A healthy environment is crucial to our collective wellbeing.
We’re talking clean water, beaches and streams; thriving trees and lush canopy; fresh air and clear skies. These are things we can take for granted, or as Joni Mitchell put it in 1970, “You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone”.
I’m grateful to have joined Quiet Sky Waitematā in their recent and ongoing organising to protect our residential skies from buzzing with all the more regular, exorbitantly polluting and excessively disruptive private helicopter flights. This is an issue I’ve become deeply familiar with by virtue of their proliferation on the Hauraki Islands, where unfortunately unlike with the sliver of public consultation in mainland Auckland, consents for new pads are not notified.
In the recent Parliamentary Transport and Infrastructure Select Committee report on the Civil Aviation Bill, you’ll find a Green Party differing view co-authored by Hon. Eugenie Sage and myself regarding exactly these concerns which we have and will continue to take to the transport minister. I’ve also raised these concerns with the mayor and addressed them with the environment minister.
In a climate crisis, let alone a housing crisis, where more of us are becoming more comfortable with the idea of living in closer proximity to each other near the city centre, the loud uber-convenience of a handful of people at the expense of everyone else’s quiet enjoyment has never felt quite such bad taste. It’s past time to fix the rules so we’re not having to so frequently, quickly, and reactively scramble together to defend our shared peace.
Talking of collective action, it’s been a privilege these past few months getting to know our local Pitt Street firefighters and the fight they’ve had to raise in absence of any meaningful move by Fire and Emergency New Zealand to pay them what they’re worth, ensure safe working conditions and functional equipment.
On Friday 19 August, career firefighters across Aotearoa New Zealand walked off their job for a very carefully selected hour, for the first time ever. It wasn’t something done lightly and even in the thick of it, I was talking to long-serving truly public servants whose anger and upset was palpable – they didn’t want to have to do this for their basic needs as essential workers to be recognised. With our Workplace Relations Spokesperson, Jan Logie, raising these issues in the House, I’ve initiated work through the Cross-Party Group on Mental Health, hoping to progress extension of ACC coverage to front-line workers with repeated exposure to trauma.
As always, there’s a lot more that’s been happening this month which I invite you to reach out and chat about if you’d like! I submitted to the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board to support their community ambitions in repurposing space currently used for a greyhound race track (and the harm that comes with it), which if successful, would phase out the practice in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. The campaign to save the St James rolls on with serious focus on locking in a strategy and government funding.
Ongoing work with Max and the family behind iconic foodtruck The White Lady has exposed an opportunity to turn ad hoc compliance and complaints into a blueprint for more vibrancy downtown. I joined Ngāti Pāoa, Waiheke locals, Massey University researchers and the Department of Conservation at a hugely concerning (and very rare) mass stranding of dolphins on Whakanewha Bay, Waiheke – with more to come on why this happened and how we prevent it in the future.
(Chlöe SWARBRICK)
Chlöe Swarbrick, T: 09 378 4810, E: chloe.swarbrick@parliament.govt.nz
www.greens.org.nz/chloe_swarbrick
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