Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has delivered her State of the Planet speech on Sunday.
Swarbrick delivered the speech to a packed audience of Greens supporters in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter.
Speaking alongside Marama Davidson, the pair called on the Government to prioritise people and the planet over profit, as Budget 2024 edges closer.
Read the full speech here:
It’s an honour to be here with you on our debut State of the Planet as co-leaders.
E te whanau - nau mai, haere mai and welcome here to Auckland Central.
Just over a year ago, as day broke after the night of the Auckland Anniversary floods, I walked from Karangahape Rd down through Freeman’s Bay, across a waterlogged Victoria Park through Wynyard Quarter – just around the corner from here where car alarms echoed
in underwater, underground carparks – down through Fort Street and Beach Road where torrential rain had torn out huge concrete blocks and smashed them through glass doors into the lobby of apartment buildings.
It looked like the aftermath of some horrific, apocalyptic storm. And it was. Climate change had arrived on the doorstep of our largest city.
Those floods, and the ensuing Cyclone Gabrielle, took 15 lives.
Hundreds of homes and livelihoods were destroyed. Some of my constituents are still now fighting insurance battles.
At that point, I had spent around five years in politics with the Greens on our shared mission trying to figure out how to communicate the climate crisis to drive the necessary urgency and action.
In the blink of an eye, I was working with Student Volunteer Army helping rip up carpets and curtains and helping piece back together people’s lives from the wreckage.
The climate crisis is here. But the worst outcomes are not inevitable. We have choices about what the future looks like - if we act now and bring emissions down as fast as possible, storms like this will stay relatively rare.
But if we let oil companies continue to burn fossil fuels and pollute our climate, we may look back on these storms as being mild and manageable. I know which world I would rather live in. And that’s what has motivated me every single day since I got involved in politics.
If you take one thing from me talking today, I want it to be your knowledge that all the bad stuff is not inevitable. As hard as it feels right now - our communities, our country and our world are shaped by those who realise their power and turn up.
We have a choice. Whether we want to improve everyone’s lives by changing the irrational and exhausting economic system that is putting our planet and our communities under immense pressure, or treat the trickle-down economics rule book as though it’s some natural law of the world.
Whether we want to replace the race-to-the-bottom with systems that prioritise our natural world, the contributions everyone can make and – god forbid – our happiness.
What do we value?
We’ve already got a few receipts on this Government’s values - how dedicated they are to making life harder for anyone but those at the top.
A year ago, the Inland Revenue Department told us that 311 families in this country hold more wealth than the bottom two and a half million New Zealanders.
That’s not an accident.
It’s a direct consequence of a tax system that lets the rich get richer and richer on the back of untaxed capital gains, paying less than half the effective tax rate of the average New Zealander.
That is where poverty comes from.
Poverty is a political decision.
It is created by political leaders who say that this is inevitable - because they would rather not fix it. It is created by economic settings that wrestle down wages, benefit levels and living standards for regular people so those at the top can have mega yachts and multiple properties.
One in eight children in Aotearoa are growing up in poverty. For Māori, it’s one in five.
63,000 tamariki woke up in severe poverty this morning. That is 63,000 children who can’t count on regular meals every day, who don’t have warm clothes in winter, whose parents cannot afford to pay the rent and the power bill every month.
This Government knows this and they have all of the data and evidence in the world to be able to fix it.
Instead, they’re ploughing ahead, knowingly increasing inequality. Shredding fair pay agreements, cutting back benefit increases and handing 2.9 billion dollars to landlords.
Worse than knowingly increasing inequality, they have made decisions to try and hide the impacts of those choices from you.
Quietly, just before Christmas, along with cutting half price public transport, they axed IRD’s requirements to publicly report on the fairness of our tax system. They did this under Parliamentary urgency, cutting out your public participation.
They showed us their priorities by rolling back smoke-free protections, which no one campaigned on and no one but the tobacco lobby asked for.
Researchers tell us thousands more people will die as a result of these decisions. It will give the Coalition Government an extra half a billion dollars in tax revenue to pay for their extraordinarily expensive trickle-down tax cuts.
The Reserve Bank has told us that the Government’s 2.9 billion dollar tax breaks for landlords will drive up house prices, putting home ownership further out of reach for a whole generation of New Zealanders.
Treasury and even the market orthodoxy economists at the IMF and OECD have told the government that one of the crucial missing ingredients for Aotearoa to have a more prosperous, productive, and fairer economy is a capital gains tax.
This Government is not just ignoring the solutions to the problems that we face in Aotearoa, it is committed to actively making things worse.
Now, the same thinking and rules that create this inequality also trash our shared home, this planet.
Every week there’s a new outrageous headline from a coalition party about how endangered animals are getting in the way of what they call progress.
But any politician who pretends that we can have a thriving economy on a burning planet is lying to you.
More than 75 percent of native animals in Aotearoa are threatened or at risk of extinction.
The International Energy Agency has told governments across the world that any attempts to mine and burn more coal, oil, and gas will send planet Earth over a dangerous threshold of warming into climate catastrophe.
The Climate Commission underscored this urgency in their three recent reports. They also explicitly called out this Government’s dangerous dance with unscientific ‘no additional warming’ targets for agriculture, laying bare that such an approach would mean higher burdens on households and businesses across the country.
In the late 1980s, around one in ten of people spent more than 30% of their income on housing. Now, it’s three in ten.
That’s not an accident. It didn’t just happen. It’s a consequence of political decisions made in the past and right up to this day.
Over the past few years you have paid record high prices for groceries, rents, and electricity. Meanwhile supermarkets, landlords, the banks and the electricity providers have made record profits.
Connect the dots here, whanau.
The reason it feels like no matter how hard you work, you can’t get ahead is because we have a set of rules in this economy that actively exploit people and the planet for the benefit of a wealthy few.
The reason that the system feels like it’s rigged is because it is.
The coalition Government not only want to double down on that, they want you so frustrated that you switch off from politics - giving the lobbyists and corporate superpowers all the more free reign.
It is hard not to despair. But that’s what they want.
They want you to give up.
They want you to think this is all inevitable.
But bad things are not inevitable. And we actually can have good things, if we fight for them.
Just over a decade ago, it was illegal for me to marry the person that I love.
But the law changed - although some of the now very powerful politicians who voted against that are still in our Parliament.
That law changed not because of the evidence that the gays can be quite nice people who deserve the same rights as everyone else.
Marriage equality didn’t just happen because it was right and fair. Good things don’t happen by themselves.
The law changed because enough regular people turned up to put enough pressure on enough politicians.
Positive change doesn’t just happen. It is fought for. Like the revival of te reo Māori. Like women’s suffrage. Like annual leave. Like national parks.
Power in politics belongs to those who turn up.
And 27,000 of you have turned up to submit on the Government’s Fast-Track Bi
That’s 27,000 people who will not sit by and allow coal mines to be dug on conservation land.
Or the seabed to be ripped up off the coast of Taranaki.
Or projects that have been rejected by the Environment Court to be given a new life by Shane Jones and Chris Bishop.
When faced with the kind of blatant resource and power grab that only money can buy, successful resistance lies in the power of regular people. Our communities.
The government is already talking about changing the Fast Track bill. Because 27,000 of you stood up.
And I hope we’ll see you march for nature on Saturday 8 June.
Bad things happen when good people stand idly by.
Equally, good things happen when we work together to make them happen.
Do not leave politics to the politicians.
Democracy doesn’t work if we just sit back and wait every three years for a general election. Politics happens every single day in decisions that shape the world around us.
While this is the most anti-nature and anti-democracy Government in my lifetime, we have to be honest with ourselves that it’s simply playing a game of Monopoly with rules which have remained relatively unchanged in four decades.
Governments of the last forty years, shaped by two legacy parties, have failed to change the fundamentals that drive environmental and social degradation.
Why?
Well, I guess if your main goal is staying in power at all costs, you will almost always take the path of least resistance.
But in the Green Party, we do things differently. And that is why I am so enormously proud to be in this Party.
We know that our power doesn’t come from the top down. Parties and politicians that pretend as such are resting on a house of cards.
The Greens know that no one person changes the world alone.
We know that sustainable, transformative change is built from communities up, when we are intentional and explicit about our values and act according to the world we want to see.
Human history tells a tale of tension between the power of the few, and the wellbeing of the many. Between greed and democracy.
This Government has told us they’re far more in favour of the greed than the democracy.
But they will only get away with it if we let them.
The more we resist, the more we organise, the more pressure that we put on, the more everyone realises their power, the more the cracks start to show in this Coalition.
And we see the truth: we can make this a one term Government.
Their cruel and cynical decisions are not inevitable.
But neither is progress towards a better future. There’s no one out there coming to save us. We are the change we’ve been waiting for.
That’s where you come in.
What would you do if you truly believed it was possible to change the world? Because it is possible.
Twenty years from now, by the time today’s toddlers are celebrating their 21st birthdays, Aotearoa could be a very different place.
We could have reached net zero emissions.
Our native forests could be restored - teaming with bird song.
Our oceans could be free of plastic pollution, and home to abundant kaimoana.
We get to create that future. Together.
We can choose to create a future where people move through and between our towns and cities freely, conveniently and comfortably without the baggage of a car.
Where we could know our neighbours - everyone could, because homes could be affordable, stable and long-term, grounded in community and surrounded by well-cared for public parks and schools and libraries and thriving local businesses.
Where every single child gets a nutritious, locally grown and lovingly prepared lunch at school.
Where we can hear and read Te Reo Māori everywhere and feel deep pride in our nation’s reconciling with our past to create the equitable, inclusive and uniquely wonderful today.
Where young people know they’ll be able to work in a job that gives them pride and purpose.
Where whānau can raise kids or look after elderly or disabled relatives knowing the country values and supports this contribution.
Where people can retire knowing that representatives had made the right decisions to invest a long time ago in the housing and healthcare and welfare systems - so everyone can be looked after.
Our future is not set in stone. It will be the consequence of the decisions we make today.
We do not have to let three men gaslight us with all the more oil, coal and gas.
We can take power into our own hands and resist their cruelty every step of the way, in turn, reminding ourselves of our collective power to build a new way together.
A way of living – dare I say it, a new economy - that supports people and the planet. That puts manaakitanga ahead of relentless greed.
When thousands of people came together to support each other in the clean-up after Cyclone Gabrielle and Auckland Anniversary floods, we saw this in action.
We saw the power of compassion and justice.
We saw that together, we can take things that are broken and we can fix them.
We can create the Aotearoa that all of us deserve.
The privilege of my position is that I know that I am not alone. I want everyone who cares for our people and our planet to know they are not alone either.
The Greens see you, we hear you, and we fight for you in the halls of power.
We know where our power and motivation comes from – and it isn’t the vested interests of the wealthy – it’s you. Your kids, your communities, and our shared future on this beautiful planet.
And just as we will fight for you - we need you. We need each other.
I’m asking you, today, to step up to the fight as well. Organise within your communities. March in the streets. Be loud, be strong - kia kaha tātau, kia maia, kia manawanui.
And together, let’s create the future all of us and our tamariki deserve.
