It was my 85 year-old mum who said it best over the weekend. Chatting on the phone, she said, “Isn’t it just awful what these people are going through in Hawke’s Bay? If there’s one good thing to come out of it though, it’s at least no-one will be stupid enough to question climate change any more”.
No, my mother’s never met Maureen Pugh.
Almost as if on cue, Pugh, the list MP based on the West Coast who former National leader Simon Bridges famously described as “f*****g useless”, yesterday declared that she was yet to see proof that climate change was man-made. “I am waiting on the evidence,” she declared.
Even if she doesn’t believe the evidence of her own eyes these past few weeks, in the context of New Zealand’s two warmest years on record in 2021 and 2022, Pugh could have read any of six IPCC reports published since 1990. Or any of the thousands of scientific reports written during her adult life. Given the importance of farming and tourism to the West Coast, you’d have thought she would have paid close attention to just some of the plethora of science on anthropogenic (man-made) climate change.
Instead, as the east coast of the North Island clears away silt and debris and we wait for the death toll to rise, Pugh trotted out the climate denier’s chestnut that temperatures have risen and fallen for centuries. When asked about the recent floods, she said, “a lot of the damage that was done, especially around Auckland, was because people weren't allowed to prune and manage trees, that have come down and taken the cliffsides with them."
It’s a glimpse of how the damage done by Cyclone Gabrielle could extend into the political realm. National has a relatively inexperienced leadership duo who will need to rely on a level of discipline better than that shown by Pugh . It hints at a National Party of the past that Chris Luxon and Nicola Willis want voters to know they have put well and truly behind them. The pair handled it well today, putting Pugh in her place and insisting she would be given plenty of science homework to do. Within hours, she’d recanted.
But Gabrielle has put climate change on the agenda in election year. Slap, bang at the top of the agenda. Like Covid-19 in 2020, it’s a single issue that has the potential to over-shadow the whole campaign.
No-one’s suggesting any glee in the deadly misery we’ve seen unfolding in Northland, Auckland, the Coromandel, Hawke’s Bay and Tairawhiti, but politically it plays into the hands of the Green Party. Their climate concern has sometimes left them looking a bit like a Cassandra, always preaching doom. Now, when they want to give their warming warnings, people have something tangible – even visceral – to relate to. Climate change isn’t just amorphous worries about complex net-zero somethings in the future anymore. It’s got a name - Gabrielle. And it’s real now for so many New Zealanders in a way Pugh has yet to understand.
It’s already been a strong term for the Greens.
They were the only minor party in the MMP era to have grown its share of the vote while in government between 2017 and 2020 and despite the sliding popularity of its government partner, Labour, its support has held up at around eight percent.
Jacinda Ardern’s decision to leave parliament has done then a favour as well, with Chris Hipkins seemingly looking to position Labour more to the blokey centre, with a focus on “bread and butter” issues. While Hipkins may have to change his approach and will undoubtedly need to adjust his policy priorities after the storms (the impact of climate change has just become a bread and butter issue for many), it still means the Greens have more space on the left of New Zealand politics.
Labour won’t mind that as it battle National in the political centre. It will be happy to accept a stronger partner on its left if it can use its resources to weaken its main opponent to its right.
And National’s job to fend off Labour’s reboot has just become that much harder in the wake of Gabrielle. One of its key campaign messages was going to criticism of Labour and the Greens’ inflationary spending. The government’s willingness to spend too much, too quickly and without proper discipline through the Covid years. It’s time to rein that in, to bring back some fiscal discipline, National has been saying.
Now, Labour is again compelled to use the power of the public purse and spend. To throw caution to the wind as it seeks to rebuild billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. Heck, to completely rethink some infrastructure. To rebuild on a scale comparable to the Christchurch earthquake.
And some of it will be in battleground electorates such as Tukituki and Napier, where the government’s financial support will be very welcome indeed. Possibly through many of the regions where Labour picked up so much Covid-inspired support in 2020, but where patience with the government had been evaporating. It may mean a shallower than expected recession. National’s case of ‘fiscal discipline’ and smaller government has just become much harder to sell. Its argument that Labour can’t ‘deliver’ the fruits of big spending, so much more vital.
The winds in the past few weeks, it seems, are blowing to the left. So the last thing National needs is MPs like Maureen Pugh fanning them. Better to listen to mum.