R roning out
Ohariu to vote for O’Connor — I’m increasingly unbothered by the so-called “dirty deals”. It’s all fine. Go for your life.
There is a really serious rort, however, which warrants much greater attention than the endless rotten-borough hyperbole: the coat-tails provision itself. When New Zealanders voted in a 2011 referendum to keep MMP, they did so on the basis that there would be a review of the system, in an effort to iron out some of the creases.
The greatest of those creases, most submitters to the Electoral Commission seemed to agree, was in the coat-tails. It may have hardly reared its head as a problem in recent years, with the victors in Epsom and Ohariu failing to rummage up enough party votes to scoop up a parliamentary buddy — only the Maori Party has benefited of late. But in 2008, for example, Act got a bunch of seats with 3.7 per cent of the vote. NZ First polled higher, but failed to win an electorate, so they were out.
The Electoral Commission, a scrupulously non-partisan body, pored over all the evidence and announced in its 2012 report that “relatively few changes are required. But those we recommend are important. They would enhance public confidence in the fairness and operation of our MMP voting system and parliamentary democracy”. Those important recommendations centred on ditching the one-electorate rule and dropping the party vote threshold to 4 per cent, with a view to potentially dropping it further. The current coat-tail rule delivered “arbitrary and inconsistent” results: “Its effect has been to undermine the principles of fairness and equity and the primacy of the party vote in determining the overall composition of parliament that underpin MMP.”
But the Government was having none of this reasoned, intelligent, sensible stuff. In an award-worthy display of dissembling, then justice minister Judith Collins announced that such changes demanded cross-party consensus and given that consensus could not be reached her commitment to democratic integrity prevented proceeding with the recommendations — while quietly omitting to mention that such consensus was unachievable because the National Party had said nah.
Electoral reform is not typically a hot-button topic. But the political tactics are not the problem — the rules are. What an opportunity for the prime minister to signal a new direction. Because shredding the advice to tweak the system to make it fairer is the truly dodgy, dirty deal. Our forests and other land areas may be sucking up to 60 per cent more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than previously thought and we can likely thank our native trees for much of it.
That’s according to new research led by National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) scientists, who further found much of the newfound uptake is occurring in the southwest of the South Island.
Carbon dioxide is a primary greenhouse gas and responsible for most of the human-induced warming in the atmosphere.
Globally, carbon sinks, such as oceans and forests, have helped mitigate the effects of climate change by absorbing about half the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities during the past few decades.
New Zealand’s forest carbon uptake played a key role in meeting our Kyoto Climate treaty commitments and is expected to play an important role in meeting the country’s climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement.
In the study, just published in scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, a team led by Dr Kay Steinkamp and Dr Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher used an “inverse” modelling approach to estimate the amount of carbon uptake.
This was done by measuring the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere at a network of sites, and then using highresolution weather models to determine what parts of New Zealand the air had passed over before reaching the site.
Simulations from a land model, run by partners at GNS Science, and ocean carbon data, provided further information.
From there, the team calculated the best combinations of sources and sinks to match the data.
“The story the atmosphere is telling us is that there’s a big carbon sink somewhere in the South Island, and the areas that seem to be responsible are those largely dominated by indigenous forests,” Steinkamp said.
But the scientists could not rule out an important role for carbon uptake in the hill country or in pasture from current data.
In New Zealand, indigenous forests covered about 6.2 million hectares.
Mikaloff-Fletcher said the result was surprising, mainly because strong carbon sinks were expected when there was a lot of forest regrowth.
“Carbon uptake this strong is usually associated with peak growth of recently planted forests and tends to slow as forests mature.
“This amount of uptake from relatively undisturbed forest land is remarkable.”
The National Inventory method reported by Ministry for the Environment reports annually on New Zealand’s carbon uptake and puts the amount of carbon being absorbed by all New Zealand forests at 82 teragrams CO (a teragram is one millon metric tonnes) total during 2011-2013, the period studied by Mikaloff-Fletcher’s team.
Once accounting rule differences were corrected for, the new Niwa measurement approach found that actual carbon uptake could be up to 60 per cent higher.