Triple headache for PM
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision to stand down a minister – less than a week after booting Clare Curran out of Cabinet – was the culmination of a day that went from bad to worse.
First up yesterday was the ANZ business outlook survey, which signalled that business confidence was continuing to slide. The survey reported that the contentious ‘‘headline business confidence’’ had dropped five percentage points, with 50 per cent of respondents expecting conditions to deteriorate. But the Labour-led Government wasn’t just being hit on the business front, it took heat from one of its own.
Former prime minister Helen Clark, speaking in Rotorua, said heads would have rolled if the Labour Party’s youth camp sex scandal had occurred under her watch.
She told Stuff that ‘‘she would have handled it differently from the start’’, and said that under her watch, ‘‘people didn’t keep their jobs’’.
The heaviest blow, though, was left for later in the day when Ardern said Customs Minister Meka Whaitiri was being stood down while an investigation took place into a staffing issue in her office.
The prime minister said the inquiry would be ‘‘thorough and conducted as quickly as possible’’.
New Zealand would need to reduce livestock methane emissions by up to 22 per cent by 2050 to stop any additional global warming, official research shows.
This would likely require a serious reduction in the number of livestock farmed, unless new and untried technologies can be shown to work.
Livestock contribute the vast majority of our methane emissions, mostly through belching. The release from the Parliamentary commissioner for the environment throws a wrench into an emerging consensus across the country that ‘‘stabilising’’ New Zealand’s shortlived methane emissions at current levels could be a viable option to stop warming.
It suggests that actual ‘‘stabilisation’’ would still require a reduction in livestock or the success of new methods to lower emissions, such as special feeds, vaccines or tweaking livestock breeding.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw is currently consulting on plans for a Zero Carbon Act, which would set some kind of reduction target in law.
Parliamentary commissioner and former National Party environment minister Simon Upton is working on a wider report concerning the Zero Carbon Act but decided to put out this research from Andy Reisinger early in order to inform debate.
Federated Farmers vicepresident Andrew Hoggard said the key point of the report was reductions of 10 to 22 per cent were needed by 2050, whereas earlier reports before said they just needed to be stabilised.
‘‘To me the report is saying we don’t need to go to complete net zero,’’ Hoggard said.