28 July: Last week, I climbed to the top of an artificial sandbank in South Dunedin. Reaching the peak, it wasn’t the rugged and beautiful strip of St Kilda Beach and wild expanse of rough sea that took my breath away.

It was the sight of several diggers and a converted container filled with pumped seawater spewing sand and liquid back out into enormously long, man-made sand bags.

Rising sea levels and ever more extreme weather, super charged by climate change, had been eroding the vantage point on which we stood - a sandbank itself built on top of a disused landfill.

Nearly ten years ago, in June 2015 , the South Dunedin community behind us had been flooded - around 1,200 homes and businesses directly impacted. These homes and livelihoods had been built on a flat that a long time ago was a biodiversity-rich wetland.

The locals I talked to told me about the normalcy of digging holes in their back gardens and watching those holes fill with water.

I heard about researchers and scientists working to understand the connection between that underground water table and the ever so slowly rising sea, kept at bay by the ever so slowly eroding sand dune.

The community knows what they’re dealing with. The South Dunedin Future project are organising to find their own solutions, through conversation and connection, bringing along everyone they possibly can in the neighbourhood to make the decisions that will impact all of them.

Their process sounds deceptively simple. At every step o f the way they’re doing the work to bring people along with them, making sure they’re led b y the evidence. They’re clarifying the science o n how their environment is changing around them, they’re building consensus throughout the community o n what matters most, then defining what they can actually do about it, and finally, they will set in motion the plans to make it happen.

The ‘sand sausages’ being installed along St Kilda Beach - technically, called ‘geobags’ - are being pumped up to slow the impact of growing, crashing waves and buy more time.

More time to figure out what to do next.

More time to figure out what to do with the probable toxic materials under the sandbank at our feet, at growing risk of exposure to people and our environment by the day.

More time to adapt to the global warming already locked in by decades of intensive carbon emissions, and more time to curtail the worst of all possible worlds by wrangling down those emissions.

Standing on that sandbank, it was clearer than ever that climate delay is the new denial.

Rising seas are driven by the same kinds of political and economic decisions that drive rising rents.

Let’s take a second to unpack that connection, because it’s important.

The trickle-down system that turned housing in this country into a run-down, state-sanctioned casino is the same system that hands fossil fuel executives licence to fry the fundamentals for life on earth as we know it in order for them to make a quick buck.

It’s the same system that allows businesses to pay poverty wages - so CEOs can get rich while workers struggle to get by.

It’s the same system that further allows those businesses to spew commercial waste into our lakes and rivers - avoiding the cost of their pollution.

It’s a system that privatises profit and socialises cost. Regular people are forced to underwrite bad business through bad law and nonsensical economic policy.

As I said yesterday, the system wasn’t handed down b y the gods.

The social and environmental crises we face are not inevitable or natural.

They’re man-made, as is the system that underpins them.

As depressing as that might be to realise, I tend to think it is, in fact, incredibly liberating. Precisely because this system is made up , it can be remade.

And New Zealanders can have true freedom.

Freedom to move around and between our towns and cities like they do in so many other countries, where politicians get over themselves and make necessary investment in public infrastructure, like frequent, affordable and efficient high-speed rail.

Freedom to plan for the future from your stable, warm, dry home.

Freedom to make decisions about your life, with guaranteed liveable incomes for all.

Freedom to learn in a well-resourced and universally free education system, which values your contribution.

Freedom to explore our native forests, teaming with native birds and other wildlife - because we did the right thing and protected them.

Real freedom for everyone to live a good life. The kind of freedom that comes from looking out for each other and the planet that we live on .

Not the pretend kind o f freedom spouted by politicians who want to start pricing up and selling off everything and anything to the highest bidder.

That’s not freedom, that’s privilege for those who can afford it, and increasingly, only for those who inherit it.

We’re talking about the freedom that comes from upholding each other’s basic rights. From recognising that we live, my friends, in a society. Not a market.

That means we need each other.

One of the coolest things about this vision is that it’s actually already incredibly popular.

Most people in this country support a wealth tax – but neither of the legacy parties wanna touch it.

1 .4 million people rent in this country, yet somehow, it’s run by landlords.

77% of this country wants stronger action on climate, yet the Luxon Government is stuck on fossil economics.

And our people need that action. Think back to those real-world leaders at the coal-fired face of the climate crisis in South Dunedin.

They’re a t the frontlines of the consequences of the climate crisis and trickle-down-economic infrastructure deficit.

They’re not waiting for anyone’s permission. They’re acting.

That’s the sort of community building that inspires me, and that needs the Government to really devolve power and resources to .

That South Dunedin community are putting their values into action. Because they know that if they act now, the future can be more secure.

Meanwhile, out of the real world and back in Parliament this week, I asked Christopher Luxon about his Government’s draft Emissions Reduction Plan.

That so-called plan tells us that in less than a year, the Luxon Government has made decisions to take us off track to reach our climate goals in 2035 . Even worse, they have no idea how to uphold the net zero 2050 commitment.

This Government is treating the Zero Carbon Act goals – which, b y the way, they voted for – as though they’re some vague corporate KPIs to be fiddled with as convenient. But those ‘goals’ aren’t just numbers on a paper.

They’re the scientific fundamentals for life on earth as we know it.

And not only is the Government knowingly increasing our emissions, they’re knowingly increasing inequality too.

According to their own official advice, this Government’s decision to overly rely on blunt market mechanisms like the Emissions Trading Scheme, instead of stopping pollution at the source will cost the lowest income households four times as much as the wealthiest.

Christopher Luxon responded to my question to type, avoiding the actual question and telling me that’s why we should all just support his Government’s trickle down tax cuts.

Trickle-down tax cuts like the $2 .9 billion to landlords, which they continue to say against all reality will put ‘downward pressure’ on rents - which instead have seen rents rise higher than the average rate of inflation.

Trickle down tax cuts that our Reserve Bank tells us will only serve to bid up the cost of housing.

Trickle down tax cuts that will see 64% of the benefit will go to the top 40% of households.

For the record, Luxon’s Government are paying for those tax cuts by raiding future benefit increases, using revenue that would allow us to reduce emissions, and continuing to pay some disabled workers as low as $2 an hour.

This is what the Greens mean when we say you can’t divorce climate and social justice.

Because whether it is Dunedin, Northland, Gisborne , Nelson, Auckland or anywhere in the country that faces climate-change-charged extreme weather events, the evidence is clear: whanau already struggling to make ends meet on a good sunny day will see that hardship compound if this Government continues to enable the climate crisis.

That climate crisis, though, it’s good short term business for the few happy to leave an enormous human, environmental and financial bill in the not-too-distant future.

For those comfortable to privatise profit and socialise cost.

This month, the Government also celebrated increasing the number of families being evicted from public housing. So, we called them out for allowing more than 20,000 more New Zealanders to fall into hardship in part because incomes aren’t keeping up with rents.

They are also comfortable with making a joke of climate action by reopening oil and gas exploration, a change that could increase emissions by triple what their so-called emission reductions plan aims to reduce by 2050 .

That’s the equivalent of 420,000 more cars on the road for the next 26 years.

This so-called ‘plan’ has intentionally shredded policies that were in place only a year ago to develop a fair and equitable transition strategy, to support workers and the regions to manage the change to a thriving zero emissions economy, and to implement a just transitions programme.

Earlier this year, Christopher Luxon spent a lot of time talking about the ‘hard decisions’ his Government would have to make.

Those so-called hard decisions have looked an awful lot like passing the buck.

The two sectors responsible for more than two thirds of our climate changing emissions - agriculture and transport - haven’t so much been put on the backburner as chucked in the oven at 200 degrees.

Luxon’s Government is astonishingly more regressive than John Key’s Government.

Climate change has been removed as an objective in Luxon Government’s Policy Statement on Land Transport - something John Key’s Government had included way back in 2015 .

And not only is Luxon’s Government refusing to do anything meaningful about agriculture emissions while setting up a pseudo-scientific smokescreen on so-called ‘no additional warming’ against the backdrop of serious concern from the independent, expert Climate Change Commission.

Luxon’s Government are also hoping to quietly remove agriculture processor-level emissions reporting requirements that have been in the law since Key’s National Government in 2011.

The answer to all these gnarly emissions reduction questions, they said, could be found through the $400 million odd fund for agriculture research.

Which, it’s important to know, the previous Government announced back in 2022. And as we uncovered, and had reported in the news just this morning, this Government has actually cut tens of millions of dollars from.

Christopher Luxon wants to keep us all distracted.

He wants you to think that all we can do is rearrange the deck chairs on his Titanic.

He wants your dreams limited to mere tinkering, keeping our eyes off the prize of turning this trickle-down economy the right way up - into a system that works for people and planet.

He wants to keep the public looking in the other direction, whipping up hysteria over the use of kara kia while kids go hungry and the NBR rich list grew an extra $2 3 billion this year.

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