Who will speak for the environment without a ministry behind it?

The proposed dissolution of the Ministry for the Environment would shut the door on decades of work aimed at incorporating concern and protection of the environment into national development policy, simultaneously erasing hard-earned institutional memory of how to do it well.

At a time when environmental crises are issuing new demands daily for these skills, this would be an act of institutional vandalism, one that threatens far more than our environments.

Generally understood as an independent voice for the environment, the environment ministry would be replaced by what can only be imagined as a new super-ministry for developers (roads, infrastructure companies, miners, farmers, urban developers, and the trades and bankers that support them). The Ministry of Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT) is not a like-for-like replacement.

The environment ministry administers the Environment Act 1986, which includes promoting environmental education and encouraging public participation in environmental activities, as well as offering ministerial advice. Even under a National government in 2016, the ministry defined its purpose as ‘Aotearoa New Zealand is the most liveable place in the world: Aotearoa – he whenua mana kura mō te tangata’.).

From that position, the ministry was compelled to inform other regulatory and governmental processes and consider the health of the environment in relation to multiple advisory, regulatory, and management responsibilities. These included monitoring, measuring, and analysing changing environmental conditions and how they might affect and be affected by resource use. It was to do this publicly and invite and inform public debate.

While none of this implies a mandate for open environmental advocacy, the ministry’s naming (for the environment) was purposeful. It supported the government and the public to steward our environments, independent of developer interests.

How MCERT will perform similar roles is uncertain, but its loss of independence bodes ill for the environments, landscapes, and urban amenity that define our nation.

We have been offered no compelling reason why this move was required (what was broken at the environment ministry), how MCERT will operate, or how the guardianship the Ministry for the Environment exercised will be replaced. Instead, we are asked to put our faith in ‘Going for Growth’.

Fantasies of growthOther commentators have detailed the threat to our environments but there are other concerns.

First, there is little sense of a plan beyond the slogan ‘Going for Growth’, which appears to mean we will grow at any cost, or as Finance Minister Nicola Willis has put it, “to grow that pie baby”. Because if we grow it, everyone can get more pie however it is sliced – growing the pie will lift all boats, she says.

Growth, for its own sake, is the strategy, while productivism and the exploitation of resources enabled by deregulation and de-risking investment are the means. But are they really ‘freeing up markets’ as we’ve been promised?

Modern markets require regulation and state organisation of social, technological and physical infrastructure (and as we have surely learned recently, geopolitical stabilisation). Going for Growth is a strategy that creates opportunities for developers and property speculators to secure tradable property rights, earn monopoly returns, and capture economic rents or unearned incomes simply from owning scarce resources.

Going for growth appears to be about creating conditions for a few to prosper. The cost of that pie will be experiences, rights, and potential returns denied or stripped from others and future generations.

Property and resource-driven growth without a plan for all is not lifting all boats. Some may receive nano-slices of pie and a few more will receive crumbs, but at what cost for my children overseas and great grandchildren not yet born?

The dissolution of the Ministry for the Environment is one of a suite of measures undermining institutions designed to support us to question how we are governed and to imagine, debate, design and enact better futures, environmental or otherwise.

Its dissolution erases a voice for a fairer, better, and more sustainable future. As New Zealanders consider the meaning of yet another assault on their assets, future prosperity, and identity, they should ask themselves the crucial question: Is the nation really in so much trouble that we must give it and its environments away to developers and hope that we will get a few crumbs?

Who will hold the developers and speculators to account? Who benefits, now, or in 25 years, in 500 years? Who speaks for the environment and for future generations?