will deliver them. By leaving it to next year, many people will be shocked rather than enthused by the Climate Commission’s recommendations. The public and political backlash could be severe.

Keeping James Shaw, Green party co-leader, as Climate Change Minister was also an excellent decision. He has greater knowledge, experience and commitment to the fundamentally vital subject than any other MP. He is also a patient and effective negotiator on climate legislation with other parties, as he proved last year on the Zero Carbon Act and reforms of the Emissions Trading Scheme.

He also takes on the role of associate Minister for the Environment for biodiversity. There’s good synergy, since restoring ecosystem biodiversity globally is a key component of so-called nature-based solutions to the climate crisis. Here at home Shaw will help farmers build biodiversity into deep changes in their practices so they can play their crucial role in helping us achieve our goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

New Zealand needs to do plenty more to create its prosperous and sustainable future; and there are lots of opportunities Ardern can chose from if she wants an ambitious second term, as I described in a recent column.

Next year will be a pivotal one anyway. In May, the Climate Commission will propose three, five-year carbon budgets and the pathways to meet them. The first will be lower than our emissions now and the subsequent ones successively lower.

Legislation requires the government to decide by December whether to accept or modify the budgets and pathways which are meant to set us firmly on the path to net zero emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050.

The government should have begun a long time ago a national conversation about the climate goals we have and how we will deliver them. By leaving it to next year, many people will be shocked rather than enthused by the Climate Commission’s recommendations. The public and political backlash could be severe.

Ardern’s second announcement this week only compounded the risk. She laid out her economic plans in a speech on Thursday to an audience of senior business people in Auckland.

It’s “a strong plan that we started to roll out before the election, and will now look to speed up,” she said. “Many of you will recall the foundation of that plan: 1) Investing in our people; 2) Job creation; 3) Preparing for the future; 4) Supporting small business; 5) Backing our exporters.”

But a plan is not a strategy. Worse, this plan is woefully generic. Many of the elements devised so far are worthy but geared to incremental improvement. They will ease the pain of Covid and help us achieve a modest recovery. But they won’t build our prosperous and sustainable future.