ACT Is Right. National Needs to Join Them.

The latest Free Press from the ACT Party concerns the Zero Carbon Act which the party was the only one to oppose. When it was debated in Parliament David Seymour said it was “pernicious, because it introduces a level of central control over economic-decision making that this country has not seen since 1984. The powers that are put in the hands of a government or a Minister, under this bill, take us back to a place New Zealand has not been for thirty-five years.” He continued by saying, “and that is when we were under the Economic Stabilisation Act, where a Minister or Cabinet could actually make economic decisions about just not what the general rules of the game are but about how much and what price people could trade in different sectors.”

So it has come to pass. Sunday’s release of a draft annual report recommends that the Government ban petrol cars, gas heating and gas cookers. Ban coal from industry, reduce the number of farm animals by 15 per cent and make people live in higher-density housing. ACT says for every stick there will be a carrot, with the Commission not only urging the Government to ban some things but engineer new habits. That word engineer makes my blood run cold. It has sinister connotations to me. Right up Jacinda’s alley.

ACT further says that the worst of all these interventions won’t actually reduce emissions. So long as there are a certain number of credits for emissions each year, people will emit them one way or another. The Government banning one technology or subsidising another simply frees up credits for emissions in another way. It’s nuts. David is right. He says the Zero Carbon Act is simply a huge bureaucratisation of New Zealanders reaching their emissions reduction targets under the Emissions Trading Scheme cap.

Your job is to reconnect with these people and most will not want to listen to this. You will not recover those National voters who went to Labour last time by buying into this type of narrative.

ACT has a better way which anyone can read on the Free Press on the Act Party website. My advice to National is to get on board with Act and present a united front to oppose the stupidity being proposed.

Only a couple of weeks ago, on Sky News Australia, a geologist and earth scientist was saying, quite rightly in my view, that we are simply going through cyclical changes and the current warming period peaked about five thousand years ago and is nearing its end. We need to be preparing for the next cooling period. What this tells me is this global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the left for huge financial gain for a few. Of course, there’s global warming and there will be again. But just like Covid, the world must be careful not to over react. There can be huge economic damage as a result.

There is a larger global game plan at play here driven mainly by the left and National must not fall for it. Judith Collins said National is going back to their founding principles and will be a party for all New Zealanders. That is good to hear but in order to achieve that in the area of climate change they need to change their thinking. How about pulling out of the useless Paris Climate Accord that President Biden is so keen to join. How about sending silly James Shaw on a useless carbon footprint to tell China and India to stop opening coal-powered stations every week.

Until the big polluters of the world come to the party we are wasting our time. Nothing we do will make one iota of difference. What that means is buckets of taxpayers monies, our money, are being wasted in what is basically a game of trivial pursuit. This is the thinking that National has to adopt. Attaching yourself to what appears to be the populist bandwagon is not the way to go. We’ve seen to much of this from National over the last decade or more and it has to change.

National needs to reflect on where it’s core vote is – in the regions, in rural and provincial New Zealand, in the heartland. That is the vote National needs to get back. It needs to be very careful how it goes about it.

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