Boomers — key to change?
Most of us probably could still choose right side to be on
At a business conference in the Aotea Centre this month, Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton came out swinging. “It’s not good enough to pick at the scabs of public discontent,” he declared. He wants effective action on climate change and he was talking about political parties that stop that happening, because they pander to voters who object to any threat to their existing lifestyles.
He meant Act and National. Act, we know, is likely to keep the flag flying for denialism, even while sometimes denying it’s doing that.
But the National Party? Leader Judith Collins has had her fingernails dug deeply into those scabs. She’s promised lots more roads, complained farmers are treated as “pariahs”, and threatened to gut key provisions of the Zero Carbon Act.
Upton was calling out opportunist politicking from people who should know better. He was reminding his audience that climate change poses the greatest threat to our wellbeing in our lifetimes.
So who is this Upton upstart? Older voters will remember him from the National Party: He was our youngest MP, aged 23 when he was first elected in 1981, and a stroppy supporter of National colleague Marilyn Waring, who had also been just 23 when elected in 1975. The pair of them, supported by a few others, went to war on the PM, their boss, the backward-looking, irascible old fool Robert Muldoon.
It’s a good age, 23. The same age Chloe Swarbrick was when she entered Parliament.
Upton, like Waring, like me, is a boomer. Part of a whole stroppy generation: The boys wore long hair and the girls short skirts, both of them enraging to Muldoon and his ilk.
Not all boomers were hippies, but the sentiment was widespread. We protested: At the Vietnam War, apartheid South Africa, punitive abortion laws, nuclear ship visits, bans on mixed flatting and pretty much everything “the olds” said we had to do or couldn’t do. Even the All Blacks grew their hair long.
We made up our own minds, or so we believed, and our defining characteristic was that we believed, “I’m the boss of me.” We dismissed authority, a skill we learned at 14.
And now the people who want to tell us what to do are the kids.
Don’t they know Upton is one of us! We’re the generation who’ve been there and done that and earned the
We’re so determined to believe our minds are open, we don’t realise it might not be true.
right to what we’ve got. But the flip side to the freedom that comes with being the boss of me is selfishness.
Interesting real news out of America last month. During the 2016 election, people on Facebook aged 65 or older were seven times more likely to share fake news than those aged 18 to 29. There are many reasons. We’re not good at processing information on the internet: We’re too trusting and we don’t recognise when we’re being led from fact to fantasy.
Also, despite some decline in memory, we remain super-confident of our own cognitive powers.
We like to say young people are ruining their brains with their screen obsessions. Turns out the people whose brains are being scrambled by the net are far more likely to be ours.
It’s surely worse in America, but it affects us here too. Facebook, which is so great for sharing but is also a seething mess of misinformation, is becoming much more popular among the over-50s, while it may be declining among younger people.
Boomers, eh. We’re so determined to believe our minds are open, we don’t realise it might not be true.
Meanwhile, Upton’s old stomping ground, the National Party, has decided to keep on its two boomer leaders, Collins and president Peter Goodfellow. An abysmal election result was not, apparently, their fault.
It was because of Jacinda, she’s too telegenic. It was Covid, which gave her the excuse for “temporary tyranny”, according to Goodfellow. This is called the denial stage of grief, with bonus flashes of anger.
At some stage, it will occur to the party that the 400,000 former Nat voters who switched to Labour, if we accept John Key’s numbers, did so because they preferred what Labour had to offer. That includes its position on the climate crisis. Polls show Kiwis do understand the danger and want action. We may not want every hard thing done, but we are on side.
There were some remarkable outcomes of the election in October than critics of the Government tend to overlook. The Green Party broke the rules by increasing its vote, and it did so with clearly progressive policies. Almost all parties seeking to exploit “popular discontent” did very badly. And rural and provincial New Zealand gave their party votes to Labour in every single electorate.
There’s revelation in this. We don’t have a huge town and country divide. We believe in our ability to deal with a crisis, and that we’ve a Government that can lead us through it.
In relation to the climate crisis, it means we’ve just agreed: Let’s do this. And the PM has indicated, through yesterday’s Speech from the Throne, that she agrees too. (Details to follow.)
National’s reconfirmed leaders show no sign of grasping this new mood. Classic boomer denialism?
We’ll know they’ve reached the acceptance stage when they show they understand what Upton is telling us: That we must reduce emissions by about half, within the next nine years. That it will be very hard, so good leadership will be essential. That it boils down to this: We must rethink our approach to cars and cows.
Political leaders who deny it will do the country a terrible disservice and their parties will have no future, except on the fringe.
But hang on. Maybe it’s going to be boomer time after all. It’s easy enough to write us off as selfish and entitled. Many of us are. Many people in most demographics are.
But the thing about boomers is, we know about making change for a better world. There’s a well of goodwill and experience in these old bones, and it can be harnessed, because we have a surprisingly useful magic power: The confidence to believe we can do anything.
Changing the world is already in our social and political DNA, along with a love for our descendants.
Christiana Figueres, a boomer who has headed the UN effort on climate change, told that same business conference: “We are the generation. Our parents did not have the tools. And for our children it will be too late.” Most of us probably still have the wit to choose the right side to be on, if we want to.
Part 2 of my essay Why I’m Afraid, on the climate crisis and much more, will be published tomorrow, with more to come in the new year.