Ardern throws down gauntlet to National
Imagine this. It’s almost the end of the decade. The Labour government is pushing through a controversial bill to combat climate change, but is leaving the biggest emitter in the country out – for now.
Instead agriculture will join half a decade later, once it has the technology to really bring down emissions.
This situation describes 2008 perfectly. It also describes yesterday.
The Government has yet again given the agricultural industry more time to get ready to start paying for its emissions, as the rest of the economy does. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has extended the free pass for our biggest emitter until 2025, when the sector says it can work out some kind of new farm-by-farm emissions policy.
There are catches in that free pass.
Instead of just trusting the industry to get on with it, the Government has inserted some accountability. It will pass law to insert agriculture into the scary old ETS by default in 2025, and allow it to come in by a simple pen stroke in 2022, if enough progress towards a real emissions pricing scheme is not apparent to the Climate Change Commission.
Ardern gave a commitment yesterday that, if the commission did recommend using that 2022 check-in to bring in agriculture, and she was still prime minister, she would use the power to do so.
This sounds like a big stick, but even that sudden entry would not realistically be that hard. At current emissions pricing, and with the 95 per cent discount NZ First already won for the sector, it would likely be paying $0.01c a kg of milksolids, or about $0.03c a kg of sheep meat.
Some in the farming lobby do realise that their social licence will be in pretty bad shape if they miss the deadlines, particularly as they are rightly feeling heat over water quality. And there is every chance that the industry will miss. A brand new regulatory scheme for individual farms that is sharp enough to encourage good behaviour, but simple enough not to be an expensive nightmare, is far from a sure bet.
Just ask any farmer what she makes of Overseer, the software they will likely have to use to measure all this. The ETS may be blunt, complex, and distracting from core farming activity, but it does at least have the virtue of already existing.
The upshot for the prime minister is the challenge this lays out for National. The last time this happened, a decade ago, National first delayed the entry of agriculture into the ETS, then put it off indefinitely. The perception that this could happen again should it win an election at some point in the next two terms means a lot of investment decisions might be held off – a specific warning the interim Climate Change Commission noted when discussing the sector-led approach being undertaken.
Yet attacking this policy hard may be difficult for National. It’s similar to the position Labour found itself in when National boosted benefit rates.
National has long said the agriculture sector needs more time. It may well say 2025 is not enough time, that the technology won’t be ready by then, but to do so while also believing New Zealand should meet the Paris target the National government signed up to for 2030 will be difficult. If you exempt agriculture for too long, the speed with which you have to regulate other sectors could be brutal.
Truthfully, there is not a single voice from National on this issue. Simon Bridges started his leadership reaching across the aisle on climate change, correctly reading it as a potential vulnerability for a party that relies on Auckland for much of its vote.
He has attacked the Government on many of its moves on the issue – the ‘‘war on farmers’’ narrative is a very comfortable place for the party – but still has MPs trying to negotiate with James Shaw over the Zero Carbon Bill.
Bridges is a close watcher of Australian politics, where the issue of climate change has brought down several party leaders. He’ll be sure not to let that happen to him.