second round of his reprioritisation<\/a>\u00a0of the government’s work programme, the policies being scrapped, restricted or delayed had a distinctly Green tinge.<\/p>\nThey included the clean car upgrade, social leasing scheme, alcohol reform, a container-return scheme, speed limit reviews, a public transport improvement programme, Auckland light rail and the Vote 16 legislation – most were supported by the Green Party.<\/p>\n
Hipkins this morning defended scrapping the climate initiatives, saying they would have made a very small difference to emissions for the cost.<\/p>\n
Greens co-leader Shaw said he was “really disappointed” with some of the choices.<\/p>\n
“They might individually not have amounted to a great deal of emissions reduction but collectively they do start to add up,” he said.<\/p>\n
“As a country we’ve spent 30 years not treading with a great deal of urgency and we are now in I would say quite dire straits.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think that this government has treated it with the level of urgency that was outlined in the Cabinet paper when we declared that climate emergency.”<\/p>\n
But – because of the way climate budgets work – the government would still be required to make up the difference elsewhere, he said.<\/p>\n
“Any time that you decide to ditch a policy that has an impact on reducing pollution means that you’ve got to make that up somewhere else.”<\/p>\n
“What it actually demonstrates to me is that we need to double down, that we need more Green MPs in Parliament, that we need more Green ministers and that we need to be sitting around the Cabinet table – and we’ll have a chance to do that this October.”<\/p>\n
Co-leader Marama Davidson agreed, saying the Greens were the ones who would always prioritise climate change and inequality reduction.<\/p>\n
“It is too slow, the rate of change and reducing pollution is too slow, we’ve always been really clear about that. We’re focused on an election where the Green party has the most influence on any government … if they want to work with us they will have to come to the table with strong climate action and inequality [reduction].”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
SOURCE RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Parties on the left are clashing over the government’s climate policy purge, with Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori saying the Greens’ climate minister James Shaw should resign. Shaw says that would leave him with no influence, and the recent extreme weather events show the need to instead double down – but the moves amount to a breach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3699,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697\/revisions\/3699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}