While sometimes political decision making can seem far away, we see the results of those decisions all around us in our day to day lives.
That’s why, last month, we released our Green Budget, to show what kinds of decisions we could make to lower the cost of living, increase your quality of life and rapidly reduce climate changing emissions.
We proved how we can support and protect the simple things that make life worth living. How we could address and prevent the three entirely predictable crises to hit this winter: the health crisis, energy crisis and homelessness crisis. That means making GPs free for all, building distributed renewable energy and high-quality housing and creating good green jobs along the way.
May also marked the long awaited opening of Te Rimutahi, our new beautiful public performance and gathering space towards the Three Lamps end of Ponsonby Road. We can and should have more of these green spaces, not only to allow our cities breathing room as housing becomes more dense, but to help with climate adaptation and mitigation. Our Green Budget shows how we can grow these kinds of desperately needed initiatives across our city.
As the wild weather and rain bites, the homelessness crisis generated by the Luxon Government’s cuts to emergency housing and wrap around support will become more visible. This is because Aucklanders currently sleeping under bridges, in parks and cemeteries will need shelter – as all humans do – and will likely find it in more public spaces, like in arcades and under awnings and business doorways.
Clearly, emergency housing has never been a long term solution, but it is a necessary immediate safe place which requires wrap around support. The real solution has always been to get people into long term, stable housing. That requires upfront, serious, common sense investment, which the Greens have shown is possible by building 35,000 new homes, made all the easier with our proposed new local central North Island timber hub, repurposing recently closed mills.
This was the point of our Green Industrial Strategy; to show that we can build high-quality things here at home, create tens of thousands of jobs, and build a far more resilient, low carbon economy we own and can be proud of. That’s the best way to ready ourselves for the stormy seas of tariffs and trade wars: by focusing on and strengthening what we do have control over.
That economy should be grounded in creativity and creation, not extraction and exploitation. To understand just how insane the current Government’s bizarre fixation on mining is, look at their goals to grow the value of the sector (by destroying our native wildlife and lining the pockets of fossil fuel executives) from $1 billion to $3 billion, 5000 jobs to 7000 jobs. By contrast, the arts and culture sector alone, not renowned for Government support, is currently worth 17 times that, at more than $17.2 billion and ~120,000 jobs. Just think of the untapped, underinvested in potential.
That potential was all on display this past Music Month (alongside Comedy Fest, which buoyed spirits) across Tāmaki Makaurau. Our city and our country is filled to the brim with talent, but we need desperate investment to prevent it spilling out across to Australia, where Stats NZ tells us 191 New Zealanders are currently leaving for every single day in hopes of greener pastures.
As that old song goes, we don’t know how lucky we are. But it’s clear with a bit of planning, investment, and common sense decisions for our common good, boy, could we be even more lucky. (Chlöe Swarbrick)
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