By the time you read this, Parliament will have hopefully returned to its supposedly core business of serving the people of this country.
At the time of writing, 40 days since Election 2023, we are still waiting for the formation of Government with major hold ups publicised as who gets what job title and place in the pecking order.
Yet the challenges we face locally and internationally are colossal, and can only be resolved through large-scale cooperation and systems transformation, to explicitly put the wellbeing of people and planet first.
In mid-November, the world briefly recorded our breaching two degrees of warming — the threshold which, if solidified, would have catastrophic and irreversible impacts on our ecosystems necessary to sustain life, grow food, provide freshwater and stable weather.
El Niño is settling in across Aotearoa, with warmer waters and changing currents threatening more rapid and devastating spread of invasive seaweed caulerpa brachypus through our Hauraki Gulf. In six years, it had decimated an estimated half of fish biomass in the Mediterranean.
We know the solutions to these problems. It requires an end to economic practices which exploit people and planet — which don’t account for the real cost of privatising profit and socialising cost.
That means decarbonising our country at pace, which means investing in common sense green policies which also happen to improve our lives, make our neighbourhoods more vibrant and reduce household costs.
We’re talking efficient public transport, density done well, urban biodiversity such as planting out berms and roofs and a mass insulation programme. We’re talking community-led solutions and treating our ocean ecosystem, as we should all our ecosystems — with the same respect we do agriculture, which saw the better part of a billion dollars invested in eradicating mycoplasma bovis (the caulerpa response has so far only received a few million dollars).
What does all of that mean for us in Ponsonby and the Bays, Auckland Central and Tāmaki Makaurau at large? It’s pulling every lever we’ve got to get things happening.
In my robust and respectful relationship with Mayor Wayne Brown, we have found a pathway for bringing together the 40-odd electorate and list MPs based in Auckland to commit to cross-party action and investment in our nation’s largest city. We’re still working on breaking down tribal tendencies that have long prevented this kind of collaboration, but the stakes have never been higher and leadership necessary.
Within the world of Ponsonby News, I really valued a recent catch-up with Editor and Publisher Martin Leach on a busy Monday afternoon at Ponsonby Road’s Daily Bread. We discussed the opportunities and challenges for our communities, small businesses and organisations and agreed the most important thing any and all of us can do is engage with each other to get things done.
If Parliamentary politics can teach us anything, it’s the importance of collaboration on the things we hold dearly, even and especially when we don’t agree on everything. This approach lies at the heart of the Green legacy of the past six years, in the form of the Zero Carbon Act, which gave us the institution of the Climate Change Commission and framework for whole-of-economy emissions reduction plans.
At the end of a year that began with biblical climate-change-charged extreme weather and marred throughout with serious cost-of-living challenges, the time is now to get on with the work and leave the egos at the door. (Chlöe Swarbrick)
Chlöe Swarbrick, T: 09 378 4810, E: chloe.swarbrick@parliament.govt.nz
www.greens.org.nz/chloe_swarbrick
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Published: November 2023