07.08.04
Agenda
Jeanette Fitzsimmons
Interviewed by Simon Dallow
This transcript is copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used provided acknowledgement is given to Agenda and TVOne.
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It should be checked against a tape of the programme to ensure complete accuracy.
SD:
You’ve adopted the slogan “a vote for the Greens is a vote for a Labour led government”… why so explicit?
JF:
I think it’s very important in this next election when there looks like being a fairly close race between Labour and National, for people to know which of the major parties we would support to form a government. We’ve made it very clear that although we differ from the Labour party on a lot of issues, that we differ from the National party more. It is important for our voters to know that if they vote Green, they’re not risking that we will use that vote to support Don Brash.
SD:
Doesn’t it though diminish the Green’s identity and paint you into a corner, in fact perhaps paint you as Labour’s lap dog?
JF:
I don’t think it does. I think it’s very clear that if Labour needs us to form the next government, which is likely, that they are going to have to negotiate with us after the election on a policy agreement for what that government will do. We will expect some key issues in that for the benefit of our constituency.
SD:
Under what conditions could you not support a Labour government? For instance if Michael Cullen were leader?
JF:
I don’t think it’s about who is leader at all. I think it’s about what the policies are and about whether you can trust that the agreement will be followed through on. I think trust is really important and in terms of a policy agreement, there won’t be any surprises as to what we’ll be asking for, in that we will have campaigned on our key issues during the election. People will know that we will do our very best after the election to get those things that we campaigned for.
SD:
What are those key issues?
JF:
Well we’re not divulging our election campaign strategy, or our negotiating strategy at this stage, but I think it’s pretty clear that the Green’s have campaigned for a long time on key issues of environmental sustainability and key issues of social justice. Both will be represented in what we ask for.
SD:
How important for the Green’s integrity and future viability is being part of the government, does it really matter, to be part of the government?
JF:
I don’t think it’s important for our integrity and I don’t think it is important for our viability. I do think it’s important for implementing a Green agenda. Going into government is something that we are prepared to do under the right circumstances. It’s not something that we are desperate to do regardless of the consequences. We’ll assess that when we see what sort of result the voters deliver at the election.
SD:
By agreeing an agenda, do you mean adhering to principle? What is the agenda?
JF:
That’s a big question overall. What is the Green agenda? We have got to recognise that the planet puts limits on what we can do as human beings, that we have to develop a much more sustainable economy. We want changes, for example, like shifting some of the taxation burden off incomes and off enterprise and putting it onto pollution and scarce resources, so that we make our economy more sustainable.
We want to measure success differently, that’s the most fundamental thing. We don’t believe that simply growing GDP is any guarantee of delivering well-being to people, or to the other creatures that we share the planet with. We want to measure our economic success differently. We want to be in the top half of the OECD. Who cares about GDP. We want to be in the top half of the OECD for the health of our people for educational standards, for access to open spaces, for a clean marine environment, for clean water and air and productive eco systems.
SD:
I want to come back to some of those policy issues in just a moment, but right now let’s explore the political situation. What’s your attitude to the recent rise of the Maori party? Would you be comfortable working with them?
JF:
We still don’t know the policies that the Maori party will adopt, but I’m certainly comfortable working with Tariana. I think it is a good thing that there is now a party that is explicitly representing Maori, although we have to recognise that not all Maori are going to think the same on everything. That won’t be easy for them, but I think it is a very appropriate development under MMP. I believe that we will be able to work with them, though we still have to wait to see what their policies do.
SD:
Well they like most of the minor parties already seem to be aligning themselves with Labour, including New Zealand First and Winston Peters. Doesn’t that then give Labour all the power in coalition negotiations and leave the minor parties in the position of being in a political beauty contest?
JF:
No I don’t think it’s about a contest among the minor parties at all. I think you give the major party all the power if you don’t carefully prepare for and negotiate your policy agreement and also an agreement on process. We would never go into coalition unless we had a policy agreement that we could live with. We wouldn’t get everything we wanted.
We would have to swallow some things we didn’t want, but it would be about, what will this government that we’re going to be part of do in the next 3 years. Now if that’s going to be invading other countries and getting rid of the Resource Management Act and totally destroying the environment, then obviously we wouldn’t have a bar of it. We would stay in strong opposition. I don’t think that is what it will be and I think we will be able to negotiate something that improves New Zealanders quality of life and takes care of our environment.
SD:
Let’s say you were able to go into a coalition arrangement with Labour, but it still required a third minor party, who would you prefer that to be?
JF:
I don’t want to make that statement at the moment. I think we could work comfortably with the Maori party. Recent polling results suggest that Labour could form a government with the Green’s and the Maori party. It’s far too soon to tell from the polls what the options are going to be next year.
SD:
How committed are you at this point to only pursuing, actively pursuing the party vote?
JF:
We’ve always actively pursued the party vote, because that is what guarantees representation in Parliament. Last election we did make a bid for 3 electorates. This year we’ve made it clear that we’re not going to be putting huge effort into winning any electorates, but we will have candidates in those electorates. They will be campaigning for the party vote. There has got to be somebody that personifies the party, that people can relate to, that can explain policies.
SD:
Alright then, how strongly will you chase the Coromandel seat given, I mean if you are only chasing the party vote, you’re flirting dangerously with the 5% threshold, how strongly are you now going to chase Coromandel?
JF:
As long as Labour decides to run strongly in Coromandel, they will split the vote 3 ways and National will win. I don’t intend to engage too strongly in that context. I will be standing on the ballot paper, but I will be campaigning for the party vote in Coromandel. I think we can increase that a lot compared with where it’s been in the past.
I’m not too worried about recent polls. We generally come out just above the 5% in the rolling polls, but actually the Green party has always done much better in election campaigns when we were in campaign mode, than mid term.
All the focus has been on, will it be Clark, or will it be Brash and then on the emergence of the Maori party, which is new. It hasn’t been a particularly conducive environment for the Green vote to go up in the polls. We’ve held, compared with Act and United, we have held our vote much more strongly than the other small parties.
SD:
Let’s look at the defining policy issues then. What is currently your position on GE, how far will you compromise principle to ensure a Labour government?
JF:
We won’t compromise principle on GE, but we recognise that the position we took at the last election of, we must extend the moratorium, we can’t take this time, because there is no moratorium to extend. What we recognise is that although the moratorium has been lifted, after almost a year there are still not applications for release of GE and none expected, or in the pipeline.
It’s entirely possible that we can maintain New Zealand’s GE free status without having to reimpose a moratorium. Now no moratorium is bottom line for the Labour party. There is no point going head to head on a moratorium. What we will be seeking in the policy agreement is other mechanisms for protecting our GE free status. I believe that is possible.
SD:
So it’s no longer non-negotiable. What is non-negotiable, anything?
JF:
What is non-negotiable is some progress on the GE issue in terms of protecting our current status. It won’t be a moratorium, because the Labour party won’t entertain that possibility, but there are a number of other things that you can do. We will certainly be expecting progress on that.
SD:
How fundamental to you is maintaining our nuclear free status?
JF:
It is fundamental, but it’s also fundamental to the Labour party, so I actually don’t waste a lot of time worrying about it. I would worry about it if Don Brash got in, but not otherwise.
SD:
Could you modify your stance if say nuclear power was established as being the most effective means of providing for our infrastructural energy needs?
JF:
Nuclear power, even if it were to be able to be made safe, which is highly unlikely, can never be appropriate in New Zealand because it comes in very large sizes that don’t fit within the New Zealand electricity system. You have to provide backup for the largest generating unit you’ve got. They are so huge that we could never provide the spinning reserve as it’s called, the backup for, if a plant goes down, picking up the load immediately.
Also, you’d have to invest an enormous amount in the whole infrastructure of security systems, fuel transport, armed guards, radiation inspection, trained people, that we don’t have and you’d have only one plant producing to pay for the costs of that huge infrastructure. If would be a much more experience here than in the States.
SD:
So what do you see as the answer for our future electricity generation needs?
JF:
The answer for the future is a jigsaw. It’s a number of pieces that have to fit together, but together they can work. The first thing is much greater energy efficiency. We are wasting 20-30% of all the electricity we produce in technologies that are not up to scratch and wasteful behaviour comes on top of that. We can make big changes there quite cheaply.
Secondly, for electricity, the big coming thing is wind. Yesterday I stood on the top of the Tararua’s and at the opening of the southern hemisphere’s largest wind farm and it was awesome. They were actually beautiful machines, beautifully designed, totally silent. I stood right underneath them and couldn’t hear a thing. That’s producing 90 megawatts. There’s scope for a lot more of that. There are very good wind sites all over New Zealand.
In terms of other electrical use, we don’t need to use electricity to heat water, or to heat buildings. We can actually do that by capturing the direct heat of the sun, which is the cheapest way to use solar energy. Those technologies have been around for hundreds of years. They’re not very widely used, they could be.
We’ve got a huge amount of wood, waste wood in the wall of wood that’s coming on stream, that contains energy. That is a very suitable fuel for industrial co-generation of heat and power. Like at Kinleith, that could be implemented better. Solid Energy, the coal company, has just bought a wood pelleting plant and is selling wood pellets as domestic fuel in Christchurch, rather than coal. We have a lot of options.
SD:
Is energy your number one priority for infrastructure, is that what we need to address first? What are the other priorities?
JF:
Energy is enormously important. Another very important one is transport because we don’t think we can rely on oil being available at its current price for very much longer. There is a lot of indication that we are getting close to the point where world demand for oil outstrips the capacity of the oil wells to produce, because they’ve passed their peak. Now you can argue about when that’s going to happen, but whenever it happens the price is going to skyrocket.
We think it’s very important to redevelop the rail system for freight and for passengers, to build good urban public transport, to consolidate cities so that people don’t have to travel so far to work, to adopt fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, which could be twice as efficient as they are, small European style cars and hybrids rather than 4 wheel drives and eventually, god help us, Hummers, which is the direction in which we are heading at the moment following the US.
SD:
How important then is the Resource Management Act in achieving the right balance between environmental concerns and infrastructural investment? How would you change it?
JF:
Well the Resource Management Act at the moment says that people shall be able to provide for their economic and social needs while protecting the environment. It’s not protecting the environment very well. It is allowing people to provide for their social and economic needs. The business lobby, the beat-up on the RMA for years now is just about trying to remove obstacles to large, unsustainable and badly planned projects.
If you look at that wind farm I was at yesterday. That’s a big power station. That started its planning hearings on the Monday. The consent was granted on Thursday lunchtime. Nobody appealed it and it was built within a year. If you do your homework properly and you’ve got a good project, you get it through the Resource Management Act.
Project Aqua was going to have trouble because it was taking three quarters of the water in our largest braided river and that’s clearly not sustainable, so of course it was going to have problems.
I think we’ve got to defend the Resource Management Act and not provide this kind of fast track process for what some people think is in the national interest, but it’s actually highly contestable whether they are.
SD:
What do you support in the National interest then? Where could you go past the RMA? Where is the RMA an obstacle?
JF:
Well I don’t think it is for the sort of projects that New Zealand needs. If it is, then it’s because the developers, the applicants haven’t done their homework properly. Now look we can streamline processes. We can have better training and mandatory training for counsellors sitting on hearings commissions.
We can streamline some of the processes at the Environment Court. There is a lot that can be done, but it’s detail. Most of it you don’t need to change the Act. The Act already provides for people to do things that they’re not currently doing. There are processes in the Act and have been since 1991, for the central government to give some guidance in terms of the national interest.
There are national policy standards, there are national policy statements, there are national environmental standards and there is the call in procedure. They’re not used and now government is complaining that they need other tools and they’re not using the ones that they’ve got.
SD:
Let’s look at your attitude to roading. You’re often seen as anti-roads. Do you accept that Auckland in particular needs a completed roading system?
JF:
Auckland most of all needs travel demand management, a good rail public transport system and more buses that are on time and regular and frequent. It needs better facilities for people to get around on bikes and on foot.
SD:
But it doesn’t need a completed roading system?
JF:
When it’s done those things, there will be a need also for further roads and some of that needs to happen in parallel. Look for decades there have been transport studies coming out for Auckland saying, here is what you need to do for your roading system, here’s what you need to do for public transport. For decades the roading system has been built and the public transport hasn’t. If we simply build more motorways in Auckland now, without doing the public transport, we will not ease congestion one little bit because those roads will fill up immediately. We’ve got to deal with the demand side of the equation as well as the supply side, it’s a bit like energy really.
SD:
Thanks for speaking to Agenda today
JF:
Thank you.
Thank you Simon.
Copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda
