Luxon is back at work now.
Only joking.
The Prime Minister, who recently told RNZ that he is “working from home”, another "not-your-entitlement" that he is entitled to, has ordered his social team to up the socials, posting about his wedding anniversary and the latest, his Spotify playlist ala Barack Obama.
But without even one portfolio to his name, the Prime Minister displays a distinct lack of moral fortitude, capability and responsibility.
Over in Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joins an international chorus of leaders taking action against Elon Musk’s AI “Grok” tool for sexualising and undressing people without consent. That includes children.
Those images are flooding the internet.
Indonesia has now blocked X, UK is mulling the same despite threats from Musk, the EU is well underway in its investigation, and many countries including UK, Sweden, Italy, France, Malaysia and India have issued strong warnings for AI companies to stop the creation of sexual images without consent.
But in New Zealand, nada, nothing, but Luxon does offer you his PR cultivated BBQ Spotify list.
And that's not to mention Greenland, Venezuela, Manage My Health and the recent US shooting.
This morning, former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark sounded the alarm after Donald Trump, fresh from attacking murdered American Renee Good as a “professional agitator” and left wing domestic terrorist, withdrew the United States from dozens of international organisations and frameworks - including the Framework Convention on Climate Change - a treaty that underpins all international efforts to combat global warming.
Our government has sounded similar intentions since forming government in 2024.
NZ First’s Winston Peters, like Trump, has regularly bristled at organisations like the UN, and sounded off at the Paris Climate Agreement - signalling an intent to withdraw, and David Seymour’s ACT has joined farmers to call for New Zealand to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement too.
Never mind that puts our EU trade agreement at risk, right?
Shane Jones is also Fossil Fuel Advocate #1, regularly goading the Green Party for their climate approach, and putting NZ on the line to subsidise fossil fuel companies, to the tune of billions of dollars.
Where Labour had instituted a law to prevent NZ from being on the hook when oil companies close up and stuff up, NZ First happily rolled it back with National’s support.
Those bills can be hundreds of millions, up to a billion, per oil field.
Where’s the Taxpayers Union when it really counts, right?
Oh that’s right, fossil fuel backed Atlas Network might not have sent a memo yet.
(It’s a joke right, but, yes Taxpayers Union is on record as an official partner of the global Atlas Network and accepted benefits from the fossil fuel backed organisation)
And while National has not come out with the same full frontal climate hostile wording, its actions have been labelled “full Trump”, dramatically cutting methane targets and scraping plans to price agriculture despite promising not to in its 2023 election pledge, and ignoring advice showing these changes offer little benefit to anyone but farmers.
National also delayed the government’s own carbon neutrality goal from 2025 to 2050, sidelined the Climate Commission, and willingly forms part of a domino chain of “catastrophic” climate change ignorance, while doubling down on expensive fossil fuels. 1
One analyst neatly summarised the National-ACT-NZ First Government’s climate policies as “Let it burn”.
Here in New Zealand, unlike other countries like Australia, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, UK, we don’t hear the words “climate change” very often.
Despite record flooding, and escalating temperatures (cold and hot as warming exacerbates both extremes), most media organisations seem reluctant to use those words and link floods in Dunedin and Tasman etc. to climate change.
The only outliers that still take responsibility on the environment appear to be Newsroom, RNZ and NZ Geographic
A landmark report in Australia last year showed that the effects of climate change there include a A$611 billion bill on property.
And in NZ, global insurers estimate that food insecurity relating to climate change will cost $20 billion per year, and that the current trajectory will cost the country tens of billions.
New Zealand has already lost 29% of its glaciers since 2000 - that’s just 25 years after being in existence for millions of years.
And as the UN earlier warned that the country’s glaciers will not survive the 21st century, recent research last month confirms that NZ will lose all of them should global warming continue on its current trajectory.
So the “C” word today is climate, and National’s “Climate Change” Minister, Simon Watts, who regularly lies for the government, claiming in 2023, that National’s Local Water Done Well would be cheaper than Labour’s 3 Waters, but is now declining to comment after it was revealed it costs at least $9,00,000,000 more, is no more than a shield and mouthpiece.
Climate change skepticism, long cultivated by fossil fuel money, has won the day in our country, but it hasn’t in many others.
Australia reached scorching temperatures this week: 45 degrees celsius that “felt like 55 degrees”. Many “climate change refugees” are moving south, citing the intolerable escalations in heat in the country. Bush fires are raging again, contributing to an inability to breathe in major cities.
Australians and their media are not afraid to cite climate change, link it, talk about it. Many of its media regularly covers it. Insurance companies there inform about it.
The Australian public is not blind to it.
I remember an Australian couple many years ago who were featured on TV. After escalating temperatures and a bush fire, they said:
“I finally believe in climate change”
Temperatures have always risen and fell, bush fires aren’t irregular, but as experts are at pains to point out - it’s the rapid escalation, the extremes of cold and hot causing more natural disasters, and the undeniable effects of rapidly escalating melting glaciers, displaced populations (250 million over the last 10 years) and related animal extinction, that is starkly reminding us of what is at stake.
Of course, should this government win another term, we can surely expect them to speed run Trump Term 2 too - after all, it was clear from the start.
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After over 25 international climate change scientists wrote an open letter to Christopher Luxon, calling out the Government for “ignor[ing] scientific evidence” and urging it to “deliver methane reductions that contribute to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees” Luxon insulted these highly credible experts as “worthies”.
