March 16, 2023
Greens stay in climate fight despite cabinet knock back
Greens co-leader Marama Davidson says the party will continue to fight for action on climate change, despite some of its favoured projects being suspended or scrapped by Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.
The Maori Party has called for the resignation of Climate Minister James Shaw failing to defend measures to reduce carbon emissions.
But Ms Davidson says as a minister outside cabinet Mr Shaw wasn’t involved into the decisions, but he can point to the progress already made.
“In the past five years only under James’ leadership there has been more climate action than in the last 30 years combined, It’s still not fast enough for us and we have been the clear voice consistently calling for action. We need more Green MPs to influence cabinet decisions and that is what we will be fighting for,” she says.
In what he says is an effort to free up resources to tackle the cost of living crisis, the Prime Minister scrapped the $580 million clean car upgrade scheme, scaled back plans to increase public transport in the main centres and narrowed the speed reduction programme to focus on the most dangerous one per cent of state .