NZ:Ardern eyes climate change progress in NZ

Ardern NF AAP News Feature By Ben McKay WELLINGTON, Dec 24 AAP - Jacinda Ardern is eager to turn the page on 2021 and its relentless COVID-19 focus, saying New Zealand will reshape its approach to climate change and other "legacy projects" next year. The prime minister has notched four years in the job, the last two dominated by the global pandemic. The 41-year-old will get married this summer - coronavirus permitting - and take crucial downtime, spending her holidays in Auckland, the Coromandel and in Gisborne. But if 2020 was the year of New Zealand's stunning elimination of the virus, and 2021 was the year of vaccine, how to characterise 2022? "I haven't given it a single name," she tells AAP, "but it's going to be heavily climate change focused". "We will continue to manage COVID, we will continue to adapt and work through its ever changing profile but we also need to continue to govern. "So for me, alongside pandemic management, we need to make progress on our greatest environmental and economic threat: climate change." Ms Ardern has called climate change "my generation's nuclear free moment", an oft-repeated reference to New Zealand's galvanising anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 80s. And the country needs improvement: emissions per capita are poor by international standards, and still rising. The government's emissions-lowering plan was set in place during her first term, with the establishment of the independent Climate Change Commission, which sets climate budgets the country must meet. The first budget will land by May, timed in line with a budget cycle with billions of dollars already set aside. "We have an ambitious program on climate change that we need to implement," she said. Labour, the first party to win a parliamentary majority since 1993, is governing with the support of the Greens, and has given itself plenty to do. It is overhauling the health system, the planning regime, water management and the industrial relations system. It is merging the state broadcasters, planning both an "immigration reset" and a "tourism reset", incorporating indigenous values into its foreign policy, enacting a 25-year plan to end family violence, all while forging ahead with treaty settlements, electoral reform and criminal justice reforms. Much-needed transport projects in Auckland and Wellington are being kickstarted, the scale of which have barely been attempted before. Critics pan a lack of progress across her vast policy platform including the biggest issue facing New Zealand - a lack of safe and affordable housing. Ms Ardern insists "alongside the pandemic, we actually have continued to do a lot. A lot". "It has been a very full agenda when you take into account things like RMA (planning) reform, the health reform, the water reforms. These are all significant. These are all legacy projects," she said. "That would be enough in of itself without managing a pandemic alongside it, but government is about what you do in spite of the other challenges that come your way. "So 2022 will be COVID-plus." It will also be a year of international re-engagement. Ms Ardern hasn't left New Zealand since the arrival of COVID-19 in February 2020, but plans to travel widely next year. In recent phone calls with her counterparts abroad, she "purposely set out to talk to other leaders about how their populations are feeling". "I sense and understand the fatigue ... everywhere," she said. "Some probably assume that because (New Zealand) had such long periods without COVID present and without ongoing lockdowns ... the fatigue is different. "It seems to me that it is universal, no matter what you approach to COVID has been, everyone is is is fatigued by COVID." And on that front, Ms Ardern claims something close to satisfaction with her government's biggest undertaking this year: the vaccine rollout. There have been plenty of bumps on the journey. It was slow to start and a failure to prioritise Maori groups earned plenty of criticism, including from the Waitangi Tribunal. Still, New Zealand is among the leading pack of nations, fully vaccinating 90 per cent of Kiwis aged 12 and over, with 95 per cent at least partially vaccinated. "If you'd said to me that we would have the rates that we have now, I'm not sure that I would have believed that," she said. "New Zealand has managed to get incredibly high rates without having outbreaks. "I still walk into a room and say, 'Do you know someone who's had COVID?' and it's still limited the reach that it's had here, and yet people have still been vaccinated. "So am I satisfied? I will be satisfied with everyone that is eligible is vaccinated. So I'll probably never be."

AAP bmc/SRJ