A welcome climate of compromise

Collins at least did Bridges a favour by letting him appear statesmanlike ...

So now the politics is over and we can finally get stuck into the hard work of saving the planet. That may be a little optimistic, but there is no doubt that Thursday’s 119-0 vote to pass the Zero Carbon Bill is a significant political milestone that has been years in the making.

There was only one opponent among our 120 MPs, and that was ACT leader David Seymour. Had Seymour been in Parliament, we would have been left with the more symbolically powerful vote of 119-1.

The new law will create an independent climate change commission to advise successive governments on meeting methane reduction targets. It remained a close call until as late as Thursday afternoon, as there was some doubt about whether National would support the bill. It is to the credit of Climate Change Minister James Shaw and National’s Simon Bridges that the combined vote came through as strongly as it did. As Shaw said, ‘‘Some things are too big for politics, and the biggest of them all is climate change.’’

In short, Shaw built a bridge to Bridges. But a shared vote does not mean unanimity of thought. National MP Judith Collins retweeted a message from conservative British journalist Toby Young: ‘‘The ebbing away of the Christian tide has left a God-shaped hole in the Anglosphere and it has been filled with something more sinister – a constantly mutating moral absolutism. Its latest manifestation is Extinction Rebellion.’’ To which Collins added, ‘‘Same in New Zealand’’.

Young was having a go at ‘‘a new wave of puritanism . . . inspired by Left-wing identity politics’’. There is an opinion as old as the climate change crisis itself, which seeks to paint climate activism as quasireligious alarmism, and threats of a warming planet and mass extinction as just the latest manifestation of the apocalyptic end that humans have always dreaded. Once it was nuclear war or a new ice age.

This opinion is closely linked to a species of climate change denial. Just as those ends of the world never came to pass, nor will this one, the thinking suggests.

The irony in Collins’ endorsement of Young’s view is that the Zero Carbon Bill started as an idea invented in a Wellington coffee shop by Generation Zero in 2015. A draft law was in place by 2017.

It was also Collins who spoke strongly against the bill in Parliament, arguing that farmers are being sold down the river by a political will to be fast and first. The implication is that so-called ordinary New Zealanders will be made to suffer for the sake of the Government’s virtuous image overseas, which is a narrative National likes to promote.

But Collins at least did Bridges a favour by letting him appear statesmanlike and reasonable. While National intends to tinker with the act if it returns to power in 2020, his language on Thursday was one of consensus. He talked of compromise, ‘‘meaningful bipartisan progress’’ and the need ‘‘to listen and engage respectfully’’.

Just as some on the Right will be opposed to these compromises, some on the Left disapprove of Shaw’s willingness to build a coalition that results in law that greener activists see as toothless. But others will recognise the value of pragmatism. As Bridges said, ‘‘Compromise shouldn’t be a dirty word in politics.’’