Mike's Minute: The beat-up of the week

The beltway beat-up of the week goes to the seemingly ongoing fascination over the missing paperwork and the Prime Minister's office when it came to a meeting between Z Energy and their concerns over Mike Smith's court case involving polluters and climate cost.

Mike's Minute: Where are the rules protecting us from legal menaces?

 I've got a couple of questions around Mike Smith. 

Mike is back in the news because of his court case against big polluters. His case got upended by the recent Government move to block what they call "tort-based litigation" over climate change.

David Harvey: The Courts and Climate Change

The Smith v Fonterra case was brought by climate change spokesperson for the Iwi Chairs Forum Michael Smith (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) against several major emitters. Smith was attempting to use tort law to address the diffuse, cumulative harms of climate change to his property, culture, and iwi.

Mike's Minute: Not everything is a conspiracy

Some are working pretty hard currently to buy into the Mike Smith storyline that the big end of town has the Government's ear over climate change.

Mike Smith is the activist, the agitator, the chainsaw man, the "smack the America's Cup" bloke.

So, you know, a life of angst and upset.

John McLean: Parliament Passing Legislation Is.....Undemocratic!?

Whacky reactions to proposed legislation extinguishing crazy climate Court cases

On Tuesday 12 May, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced a legislative reform to stop New Zealand Courts forcing “greenhouse gas”-producing businesses to compensate New Zealanders for damage from bad weather. The yet-to-be-drafted legislation will amend New Zealand’s Climate Change Response Act 2002.

The legislation will have the particular effect of extinguishing current Court action by a race hustler with a boring name. I’ve covered Mike Smith’s judicial machinations in a previous Substack.

Roger Partridge: An affront to democracy?

Mike Smith, the climate activist suing six of New Zealand’s largest companies over greenhouse gas emissions, is unhappy. On Tuesday, the Government announced it will amend the Climate Change Response Act 2002 to stop cases like his and others like it. Smith calls the move “an affront to democracy.”

He has the wrong end of the stick.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Absurd - NZ courts can now decide on climate change

The World Justice Project ranks New Zealand 7th out of 142 countries on its ‘Rule of Law Index’, narrowly ahead of Australia’s 13th place. However, Australia still has hope – if only because of a recent decision by the Supreme Court of New Zealand.

The case is easily told. Mike Smith, an indigenous activist fighting climate change, filed a lawsuit against seven large New Zealand companies for their carbon emissions. Smith claims that they are causing him harm.

Peter Williams: Supreme Court decision astounding

Can seven New Zealand corporates really influence global climate?

Three years ago a friend of mine whose a District Court Judge asked me if I would be guest speaker at the annual DCJ shindig, scheduled that year for the Hilton in Taupo. Despite a feeling of significant intellectual inferiority, I accepted on the condition that all I would talk about were personal experiences from about half a century in the broadcasting industry.

My friend thought that was perfect. It was he said, essentially a social occasion mixed with a few legal discussions, and he and his co-organizers wanted a bloke who could tell a few yarns after dinner on the Friday night, have a few drinks with the assembled judges and all would be well with the world.

Chris Trotter: Nobody To Shoot.

There's a scene in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” where an embattled dust-bowl sharecropper struggles to defend his land. He threatens to shoot the man sent to demolish the farm buildings on behalf of the bank. Don’t blame me says the demolition man. The farmer then threatens to shoot the bank president who signed the foreclosure papers. Patiently, the demolition man explains that the bank manager is only carrying out the instructions of the bank’s owners back East. Utterly defeated, the propertyless sharecropper cries plaintively: “But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” To which the demolition man replies: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t human at all.”

It’s an exchange I always recall whenever I hear people advocating going after “the man that’s starving me”. The latest target of this “who can we shoot” proposition are the 100 companies allegedly responsible for 71 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, the first of these planetary polluters to fill the gunsights of Earth’s angry sharecroppers are the oil companies.