Profile: Simon Upton

Green pragmatist

''... this is a country where people do smile and do talk to one another. And they don't feel passionately riven by the fact that somebody passionately disagrees with them on something.''

Simon Upton has form. Parliament’s new green watchdog is the first former politician to hold the post, and a wildly controversial one he was, too.

Upton was a leader of the free-market revolution in the 1990s.

The baby-faced National minister blew up health services while Ruth Richardson butchered welfare benefits.

National leader Robert Muldoon, whose brutal interventionism helped provoke the revolution, used to call them Hansel and Gretel.

At 60, Upton is more wrinkled, but still friendly-ish and exact, if slightly nettled to be asked about that old stuff.

Nowadays the one-time storm-trooper says he’s a pragmatist. ‘‘If one hadn’t formed some different views over 35 years,’’ says the new Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, who sometimes calls himself ‘‘one’’, ‘‘you’d have to be a very limited person.’’

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said when Upton got the job that his ‘‘political career was far from a blazing success’’, and smacked of jobs for the boys and the old boys’ network.

‘‘Well, this old boy isn’t part of a network,’’ says Upton, laughing a bit. ‘‘I haven’t been a member of a political party in New Zealand for 18 years, and I was asked to take an interest in the position by people across the political spectrum.

‘‘So that’s all I can say.’’

Can he divorce himself from all those years as a Nat? Yes: ‘‘Eighteen years is quite a long divorce.’’

Upton is certainly critical of his old National mates over climate change. ‘‘I think most of the last two decades has been lost time over that,’’ he says. ‘‘The one moment when New Zealand policy finally got going was in Helen Clark’s last term when David Parker got the emissions trading scheme finally signed off.

‘‘There was a little pinnacle of progress there that got rapidly diluted.’’

Yes, it was National that ‘‘basically gutted it of its impact. They turned the dial down’’.

What countries should be trying to do, he says, ‘‘is put a price on carbon and you are doing that because you want to influence investment decision in the future. That is it.

‘‘And New Zealand to date hasn’t had a price signal that would influence anyone to do anything.’’

The new Government has set some ambitious goals on greenhouse emissions and Upton’s job is to help save the planet. His first report as commissioner, due out soon, will look at the expert Climate Commission recommended by former commissioner Jan Wright (and now Government policy).

The commissioner says he faces three sorts of issues:

❚ ‘‘Those in the too-hard basket – you know, they’ve simply got stuck.’’

❚ ‘‘Those that are on no-one’s radar screen so they haven’t even had a chance to get stuck.’’

❚ ‘‘And then the vast bulk in the middle.’’ Climate change ‘‘was in the too-hard category and I think it’s still going to be tricky’’. Another in this basket is water.

In the not-on-anyone’s radar, he says, is the marine environment. Here there are all sorts of regimes covering bits of the sea from the high-tide mark out to the 200-mile limit. But nobody has tried to join them all up.

And there’s tourism, which affects the environment in all kinds of ways but again nobody has an overview.

So expect reports on these from the commissioner.

Also, there’s a personal element. As an MP – first elected at 23, the youngest MP ever – he was deeply involved in the fight over ending logging on the West Coast. He and others used to say the region could make much more money out of tourism than by killing irreplaceable native bush.

‘‘Well, that bird’s come home to roost,’’ he says. ‘‘And it’s not without cost.’’

Having championed tourism, he now has to deal with its ecological consequences.

Upton went green at an early age after falling in love with ferns and geysers.

‘‘I grew up like quite a lot of New Zealanders, on a farm, and my first passion was fern-collecting, because there were lots of gullies on the farm and lots of ferns and I wanted to know what they all were – and they were all different.

‘‘And then when I was old enough to ride a bike and shoot down to the Hakarimata Range behind Ngaruawahia and then spend hours and hours and hours looking at all the trees and things.

‘‘And really that’s my passion, trees and plants and growing trees and plants.’’

His fern collection was going really well until he was about 20 and the cattle got in. But he’ll go back to it in retirement. And he’s been working on a native garden for 15 or 20 years on a south-facing gully-head.

He had the idea of ‘‘planting it latitudinally, with Northland at the top and Southland at the bottom’’. ‘‘So there’s kauri at the top and beech at the bottom. It’s too small and it doesn’t really work but it was a nice idea.’’

He latched on to geysers and hot springs and at the age of 9 or 10 when he got fired up by ecologist John Salmon’s 1960 book Heritage Destroyed: The Crisis in Scenery Preservation in New Zealand.

The book discusses ‘‘one of the most astonishing cases of environmental vandalism you could imagine’’, the damming of Orakei Korako in 1961 to form Lake Ohakuri. ‘‘They drowned 90 per cent of probably one of the two finest natural hot spring systems IN THE WORLD,’’ he says indignantly, ‘‘and drowned a marae in the process.’’

When it comes to Earth, Upton says, ideology doesn’t count for much, and there was ‘‘quite a lot of consensus’’ even in the 80s and 90s over environmental issues. ‘‘[Labour’s] Sir Geoffrey Palmer was the minister who introduced the Resource Management Act,’’ he says, ‘‘and I enacted it.’’

He finds some similarities between himself and fellow Waikato farmer’s kid Helen Clark.

‘‘She was born on a farm within sight of mine – it was sort of 40km Te Pahu away.’’ Also, ‘‘her father was my [National Party] branch chairman’’, he notes (Clark’s father later switched to his daughter’s party).

‘‘New Zealand went through a very ideologically polarised place because it was going through a big intergenerational change and so on,’’ says the man who was one of the leaders of the ideological battle.

‘‘[But] I don’t think it’s fundamentally that sort of place.’’

One of the nice things about coming back to New Zealand after a long stint as a senior environmental official at the OECD in Paris ‘‘is the fact that this is a country where people do smile and do talk to one another’’.

‘‘And they don’t feel passionately riven by the fact that somebody passionately disagrees with them on something.’’

In Europe, nationalism and extremism is a worrying force and ‘‘I really do think it’s terribly important to hang on to the civility of discourse – and discourse here is pretty civil’’.

New Zealand has been a bit complacent about the environment, he says, and ‘‘so we are now paying the price for that’’.

‘‘But even people who know that New Zealand isn’t quite as green as it would like to be want it to be a green place.’’