Swarbrick wants to build a mass climate movement

Analysis: The new Green Party co-leader believes the general public can play a greater role in pushing for climate action and hopes to encourage that when she likely takes on the party’s climate change portfolio after James Shaw leaves Parliament.

In an interview with Newsroom, Chlöe Swarbrick discussed her approach to climate policy and activism, and how she feels the Greens can do both effectively.

The new co-leader was careful to emphasise that portfolios for the caucus hadn’t been finalised yet, in the wake of Shaw’s resignation, the resignation of MP Golriz Ghahraman in January and the tragic death of MP Efeso Collins a month ago. But she has also made no secret of her desire to hold the climate role either.

“I’ve made it pretty clear that I have interest – a lot of interest – in that portfolio,” she said.

It would mark the first handover of the job in nearly a decade. Shaw has held the role since 2015, first as an MP, then as co-leader, then as the Minister for Climate Change over six years. He has become the face of the Greens’ environmentalist wing, and although there are plenty of MPs with climate bona fides in the caucus like former Greenpeace activist Steve Abel and energy analyst Scott Willis, Swarbrick seems a likely shoe-in for the role.

In part, that’s because it makes sense for the job to sit with one of the party’s co-leaders. Climate is an integral part of the Greens’ identity. It is a major concern for their base but also one of the ways they have wooed Labour supporters in the past, when that party has failed to live up to big promises on a transformational approach to emissions reductions. Having one of the leaders of the party also be the face of the party’s climate advocacy is just smart politics.

Then there’s the fact that Swarbrick is relatively experienced on the climate policy front. She worked on the Environment Select Committee in her first term in Parliament, acting as the Greens’ representative in discussions over the Zero Carbon Act and crucial reforms to the Emissions Trading Scheme.

In 2021 she successfully pushed the Labour government to reduce emissions from investments by Crown financial institutions like the NZ Super Fund. In the aftermath of the Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle, she has also taken an interest in adaptation and recovery work. After the election, she was made the party’s associate climate spokesperson with specific responsibility for adaptation.

Asked about Shaw’s approach to the job, Swarbrick said he ably achieved both policy victories through compromise and negotiations while continuing to publicly advocate for more radical measures.

“He’s been able to simultaneously get things across the line, behind closed doors, but then also to hold true to the things that he’s advocating for and what Green Party policy position is, including some pretty intense negotiations in our first term and relationship with Labour and New Zealand First,” she said.

That would serve as the basis of her approach as well, Swarbrick said, but she also wants to extend beyond that into building a wider public movement for climate action.

“The wahine Hurricanes team said, in their haka, governments are temporary. Governments are temporary, politicians and politics of the day and political parties are temporary. But there are some fundamental truths with regard to the scientific non-negotiables for life on Earth as we know it,” she said.

“It’s really a matter of what we can achieve in the politics of the day to overlay on that fundamental truth. The way we try and synthesise those two is in trying to get democracy to work properly. This is where we’re in a really interesting time and space with regard to the engagement or lack thereof and the potential for engagement of the general citizenship.”

The School Strike 4 Climate movement is a useful case study, Swarbrick believes. The September 2019 school strike marked New Zealand’s largest-ever protest for any issue, with nearly 3.5 percent of the population turning out to events throughout the country. Then Covid-19 hit, demonstrations were cancelled or deemed unsafe and the movement lost the wind from its sails.

Since the end of gathering restrictions, the student protesters have slowly been building back up, with another demonstration scheduled for April 5. But that will be hard work so long as people remain disengaged from politics.

“I think that we’ve got this negative feedback loop at the moment, where, not just in the climate space but also in the democracy space, where there’s this disenfranchisement with politics because people are not seeing what they want to from politicians and in turn that results in disengagement which results in less representation … which in turn results in less engagement,” she said.

“The fuse-breaker for that and the role that I would like to see myself helping to play is not only doing that behind-the-scenes work on legislative negotiations but also in helping to inform the populace so that everyday people are equipped and armed to hold their government to account.”

That means breaking down the complexity of climate policy in communications with the public but also mobilising the public to advocate not just for general climate action but for specific measures. Swarbrick uses last year’s Auckland Council budget process as an example, where when community and climate initiatives were on the line the local community was rallied to submit on the process. That saw the largest ever number of submissions through the annual budget process.

“I see the role and the way to hold the Government to account is not simply relying on the institutions of Parliament, but also rallying the people and building a sustainable movement.”

One potential opportunity to rally that nationwide climate movement is the Government’s plan to repeal the offshore oil and gas ban.

“I think that this is one of the most obvious and self-evident and least complicated anti-climate policies that the Government has put forward. I do think that this can very much capture the imagination of New Zealanders because it speaks to the antithesis of how we tend to want to view ourselves, least of all on the world stage.”

Climate feels more and more immediate to the public, Swarbrick believes. It’s no longer an intangible event, far off on the horizon. It’s affecting people, in New Zealand, right now. The Auckland floods are one example.

That has also coincided with the information revolution, where people are able to access reliable information about climate change more easily than ever before.

“What I’m seeing across the board is almost a renaissance of and a mobilisation of people realising that day-to-day political decisions impact their daily lives in a way that I haven’t seen throughout my entire lifetime,” she said.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a sure thing. While surveys repeatedly show most New Zealanders are highly concerned about climate change, there are two key caveats.

First, when asked what concerns are actual priorities, climate generally gets ranked below day-to-day concerns like cost of living, law and order and the health system.

Second, there is still a serious knowledge gap when it comes to the causes and solutions to the climate crisis. While individual action alone is insufficient, New Zealand respondents regularly say that recycling is the most climate-positive action they can take, when it is actually relatively insignificant in reducing emissions. More beneficial actions, like consuming less meat and dairy or driving less, are rarely identified by the general public.

This all suggests that building a movement is no easy feat. While the Greens are skilled at advocacy campaigns, breaking beyond their base to raise awareness and concern among the general public is a tall ask. It remains unclear when or whether we will ever again see a climate protest on the scale of that September 2019 event.