I’m writing to update you on our campaign to stop the NZ Taxonomy from the Centre for Sustainable Finance.

But first, we’re asking everyone to back the Belmont Farm Park petition to keep farming going on this historic site despite Greater Wellington Regional Council’s decision to end it in a fit of misguided climate ideology. We’ll go into more detail below, but if you’re ready now, click here to read more and sign the petition.

NZ Taxonomy: Ministers on notice

To jog your memory, the NZ Taxonomy is a proposal for categories of economic activity to decide lending and investing decisions. This stage is about agriculture and includes rules that range from the usual woke consultant verbiage, to counterproductive regulations, and all the way to the ridiculously impossible.

With another round of consultation recently closed, the CSF are pushing ahead with most of the same policies we’ve talked about before. A response to an official information request has also shown that over $3 million in taxpayer money has already been handed over by the Ministry for the Environment to fund the NZ Taxonomy project.

We wrote to the relevant ministers, telling them to scrap it and end the Government’s involvement. If they end it now, this will just be a colossal waste of money to provide jobs to the Coalition’s ideological enemies. But even that would be better than the impossible regulations the NZ Taxonomy would bring in.

We went into some detail, but this was our summary:

• The entire project is an ideological exercise divorced from scientific, economic, and political reality. Consider alone their continued insistence on the 1 tonne of CO2e per hectare limit for a farm be considered “green”, despite our farms – the most efficient in the world – operating at between three to nine times that figure.
• The policy goals, direction, and process run directly contrary to the Government’s stated approach to climate and agricultural policy, continuing with the worst of the Ardern era’s backward, unscientific approach to agricultural emissions and promoting unworkable regulations to chase the resulting unachievable targets.
• The outsourcing of policy development to a private trust, while receiving ministerial backing and Government funding, has gone beyond the unclear status of the project to make a farce of the entire consultation process.

The politicians can’t try to say in the future that they didn’t know.

This isn’t some hangover of the previous Government, either. All the funding decisions were made under the Coalition Government. In the forms to approve the spending, the bureaucrats note about Climate Change Minister Simon Watts, “The Minister’s direction supports further work on sustainable finance.”

Simon Watts met with the Centre for Sustainable Finance multiple times since he became a minister. Mr Watts, at least, knows.

But what is less clear is how much the rest of the Cabinet and Coalition party MPs know about it. That’s why we sent our letter to:

• Climate Change Minister Simon Watts
• Agriculture Minister Todd McClay
• Environment Minister Penny Simmonds
• Associate Agriculture Minister Nicola Grigg
• Associate Agriculture Minister Andrew Hoggard
• Associate Agriculture Minister Mark Patterson

We expect ACT, NZ First, and the more realistic National MPs to make this an issue. Simon Watts must explain why he is funding policy development in opposition to his Government’s commitments.

Our letter had some questions for the ministers:

• Why has the Government funded this private trust with millions of taxpayer dollars to contradict the Government?
• Does the Government intend to continue funding this plan for economic arson or will New Zealand’s taxpayers only have to bear the money lost so far?
• Is the Government sincere in its stated climate and agricultural regulation policies or should we expect the NZ Taxonomy to progress?
• Will the Government at least commit now to providing not one dollar more to this scheme?

And then, in conclusion:

Groundswell NZ, along with our tens of thousands of supporters, opposes the Paris Agreement framework and New Zealand’s current approach to it. Our surveys show more and more farmers are also coming to oppose the Paris Agreement as they understand how successive governments have sold them out.

This NZ Taxonomy proposal, however, is both opposed to the Coalition Government’s policies and funded by it. In asking you to scrap it, we are merely requesting that you act to follow your own stated policy. Anything less would confirm the complete capture of the Government by the climate consultant class.

There has been a fair bit to like with this new Government, if mainly where they set out to roll back the worst excesses of the last one. Then, when there are fights to be had, they usually at least listen to farmers and rural communities. Their commitment to this NZ Taxonomy project, though, is simply beyond belief.

It will win no votes, reduce no emissions globally, and will only serve to increase compliance costs on farmers or make banking even harder to access.

It’s time for Simon Watts to scrap the NZ Taxonomy or for his colleagues to make him.

Keep farming in Belmont Farm Park

Belmont Farm Park has been farmed since the 1860s and, from 2005, has been in public ownership, managed on our behalf by the Greater Wellington Regional Council.

It was a leader in recognising the best land management usually requires a combination of farming, conservation, and public recreation.

But the Council has decided that, going forward, only 20% of the 1,000-hectare public farm (39% of the park) can actually be farmed. The idea being that the other 80% will return to “natural regeneration” progressively over ten years, with another chunk taken off the farmer each year.

This is a walkback from their earlier plan to just end farming all together, with the Council admitting they won’t commit the resources to plant natural bush across that whole area at once. But they won’t be able to keep up to do it over ten years, either.

The locals remember what that land looked like at the times it wasn’t farmed: rampant gorse infestation.

Rather than a collaboration to decide which land could be retired and planted gradually – an approach familiar to anyone aware of the QEII Trust process – the Council’s decision is rooted in climate activism and a complete misunderstanding of agricultural emissions.

Just as we’ve seen with so many institutions where some department gets told to find ways to cut emissions, they look at the Paris Agreement and the Zero Carbon Act, don’t dig into any of the science or debates about methane or the agricultural emissions cycle, and then target what looks like a large emitter on their books: livestock.

But all the usual problems apply.

Reducing livestock numbers in one location doesn’t reduce global consumption, it just shifts the production around. In the first place, the livestock aren’t a one-off emission like natural gas extraction, but a cycle where they can only emit the gasses absorbed by their food to begin with.

Then, particularly galling in this case, the whole situation would be irrelevant if the Park and Farm weren’t counted across the Council’s emissions profile, which could easily be the case if legal arrangements happened to be constructed differently at the time.

This is an accounting exercise, but with numbers that have nothing to do with reality.

And the consequences are real. The public loses the collaborative land management approach they benefit from. The environment will have to bear gorse proliferation, creating a very real wildfire risk between Porirua and the Hutt Valley. A historic farm is shut down.

All just to change some numbers on a council report under “Corporate Carbon Footprint” for an organisation woefully unable to make emissions policy decisions.

But there is some hope.

The decision could still be reversed and there is a petition to save farming in the park from the Preserve Belmont Farm Park Incorporated Society. The original decision was made with only 300 or so submissions, while the Council made changes when 1,392 submissions raised concerns. We can make a real difference here.

Belmont Farm Park, and public reserves like it across the country, belong to all New Zealanders, not the councils and their misguided and counterproductive emissions plans.

Go to preservebelmontfarmpark.co.nz to sign the petition. Say as much or as little as you like. Have a look around the website to see more about the Park and the Farm.

Thank you again for your support.

Kind regards,

Bryce, Laurie, and the Team at Groundswell NZ