Poor, old RNZ's obituary of the climate-related disclosures (CRD) makes you weep.
"New Zealand guts climate policy it bragged about to the world".
That's their headline.
What's misleading about the headline is the Government who “gutted” it isn't the Government who bragged about it.
As for the gutting and the world leading - "world leading" in what sense? We were simply the first to the line with a pointless idea.
The first country, if you believe it, was the previous Government that made it increasingly hard to get foreign money invested in the country because they had just produced another hurdle.
It included all banks, insurers and listed companies - what for?
It's very labour to just rope everyone in whether its relevant or not.
Why didn’t they make us all write climate reports? We all have a footprint.
Airlines? Sure, they have a lot of emissions. Tell us about them in your annual report.
Issues for insurance companies? Surely they would have done it anyway, given that’s their business?
But Turners, as in cars and Tina, raised relevant issues;
As for the gutting and the world leading - "world leading" in what sense? We were simply the first to the line with a pointless idea.
The first country, if you believe it, was the previous Government that made it increasingly hard to get foreign money invested in the country because they had just produced another hurdle.
It included all banks, insurers and listed companies - what for?
It's very labour to just rope everyone in whether its relevant or not.
Why didn’t they make us all write climate reports? We all have a footprint.
Airlines? Sure, they have a lot of emissions. Tell us about them in your annual report.
Issues for insurance companies? Surely they would have done it anyway, given that’s their business?
But Turners, as in cars and Tina, raised relevant issues;
1) It wasn’t similar to Australia,
2) They opened themselves up to prosecution,
3) It cost a fortune to get someone to write all the mumbo jumbo that for many companies wasn’t remotely necessary.
Even MBIE wrote a report saying the costs of all this nonsense were prohibitive. But don't worry - as long as we are "world leading"!
What Labour never understood, and I doubt they do now, is putting the cost of business up is counter productive. Having our competitors outpace us because we are bogged down is counter productive.
Even if we all wrote glorious page after page after page about our footprints and climate intent, what difference did any of it make to the environment?
What got changed? Or saved? Or solved?
The tragedy was too much of the media got sucked in, and clearly still does, to the “feels”.
All you had to say was "look, it's a world first! A climate world first!"
And you had them hook, line and sinker.
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings - where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
When Covid slammed the borders and sank tourism, it wasn’t the bureaucrats or the branding experts who kept New Zealand alive — it was the farmers. From 2020 to 2022, while the rest of the country worked from the couch, the primary sector generated more than half the nation’s export earnings — roughly $40 billion a year in real money. Dairy, meat, wool, and horticulture carried the economy while Grant Robertson and Adrian Orr flooded it with $53 billion of freshly printed cash, inflating housing markets and fuelling the inflation that still throttles households.
And how did Jacinda Ardern’s government thank the people who saved the country? By branding them climate offenders.
In 2021, she travelled to the Wairarapa to launch her “world-first” Climate-Related Disclosures regime — a post-Covid photo-op dressed as virtue, forcing major companies to publish reports on how climate change might affect their bottom line. It looked good in UN slide decks. It did almost nothing at home except bury firms in compliance costs.
Now, with a new government paring that vanity project back to something workable, the outrage from Wellington’s climate priesthood is deafening.
Let’s examine the report.
RNZ’s senior journalist Kirsty Johnston started with the headline: “New Zealand guts climate policy it bragged about on the world stage.”
It’s an opinion headline dressed as news. First, she deftly avoids saying it was Ardern’s Labour and her sycophants who jumped on the world-first bandwagon . “Guts” is not a neutral verb but it’s aimed at the coalition government. it’s an accusation.
Johnston opens by declaring the Jacinda’s law “once world-leading,” as though bureaucratic novelty were evidence of success. She never questions the premise that the Ardern policy’s global “model of transparency” was anything more than self-promotion.
When she writes, “The rollback comes shortly after officials celebrated the policy on the world stage,” she recycles the same government talking points she claims to be scrutinising, confusing bureaucratic vanity with public good.
The main mourner-in-chief is Jessica Palairet, executive director of Lawyers for Climate Action NZ, who solemnly declares the rollback “short-sighted,” “out of step with key partners,” and lacking “strong evidence” it will help markets. She provides, naturally, no strong evidence of her own — not a number, not a trend, not even a PowerPoint pie chart. Just the usual fog of moral certainty, thick enough to hide the absence of substance. It’s the climate lobby’s version of faith healing: lay on a bit of virtue, and the data will surely rise again.
Johnston never challenges her sources — only amplifies them. Readers are nudged to believe New Zealand is now a climate renegade, when in fact the change merely restores discretion to boards already drowning in risk templates and audit bloat. “Transparency,” Frame’s experts lament, as if more reporting automatically means better governance. Yet none explain why the same corporates who can’t predict their own earnings are suddenly clairvoyant about global temperature 30 years out.
The article’s tone is pure sermon: government as sinner, business as victim, climate compliance as salvation. Economic pain is a footnote; moral outrage dominates. If you stripped away the jargon, the story would fit in one honest line: Government trims the paperwork; lobbyists fear losing relevance.
Perhaps the Broadcasting Standards Authority, before it expands its remit to thought policing, could glance at this corner of its portfolio — the one marked impartiality. Because when a taxpayer-funded newsroom mourns the trimming of red tape as a moral tragedy, the problem isn’t the climate. It’s the newsroom weather system. And if Johnston really wants a headline to match reality, it should read: New Zealand trims pointless paperwork, saves businesses money, and lets farmers get back to work. That, of course, wouldn’t make the six o’clock bulletin.
—PB
Hey Mike you used the phrase "mumbo jumbo" I feel a report to the BSA is required.
'Gutting' this stupid climate policy a good first step. How about gutting RNZ next?
Much basis to Mike's comments. Nevertheless typical of those, like most NZers, so affluent that any conservative measures an inconvenient brake on lfestyle. What sort of low whole of life CO2 car does Mike drive slowly across town to work?
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