Anxiety factories keep New Zealand on World Stage at any cost
The previous Labour government and current National (i.e. conservative) led government have both kept secret a singular global triumph which is that New Zealand in recent times has achieved 93 percent of its energy from renewables notably from hydro-electric and geothermal sources.
The reason for secrecy on the nation’s ability to keep pace with Iceland as a global renewables leader is bizarre by any standard, especially as it has nothing to do with the welfare or prosperity of the South Seas nation.
It is that the National-led government believes that any such disclosure will be seen as the agricultural nation easing up on its zero policies.
The fear is that this will lead to the remote member of the Anglosphere being perceived in Europe’s great capitals as “dragging the chain” on its international commitments in regard to zero.
Prior to the general election last year National Party candidates insisted that they would abandon the previous Labour government’s priority of pursuing and at any cost a high-minded determination to be the global leader in anything to do with emissions.
Specifically National Party candidates representing agricultural electorates pointedly claimed that they would end the era of strutting political intentions on the “world stage.”
Now a year into the National Party-led coalition there is no sign of it letting up on the forced march to be seen internationally in the forefront of leadership of the net zero movement.
It is true that the New Zealand First component of the New Zealand tripartite governing coalition via its minister Shane Jones seeks for example to overturn doctrinal strictures on using its abundant natural gas.
It is true also that the ACT party the third member of the tripartite coalition is constrained from anything but the most glancing observation about New Zealand’s determination to parade its zero virtue on the world stage.
This is because the ACT party under New Zealand’s German-derived proportion representation scheme owes its parliamentary presence to holding a single electorate, Epsom, an upscale enclave populated by exactly the voter demographic craving to strut its virtue on the world stage.
True also that New Zealand which even in the most optimistic of estimates contributes a barely calculable fraction of one percent to the global greenhouse effect tally.
True also that the various state-funded commissions, think tanks, and embedded climate units now employ thousands and who have slickly made themselves inviolate, sacrosanct, and generally untouchable.
They know that they are a permanent structure in the taxpayer funded vote harvesting spoils system.
The mainstream media remains important in curating and aggregating received opinion.
It refuses for example to reveal or even hint at the contribution of the official doctrine zero in accelerating consumer inflation.
The failure of the government’s timber planting auctions and the corresponding collapse of the once-vaunted international offsets marketing scheme, not to mention the demonstrable disastrous impact on the environment of all the required clear-felling needed to accomplish the El-Dorado are submerged by a compliant media.
The state subsidised mainstream is a propaganda component of a synchronised all-government chorus. Its cover-up on the world stage commitments includes complicity in the immense and hidden government undertakings to this same world stage if there is a failure to meet its vainglorious targets.
The chorus is all the more powerful in that there is no perceived choir master.
It has a faux spontaneity designed in order that the South Seas nation can be seen to have its politicians parading their modern virtue on the world stage in order to secure back home those leafy upscale suburban professional class votes
All the operative politicians from all parties know that if they are seen to be “dragging the chain” on all this high profile cultural virtue then the consequences will become instantly evident.
Their votes in these planetary entitled cultivated suburbs will shrivel and die like the leaves in autumn on the trees of those same sought after settled and secure avenues.
It is exactly in this climate of contorted showcased priorities that we find an international success kept a secret, buried, in order that the political class can continue to strut on the world stage its earnest, foolish and ruinous zeal for cultural prestige.