When the Luxon-led coalition took office nearly three years ago, its war on nature started within days. In the next three years the government made a bewildering number of changes leading to environmental harm. Greenpeace Aotearoa Executive Director Russel Norman has undertaken the gargantuan task of tracking them all.

It has been nearly three years since the formation of the Christopher Luxon led Government, a coalition between the National, Act and NZ First parties.

It has been three years of a veritable war on nature. New Zealand and the world is facing a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, and as will be demonstrated comprehensively below, this Government has been systematically making it worse.

There have been so many anti-environment initiatives, across so many government agencies, through so many law and regulation changes, across a raft of budgets, it is exhausting to keep track of them all. 

The aim of this article is to create a comprehensive timeline of them. I’ve gone through every week of the last nearly three years of the Luxon Government to pull out all their anti-environment policies. It’s a long read.

I’ve extracted out just the climate and freshwater policies elsewhere.

So here goes.

The War on Nature, week by week.

Voting in the New Zealand general election finished on October 14, 2023 and the Luxon Coalition Government was sworn in on November 27, 2023.

On December 3, 2023, six days later, they announced they were cancelling the New Zealand Battery Project. The Battery Project was designed to provide large-scale long-term storage to give security to the electricity network. We need this security because fossil gas has been declining for the last 20 years, the grid is moving to close to 100% renewable electricity, and we are electrifying transport and industrial processes. The Battery would have stored around 5TWh (5,000,000 MWh) of electricity in a pumped hydro scheme to cover the risk of a dry winter. This is about 1000 times the storage in the world’s largest lithium battery, or about 25,000 times Meridian’s largest lithium battery in New Zealand currently.

Federated Farmers Vice President Colin Hurst was in touch with new Associate Minister of Agriculture Andrew Hoggard on December 3 2023 claiming that freshwater was not in decline but rather ‘is broadly maintaining current state’. He misrepresented the views of scientists to claim that intensive land use was not the driver of pollution (in spite of evidence to the contrary). He thought the real problem lay with the independent state of the environment reports being produced by Statistics NZ and the Ministry for the Environment, not with the actual state of the environment.

On December 4, 2023 the new Associate Minister of Agriculture Andrew Hoggard met with the agribusiness lobby group Federated Farmers, his former colleagues. 

On December 6th, 2023 the first Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) auction under the new Government failed to attract a single bid. National promoted the ETS as its main tool to cut climate pollution, and was relying on raising $900m from ETS auctions to fund tax cuts. 

On December 11th 2023 Cabinet abolished the $650m Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry fund, as part of the mini budget. GIDI was used to support around 80 different industrial projects, including large ones at NZ Steel and Fonterra, to cut emissions in industrial processes by reducing fossil fuel use. Officials estimated that removing this fund would result in ten million tonnes of extra emissions by 2050. Removing the Fund also increased the risk from declining gas supplies and in 2026 the Government would be forced to backtrack and reintroduce some support to help businesses get off fossil gas. 

The oil and gas lobby group celebrated the end of the GIDI fund. Luxon said he didn’t want to subsidise business to cut emissions, however as we found out in the 2025 Budget, he was happy to subsidise oil and gas companies to increase emissions. 

On December 13, 2023 Nicola Willis, the Finance Minister, cancelled the new interisland ferries, which were due for delivery in 2025. The ferries were not only more carbon efficient than the old ones but underpinned the future of rail freight across the country, which is the most carbon-efficient form of freight. The cost of the cancellation was a staggering loss of $671m. The Government has since negotiated for replacement ferries due to be delivered in 2029 with cost unknown. 

Government Ministers met with agribusiness lobby group Dairy NZ somewhere between December 11 and 13 2023. Dairy NZ’s demands for gutting freshwater protections and climate policy fell on fertile ground as we shall see.

On December 14 2023, to the joy of agribusiness, the Luxon Government announced the beginning of the process to remove the clean water rules –  the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management 2020, a regulation under the Resource Management Act that was one of the most important policies to cut climate and water pollution. Without the clean water rules (and/or a price on dairy emissions) dairy herds are growing again resulting in more climate and freshwater pollution. Dairy is the country’s most climate polluting industry and Fonterra is by far the single biggest climate polluting company. Agribusiness opposed the clean water rules and, with the former head of Federated Farmers, Andrew Hoggard as Associate Agriculture Minister, they were well placed to remove them.

Transport is the country’s second biggest source of greenhouse emissions and measures to cut transport emissions were next on the chopping block.

On December 17 2023, they killed off Wellington’s low emissions transport plan and moved to replace it with an alternate plan with higher emissions and car dependency.

On December 20, 2023 they repealed the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act which was the result of years of work by government, industry and environment NGOs to update and replace the Resource Management Act (RMA). Luxon would soon move to a fast track RMA approval process, while removing environmental guardrails.

On December 31, 2023 the Gas Transition Plan was due for publication but it didn’t appear. The Plan was meant to lay out a pathway to reduce use and dependence on fossil gas. It was abandoned by the new Government as unnecessary, as they claimed that the gas shortage was a result of the 2018 ban on new oil and gas exploration permits and hence could be fixed by restarting the issue of new permits. This was in spite of the evidence that it takes at least a decade to bring on new gas fields after issuing an exploration permit, and that there were no new major gas discoveries for 20 years regardless. The Gas Transition Plan was formally cancelled in March 2025.

The Luxon Government’s decisions to end the NZ Battery Project, close GIDI, stop work on the Gas Transition Plan, and (as we will see later) fast track seabed mining thereby blocking offshore wind generation, left New Zealand dangerously exposed to an energy shock. Reality was about to impose itself on the Government’s ideology.

2024

They began 2024 by killing off the clean car discount on January 1st, resulting in a collapse of sales of low emission vehicles. 

On January 14 2024 they cancelled the project to build light rail in Auckland.

They rounded off the month on January 30 2024 by reversing New Zealand’s previous support for restrictions to bottom trawling seamounts in international waters, to the joy of the fishing industry. Bottom trawling releases masses of carbon stored on the ocean floor and causes destruction of ancient deep ocean corals.

The fishing companies shouted Shane Jones to a fine dinner on February 13, 2024. The donors to his campaign were adamant in their opposition to cameras, limits on bottom trawling etc etc.

On February 14 2024 they repealed the Three Waters process for supporting councils to improve their water supply and waste water treatment plants. The repeal will ultimately result in more water pollution and higher costs to councils, rural councils in particular. It resulted in the hospitalization of six kids in Hamner from poisoned water.

On March 1 2024, they announced that marine farming consents would simply be rolled over for 25 years and not reviewed, in spite of the significant environmental impact of marine farms using public space.

March 4th 2024 they announced the draft government policy statement on land transport, which slashed spending on cycling and walking and increased funding to motorways. These decisions will increase emissions and hence it was no coincidence that they removed climate change as a consideration in transport funding decisions.

Also on March 4 2026, Simeon Brown as Energy Minister formally cancelled the Gas Transition Plan.

On March 6th 2024 they cancelled the Auckland regional fuel tax which was funding the expansion of the Eastern Busway, which then had to be cancelled.

On March 7 2024, former tobacco lobbyist and current Minister for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop, rejected officials’ advice to include ‘sustainable management’ in the purposes clause of the fast track law. The absence of environmental guardrails in the purposes clause of the bill meant the fast track law could, and would, be used for projects causing immense environmental harm and climate pollution, such as new coal mines and irrigation expansion.

March 14 2024 saw Andrew Hoggard, former Federated Farmers president and current Associate Minister of Agriculture, announce that the Government suspended the requirement for councils to identify Significant Natural Areas so they could be protected. These remnant areas of native vegetation are an important reservoir of carbon and biodiversity. As the Environmental Defence Society pointed out, the law required councils to continue with the SNA work and Hoggard was acting like Muldoon in illegally overriding rule of law.

On March 20, 2024 Andrew Hoggard hosted a private dinner for the Dairy NZ board in the Beehive.

March 21st 2024 saw an announcement about plans for higher speeds on roads, which not only increases fuel consumption and carbon emissions, but by making it more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians will reduce cycling and walking, further increasing emissions (and deaths and injuries).

March 22nd 2024 saw increased commercial catch limits for fishing companies. This was in line with fishing company requests and at odds with environmental concerns. They even increased catch limits for endangered bluefin tuna.

March 25 2024 saw Luxon complaining about protections for endangered Hectors dolphins, whose presence had restricted racing in the SailGP yacht race. March 28 2024 saw them cancel work to increase marine protection in Rangitahua, the Kermadecs.

Fresh from removing support for electric vehicles, on March 28 2024 they announced moves to subsidise the most inefficient fossil fuelled vehicles and punish electric vehicles, with the changes to the petrol tax and road user charge regime. Academics found that this would increase emissions.

Sometime in March 2024, officials prepared a secret briefing on the Paris climate target. They told the Government that there was a risk that, if New Zealand did not meet its emissions targets, then it would undermine global efforts to cut emissions as it would give an excuse for bigger polluters to do less. The briefing was accidentally released by officials who then asked the media to hand it back – they refused. The Government has still failed to release a credible plan on how it will meet its Paris target. 

April 6th 2024 saw them announce a hand-picked review of the country’s methane reduction targets, based on the ‘no additional warming’ metric being promoted by the global and domestic livestock industry. This metric is at odds with the metric used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and opposed by the Climate Commission and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Federated Farmers, the lobby group for agribusiness, applauded, and the review was chaired by a former director of Fonterra. Methane has so far contributed 30% to global heating. 

April 8th 2024 saw cuts to Ministry for the Environment staffing.

But April 9th 2024 saw new money to subsidise agribusiness research into magic methane reduction technology- the same research that has failed for two decades to produce any meaningful results. Fonterra’s Annual Report had to acknowledge that these novel technologies may never emerge. The real purpose of the research is to maintain the fantasy that New Zealand can cut emissions without reducing dairy cow numbers. Meanwhile the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research had funding cuts.

On April 10th 2024 the Government returned their attention to freshwater rules by announcing that Freshwater Farm Plans would be changed. Previously these plans were mandatory audited plans linked to achieving the actual in-stream water quality outcomes required by the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management. Under the new industry-approved freshwater farm plans all that was required was to show industry ‘best practice’ regardless of whether that actually led to cleaner rivers. This announcement created regulatory confusion as regional councils in Waikato, Southland, the West Coast, Otago, and Manawatū-Whanganui had already started implementing the real freshwater farm plans.

New Zealand’s threatened sealions were the next target on April 10 2024, with Shane Jones, the unapologetic recipient of donations from the fishing industry, announcing that there would henceforth be no limits on the number of sealions that could be drowned in trawl nets. There are fewer than 5000 of these sealions remaining on the planet.

Funding cuts to the Department of Conservation were leading to cuts in science and the ability to protect endangered species, it was revealed on April 11 2024.

On April 14 2024 it was revealed that the cameras on boats program, long opposed by Shane Jones and his fishing company donors, had shown much higher numbers of dolphins and albatrosses being killed by the fishing industry than the industry had previously self-reported. There was a six-fold increase in reported dolphin deaths and a three-fold increase in reported albatross deaths. 

The number of endangered Hector’s dolphins which the fishing industry reported killing, jumped from two per year to 15 in a single year. The Ministry of Primary Industries stated that this level of killing of Hector’s Dolphins was assumed to be happening previously, but had not been reported until the rollout of cameras on boats. In the banal language of government officials describing illegal behaviour by fishing companies not reporting dolphin deaths they stated “Experience overseas, and in New Zealand, is that monitoring of fishing by observers or cameras generally leads to more accurate reporting.” You don’t say.

This did not prompt the Minister to ask why the fishing industry had previously been failing to report the deaths, as they were legally obliged to, but rather he suggested that the fishing companies should take over management of the cameras.

April 18 2024, Ministry officials told Resource Minister Shane Jones that his proposal to reduce the liability of oil companies for decommissioning end-of-life oil fields, would mean that New Zealand had weaker liability laws for oil companies than other countries. But he ignored the officials’ advice and carried on.

The Fisheries minister abolished the Oceans Secretariat sometime before April 19, 2024. The Secretariat sat between the Department of Conservation and the Fisheries Division of MPI in an attempt to get more coordinated oceans policy. Without the Secretariat, MPI is free to keep making fisheries decisions that are terrible for ecosystems and the ocean. When I met with Jones in March along with other environment NGOs he didn’t even know the Secretariat existed and it seems that once we alerted him to it he abolished it.

The Luxon Government rounded out the month on 30 April 2024 by abolishing financial support for lower public transport fares for young people.

May 23 2024 was a red letter day with the first Resource Management Act Amendment Bill being introduced. It removed Te Mana o Te Wai, the hierarchy embedded in the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management, that directed decision makers to prioritise ecosystem health and human health, when making resource consent decisions such as freshwater allocation. Te Mana o te Wai was at the centre of a decision to decline agribusiness applications to take millions of litres from Hawkes Bay’s already overallocated aquifers. The consent panel in that case prioritised ecosystem health ahead of agribusiness. The Amendment Bill aimed to change this, so that commercial applications were given the same priority as ecosystems and human health in freshwater allocation. 

The Bill also removed the rules keeping cows out of mud i.e. intensive winter grazing. And it removed the RMA blockage to new coal mines. This all means more cows and dirty rivers and coal mines and climate and water pollution.

Budget Day 2024 was on May 30. MfE officials who normally vet the climate impacts of the budget were kept out of the loop but Treasury did some rough calculations to show the Budget would increase emissions by about 2.8 million tonnes. Government cut about $2.4billion out of programmes designed to cut emissions.

There were many environment cuts including:

  • Environment Ministry baseline was cut by $617m over 4 years or 21%;
  • $900m remaining unspent in the Climate Emergency Response Fund was returned to general coffers;
  • Climate Commission faced a budget cut of $85m over four years;
  • MfE cut $10m from evidence data science and analysis;
  • 3D Coastal Mapping was cut from 85% of the coastline to 40%, saving $9m
  • MPI programme for research into planting native forests at scale, saving $50m;
  • And they abolished the Environmental Legal Assistance Fund in the Budget. The $600,000 fund was small but was used by community groups and environmental NGOs to take important environmental legal cases. 
  • The Community Environment Fund was cut, which supported many small environment community groups.
  • The Minister announced that the Waste Levy could now be used for many other purposes than reducing waste, resulting in an effective cut of $230m in Ministry for the Environment funding.

They increased funding to the Ministry for the Environment by $92m to cover the cost of the fast track legislation and the amendments to the RMA – that is, we are paying an extra $92m for officials to work on measures to increase pollution.

On June 9th 2024 Shane Jones announced that the Government will amend the Crown Minerals Act to overturn the ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. They aimed to change the purposes of the Act to promote oil and gas exploration. And they aimed to reduce the liability for oil companies cleaning up their mess at the end of the life of oil and gas fields – he said that this will align with international best practice, even after officials told him the opposite. 

And then we get to June 11th 2024 and agribusiness biological emissions, half of all New Zealand’s emissions. Under lobbying from agribusiness, the government announced that it will change the law so that agriculture and fertiliser companies will not face a price on emissions in 2025. This means there will be no financial incentive to cut emissions, unlike other sectors of the economy. Treasury and MfE said the government’s approach would not work in cutting emissions (surprise). And it went in the face of the Climate Commission, which supported pricing agricultural emissions as an essential tool to cut emissions. Fonterra’s claim that New Zealand is a low emissions dairy producer was debunked by their own reports, and Nestle remained skeptical of New Zealand’s claim to be a low emission producer of dairy. The Government also removed the reporting requirements on large meat and dairy processors so they don’t even need to disclose their pollution.

And with an audible sigh of relief from agribusiness, the government disestablished He Waka Eke Noa on June 11 2024. He Waka Eke Noa was the joint industry-government process established by the Ardern Government ostensibly to develop a pricing mechanism for agricultural emissions. Of course, everyone knew that in fact, He Waka Eke Noa was agreed to by agribusiness simply to delay emissions pricing until after the election. Agribusiness fought against climate action, delayed its implementation while pretending to seek consensus on the details, and then celebrated its demise under a new Government.

On June 13 2024 new rules to protect seabirds from being killed by longline fishing boats were announced. The rules were opposed by industry, of course, but the arrival of cameras on boats had led to a 350% increase in reported deaths of seabirds – previously the industry had been illegally failing to report them – so the pressure to protect seabirds was intense. The decision on the new rules was one for officials rather than the Minister fortunately and would in time lead to a big drop in seabird deaths in the longline fleet. 

On June 19th 2024, the ETS auction failed to attract any bids. The fossil fuel industry and the Government claimed that the ETS was the key mechanism to drive emissions reductions. But the repeated failure of ETS auctions to attract a single bid would suggest otherwise.

On June 30 2024, Government announced that long-delayed work to update air quality standards was to be delayed by two years. About 3300 New Zealanders die prematurely each year from air pollution.

Then, on July 9th 2024, the Government announced its carbon capture and storage (CCS) policy framework. CCS is a failed technology promoted by the oil and gas industry as an alternative to actually cutting fossil fuel use. Officials’ advice was that the CCS strategy would actually increase emissions, because it would reduce incentives to cut them. As it turned out, the main CCS project, storage of carbon dioxide in empty gas and oil reservoirs off Taranaki, was not cost-effective and is now stalled (see later). .

They followed this up on July 9 2024 announcing they were weakening carbon efficiency standards (Clean Car Standard) for imported cars (like Trump), which will increase emissions by about two million tonnes. The Transport Minister at the time, Simeon Brown, directed officials to consult only with motor vehicle lobby groups that wanted to weaken the standard, and to not consult with low-emissions vehicle sellers, which resulted in misleading information in the cabinet paper. When Ministry for the Environment officials saw the misleading information, they tried to add corrections to the Cabinet paper, but they were told they couldn’t because it had already been lodged with the Cabinet Office. It transpired that it had been lodged early by the Minister at the request of the motor vehicle lobby.

On July 10 2024, the Climate Minister Simon Watts announced the Government’s five-point climate plan in a half page press release. While there wasn’t much to it, he promised it would be fleshed out in the Emissions Reduction Plan 2026-30. 

And as promised, a week later on July 17 2024, the Government published its draft Emissions Reduction Plan. However, the Plan was not serious as it was premised on magic – magic technology to cut methane emissions and magic Carbon Capture and Storage. Neither of which has any likelihood of appearing in the real world after 20plus years of government funded research. It made it seem like New Zealand is doing something about climate change. Still, the Plan showed New Zealand missing its targets in spite of a biblical commitment to planting pine trees.

They cut the funding to climate science on July 23 2024 (like Trump) with the scientists being snapped up by Germany. 

August 8 2024 saw one in five jobs at the Environmental Protection Authority cut (like Trump).

On August 9 2024, the Government said it would overturn court decisions on sections 70 and 107 of the RMA, court decisions which restricted water pollution. The Minister for Agriculture, Todd McClay, said they would legislate over these decisions because the “the court decisions could result in more discharges needing consents, more consent applications being declined, and consent conditions becoming more restrictive, reducing the ability to improve freshwater quality over time.” So less pollution would make it harder to improve freshwater quality. Truly Orwellian.

After a huge campaign by environment NGOs, on August 25 2024 the Government backed down on some elements of the fast track bill. They backed down on having three ministers as the final decision makers on the applications for consents, to be replaced by expert panels. This would prove to be very significant in 2025 as not all expert panels were willing to rubber stamp Ministers’ favourite projects. However, the Government retained the exclusion of sustainability from the purposes clause, so that decisions were to be heavily weighted towards the profit interests of business, and they retained the exclusion of the general public from submitting to the decision making process. 

Many projects would be listed in the Bill with automatic access to the fast track, however the Government refused to release this list prior to the select committee process. After the bill became law, a single Minister, Chris Bishop, would decide which further businesses could access the fast track process. Disturbingly, in a profound conflict of interest, he was also the National Party Campaign Chair, responsible for running their re-election campaign, heavily dependent on donations from businesses some of whom also happened to be fast track applicants.

After vigorous lobbying by agribusiness, on September 3rd 2024, the Government announced it was ‘pausing’ the rollout of freshwater farm plans designed to restrict water pollution. Which means more water pollution, more cows, more climate pollution.

It followed this up on September 4 2024 with the announcement of the second RMA Amendment Bill. This aimed to weaken the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management, weaken drinking water standards, weaken protection for indigenous biodiversity to allow more quarrying and mining, remove local councils ability to set higher standards on forestry slash, stopping the rollout of freshwater farm plans until they were aligned to industry demands. More climate and water pollution. 

The forestry rules had been strengthened after Cyclone Gabrielle, where forestry slash caused widespread damage to bridges, houses, fences and other infrastructure. The strengthened rules gave councils the ability to set higher standards for commercial forestry to control slash. At the request of commercial forestry companies the Luxon Government was now proposing to roll back these stronger rules so communities would face the same issues again in the future.

The September 4 2024 ETS auction failed to attract a single bid.

On September 11 2024 the carbon-neutral public service program was put on the chopping block. In November 2025 the Government announced that the target to make the public sector carbon neutral would be moved out from 2025 to 2050, comfortably beyond the term of any current ministers

The Government also pushed an amendment to the Companies Act to remove the references to Directors’ ability to consider environment, social and governance issues when making decisions.

On September 20, 2024 the Government decided to set orange roughy quota on the basis of decade old data, an inverse of the precautionary approach. We later found out that other orange roughy fisheries had already collapsed and quotas would be cut after the collapse.

September 25 2024 saw the Government announce that it will weaken discard rules for fishing companies. In previous years fishing companies were caught illegally dumping fish at sea, and hence new rules were introduced to stop all dumping, so that fishing companies couldn’t exploit any loopholes. The dumping is back.

September 28 2024 saw the signing off of the rule requiring councils to implement higher speeds, around schools and other locations that they had previously restricted speeds. Councils told the Government it would cost them a lot of money to change all the signage, which would ultimately end up on rates, and more people would be killed and injured. Auckland Council alone faced a bill of $7m to $21m to change signage which ratepayers would be forced to pay. But the Government ignored them.

The start of October 2024 saw the leak of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade advice that the decision to restart oil and gas exploration was likely to breach the free trade agreements with the EU and UK. This part of the MFAT advice was inadvertently included in the physical briefing paper, even though it was redacted online. They tried and failed to hide their climate malfeasance.

On October 6th 2024, the Government was forced to release the list of 149 projects it planned to include in the fast track bill for automatic entry to the fast track process, after the Ombudsman intervened. It included coal mines, seabed mining, incinerators, and irrigation projects, which will increase emissions and biodiversity destruction. The list was released after the select committee process so that the public could not submit on the individual projects. It emerged that companies and individuals associated with these 149 fast track projects had given $500,000 to the ruling parties as election donations. 

The Government crowed about the handful of renewable energy projects in the list, without mentioning that the Ardern Government’s COVID 19 RMA fast track law, which maintained environmental guardrails, also included a string of renewable energy projects. Ten of these renewable energy projects were approved,  a couple are still being considered and a couple were declined. Declining some projects happens when there are environmental rules still in place. There were no coal mines or dairy expansion projects in the earlier list because of their environmentally destructive impact.

The Luxon Government discovered that some regions were already making progress on proper freshwater farm plans so they announced on October 9th that they would block the development of these freshwater farm plans while they worked with agribusiness lobby groups to replace them with weaker industry approved plans.

Then on October 11th 2024, the Government removed the renewable preference and renewable energy targets from the Government Policy Statement on electricity – Simeon Brown said he is “fuel agnostic” ie he doesn’t care if energy sources cook the climate or not. 

October 13th 2024 saw a new excursion into Orwellian discourse with the announcement that the government would allow commercial ringnet fishing in ‘high protection areas’ of the Hauraki Gulf.

October 15th 2024 saw late rushed amendments included in First RMA Amendment Bill, this time amending section 107. This amendment was aimed at overturning a March 2024 court decision. The court decision said that Section 107 restricted pollution going into freshwater if it caused significant harm to aquatic life. The Government had previously told public submitters it was not changing section 107, so there was no chance for public input. The change allows councils to grant discharge permits, regardless that these discharges would cause significant adverse effects to aquatic life. The RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop described the changes as ‘quick and dirty’ and for once it was an accurate characterization.

October 21 2024 saw the announcement of another RMA amendment, this time to section 70, which would be included in the Second RMA Amendment Bill. The proposed amendment would overturn important court decisions by the Environment Court, the High Court and finally, in 2024, the Court of Appeal. As summarised by David Williams, the court decision found that “before a regional council can include a rule in its regional plan permitting farm pollution, it needs to show there won’t be significant adverse effects on aquatic life.” Seems a pretty reasonable decision. 

Fish and Game and Forest and Bird had won this series of cases against Fonterra, Dairy NZ, Federated Farmers and the Southland Regional Council. It cost them a fortune and was eight years since the Council first proposed the rule allowing the pollution.

Fonterra, flying in the face of decades of science, claimed “no evidence has been presented pointing to diffuse farming discharge(s) either individually or cumulatively causing any of the listed effects in section 70” i.e. significant harm to aquatic life (Fonterra submission 16-8-22). But the Environment Court disagreed with Fonterra and concluded that it was “highly likely that the result of the discharges of contaminants” would be significant adverse effects on aquatic life.

The Government believed agribusiness should not be required to get a consent to discharge pollution that caused serious adverse impacts on aquatic life, rather it should be permitted ie allowed without a resource consent. A pivotal moment.

As you can see removing constraints on agribusiness water pollution was an itch which the Government could not stop scratching.

The Government faced another constraint on water pollution which was that some regional councils planned to proceed with their updated regional freshwater plans, so on October 22 2024 the Government announced that they would legislate to retrospectively block regional councils from gazetting the regional freshwater plans, regardless of what regional councils may want.

Which meant the next day the Otago Regional Council had to cancel its meeting to approve the new Otago regional freshwater plan, due to central government intervention to stop them. The plan had been developed over many years with community input.

The first RMA Amendment Bill passed on October 23, 2024 (Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2024). This Act did a number of things to remove protections for nature:

  • Panels making resource consent decisions on water allocation could no longer give highest priority to ecosystem health and human health, ahead of commercial interests. The existing hierarchy – ecosystem health, then human health, then commercial – was known as Te Mana o te Wai and sat within the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management (NPSFW). Henceforth, commercial water users have the same priority as other uses such as ecological or human drinking water. 
  • Overturned the rules controlling intensive winter grazing (mud farming) in the National Environmental Standards for Freshwater (NESF), to return to the previous situation where cows in mud was normal in Southland and Otago;
  • Made consenting for coal mining easier;
  • Suspended the requirement for councils to identify significant natural areas;
  • Allowed councils to approve water pollution discharge consents that cause ‘significant adverse effects on aquatic life’ so long as the water was already pretty polluted ( ie it  overturned the court decision on section 107 of the RMA);
  • Changed the rules excluding stock from rivers and wetlands to allow more stock access; 
  • Paused the rollout of freshwater farm plans while government reworked them along the lines demanded by Federated Farmers and Dairy NZ; 
  • Retrospectively blocked the notification of regional council freshwater plans and policy statements developed under the existing National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management 2020;
  • Changed the process for developing RMA national policy statements to remove the independent Board of Inquiry, and the Minister took over the whole process.

It was a wishlist from agribusiness and other industry lobby groups. This was no surprise given that the Associate Agriculture Minister Andrew Hoggard is the former president of Federated Farmers, a lobby group which vociferously opposed measures to clean up water pollution.

On October 25 2024, as a result of the Government’s fast tracking of seabed mining, the offshore wind developer, Bluefloat, pulled out of New Zealand. Offshore Taranaki is a great place for cheap renewable baseload wind power, but not if seabed miners are digging up the ocean floor, destabilising turbine foundations and electric cables. Bluefloat did not donate cash to the governing parties (unlike the seabed mining shareholders).

Regulations for low emissions buildings were chopped on November 6 2024, to be replaced by a voluntary approach, in spite of the building industry’s record with lax regulation leading to the leaky houses catastrophe.

On November 12 2024 a GNS study of rural school drinking water for the Ministry for the Environment was quietly released. It found 100 schools (41%) with nitrates over 1mg/L, a level which has been linked to increased rates of colorectal cancer. The study concluded that the biggest future risk to school drinking water was nitrate contamination.

Company carbon disclosure was delayed for another year by the External Reporting Board on November 14 2024. 

The Treaty Principles Bill had its first reading in Parliament on November 14, 2024. The Bill aimed to gut Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Te Tiriti has been vital to some important environmental victories such as the Supreme Court decision on seabed mining. For these reasons, and more, Greenpeace and other environmental organisations opposed the Bill. 

On November 15 2024, the Government started consultation on proposals to concentrate decision making on local conservation management plans in the hands of the Minister, removing local Conservation Boards as decision makers. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment raised concerns about this concentration of power but also the proposal to remove limits in conservation plans. Limits are important tools – currently there are limits on how many water taxis can travel in Abel Tasman Park or helicopter landings near the West Coast glaciers. A free for all approach will make those locations even more like a noisy Disneyland. 

On November 21 2024 the Southland regional council’s requirement to develop a farm plan, to control water pollution, was deferred by central government. The farm plan requirements had been developed over a decade with input from civil society including farming interests. Southland has disastrous water quality due to the expansion of industrial dairy – from 40,000 to 640,000 cows in 30 years.

More coal mining was one of Luxon Government priorities, in spite of the climate and biodiversity impacts, and they were fast tracking new mines. On December 2 2024 we learnt that the annual cost to the government of treating the acid mine leakage at a single historic coal mine, Stockton, is greater than the entire annual royalties paid by the national coal industry. Coal only survives on taxpayer subsidies.

December 4 2024 saw the publication of the report into what methane targets would be like if New Zealand adopted the livestock industry’s preferred way of measuring methane warming, as opposed to using the IPCC science. In doing its work the review group’s complete list of consultations was with two groups: a Groundswell-aligned climate denier group and one other commercial entity. Predictably, the outcome was to suggest weaker methane targets!

The ETS auction on December 4 2024 failed to clear, but 22% of the carbon credits sold and the Government put out a self-congratulatory release. It was to be a short-lived victory as the March and September auctions attracted zero bids.

On December 5th 2024, one Government minister said they won’t be buying offshore carbon credits to meet our Paris commitments, while another said they might.

On December 6th 2024, the Government really pushed the boat out when they appointed fossil fuel lobbyist John Carnegie to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. EECA was set up by Green Party Co-Leader Jeanette Fitzsimons to reduce fossil fuel use. Carnegie previously opposed EECA grants that would reduce fossil fuel usage.

On December 11 2024, the Government formally released its decisions to amend the First Emissions Reduction Plan (2022-25) some of which were already announced. The amendments abandoned 41 actions in the original Plan including:

  • Assessing how the ETS could support indigenous biodiversity;
  • Support for regions managing the energy transition;
  • The Climate Emergency Response Fund;
  • Develop a Circular Economy framework;
  • Requirement for transport decisions to demonstrate emission reductions
  • Reducing vehicle kilometers travelled
  • Support uptake of e bikes
  • Support for energy efficient capital investments (including heating/cooling)
  • Gas transition plan
  • Ban on new fossil electricity generation
  • Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry
  • MPI information for farmers to cut emissions
  • Agricultural emissions pricing mechanism
  • And more.

This was Simon Watt’s five point climate plan in action.

On December 11 2024 the Government also released its final Second Emissions Reduction Plan 2026-2030, which still relied on magic methane inhibitors to cut agricultural emissions, magic carbon capture and storage to capture energy emissions, and lots of pine trees on private and public land. Fossil gas and coal remained a key component of the projected future energy system. Fully a third of projected emissions ‘reductions’ were from carbon capture and storage. Pricing of agricultural emissions by 2030 was the cornerstone of the plan to cut agribusiness pollution. As would become clear soon enough, this was a work of fiction as the carbon capture and storage proved not feasible and in October 2025 the Government itself permanently ruled out pricing agriculture emissions.

The documents around the ERP acknowledged that ‘New Zealand is substantially off track to meet its [Paris Agreement] target”, (p.22) and that was before the Government ended 41 different initiatives to cut emissions .

On December 17, 2024 the Fast Track law passed its third reading. The law allowed for fast track approval of 149 projects including coal mines, toxic incinerators, seabed mining and irrigation projects which would all result in more climate pollution and biodiversity destruction. The law had no environmental sustainability clause in its purposes. Future access to the fast track process was controlled by Chris Bishop, who is also the National Party Campaign Committee Chair. Over $500,000 had already been channeled in 2022 and 2023 to the ruling coalition parties from individuals or corporations with connections to the 149 fast tracked projects listed in the Act. More cash flowed in 2024 from interested corporations to ministers’ parties.

A new bill weakening the rules on the release of genetically modified organisms was passed at first reading on December 17 2024. It was destined to get stuck in select committee.

2025

January 30 2025 brought the Government’s announcement of a new Paris Agreement climate target, which was pretty much the same as the old one and still with no plan for how to meet the target without massive purchases of offshore carbon credits. It wasn’t a serious commitment to global climate efforts.

They do however take coal mining seriously which is why on January 31 2025 they included it in the list of ‘critical’ minerals that it is prioritising for extraction (even though it isn’t technically a mineral, but I’m nitpicking). Vanadium is on the list too, which is what they are hoping to mine off the seafloor off Taranaki. 

But the climate was serious for the insurance companies. In February it was revealed they were suing councils over inadequate flood protection schemes, which had failed to protect property from climate-amplified extreme weather events. Councils are asking central government for help with the burden of more flooding. Good luck with that.

But the Government is keen to help reduce a different kind of climate burden – the ‘burden’ of reporting on carbon emissions. As they revealed on February 11 2025, with a proposal to reduce by half the number of companies that must disclose their emissions.

February 11 2025 found one of the Government favoured fast track projects, the Waimate waste incinerator, in trouble after it lost its land deal agreement for the pollution project.

On February 12 2025 the Government released its proposals to hide the footage from cameras on fishing boats from the public, weaken fisheries sustainability rules, and allow more fish dumping. Economic interests and voluntary measures would be given more weight in ministerial decisions on quota setting, and longer periods allowed for stocks to recover from overfishing. The proposals were developed with the fishing companies.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released his estimate of central government 2024/25 environmental expenditure on February 13, 2025. Spending on responding to climate change had increased by $670m compared to the previous year, as the Government was still funding the response to the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. Spending on other areas, such as cutting climate emissions and protecting biodiversity, had declined by about the same amount. It was a warning of the fiscal challenge of climate denialism.

The insurance industry waved another warning flag on February 14, 2025 when it issued its report on the insurance cost of the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. There were 118,000 claims costing $3.8billion. They called for ‘avoiding building in dumb places’, while the Government was fast tracking new housing on a floodplain, for one of their donors.

The diversion of International Conservation and Tourism Visitor Levy funding away from biodiversity protection was the business of the day for February 17, 2025.

February 21 2025 brought more government announcements on Carbon Capture and Storage as they sought to find ways to appear to meet their Paris commitments without cutting emissions. 

Proposals to protect the high seas by restricting bottom trawling on seamounts in international waters were being vetoed by the New Zealand Government on February 25 2025, and other governments were pretty mad about it. Remarkably the New Zealand Government position was significantly more anti-environment than the Trump Government position.

February 26 2025 found the Climate Minister telling Federated Farmers that there was no legal obligation to meet the Paris targets, and no liability.

Weakening food safety laws was the focus on February 27 2025, where the Government announced it wants faster approval of agrichemicals with less time to review their safety for people or the environment.

On March 3rd 2025, Greenpeace revealed that it had to obtain the coordinates from the Australian Government for the bottom contact incident in which a New Zealand fishing vessel dragged up coral from a seamount. Greenpeace was organising a research expedition to look at seamounts and wanted to see what damage was caused, but the New Zealand Government would not release the coordinates of the incident.

March 7 2025 found them stopping the scheduled phase out of polystyrene and PVC food and drink packaging, while they consulted further with the packaging industry. The decision not to phase out these waste streams was part of the new waste strategy which was designed to reduce waste. So figure that one out if you can.

March 14 2025 brought a second offshore wind group, Sumitomo, pulling out of New Zealand because of the Government fast tracking seabed mining in the same location – south Taranaki.

March 19 2025 found us at another ETS auction, with not a single bid. Oddly there was no government press release this time.

Part of the reason for the tepid interest in carbon credits was revealed by David Seymour when he said on the same day that the only reason the Government was staying in the Paris agreement was fear of trade retaliation, and they are weighing up the costs versus benefits of leaving it (like Trump). This does not give the carbon market a lot of certainty.

Treasury also didn’t believe the Government was serious about meeting its Paris target. Treasury had not listed the cost of buying offshore carbon credits to meet New Zealand Paris target as a liability in the government accounts. As Treasury said in February 2024 the “Government has not indicated a responsibility to other parties to achieve [the Paris target] by a sufficiently specific statement.”

On March 21, 2025 the Environment Court paused a court case brought by Fish and Game and Forest and Bird that would have restricted diffuse pollution discharges in Southland. The case was paused due to the pending Government’s changes to section 70 of the RMA to allow more pollution.

On March 24 2025, Bishop announced high level direction for two new acts to replace the RMA. They will be centred on protecting private property rights and providing compensation to property owners if local government interferes with their property rights in order to protect the environment. It is bound to have a very negative effect on environmental protection. For instance, regional councils that seek to regulate dairy companies to reduce their water pollution will find themselves facing the risk of having to pay compensation for lower stocking rates – regulatory takings – if their rules are more restrictive than central government direction.

Rock lobster numbers have totally collapsed in the Hauraki Gulf, but on March 25 2025 the Government decided not to close the whole Gulf’s rock lobster fishery. Rather they closed only the inner Gulf, where there are no rock lobsters to catch anyway, leaving the outer Gulf fishery to continue its decline.

The ETS auction may also have been undermined by the government decision revealed on March 26 2025 to double the subsidies to Rio Tinto – free ETS carbon credits of $75m per year to the global mining giant. The Climate Minister Simon Watts rejected calls to review free allocations, even when they were backed by the Climate Commission. And even when Watts said he might review some free allocations worth $70m a year that were no longer needed, he was stymied by the inability of the Climate Commission to provide the necessary advice, because Watts had cut its budget. These free credits are still being issued to companies that do not need them – free money.

On March 17, 2025 the NZ Food Safety agency proposed to increase the maximum residue limit for glyphosate (Roundup) in food by 100 fold. Glyphosate was categorised as a probable carcinogen in 2015 by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. 2015/16 was the last time NZFS tested for glyphosate in our food and found residues over the legal limit in a third of wheat samples, up to 59 times the legal limit. NZFS took no action against those companies with illegal levels of glyphosate residue and dropped glyphosate from the list of agrichemicals included in its annual testing programme. It has never tested our food again for glyphosate, but now wants to dramatically increase the maximum residue limit. The Minister for Food Safety incidentally is Andrew Hoggard.

On April 4 2025 we saw the last day of an eight week court case in which Ngāi Tahu sought co-management of freshwater in the South Island. This was driven by central government’s abject failure to protect the rivers and lakes of the South Island from dairy pollution resulting in widespread water contamination. The Government opposed it and wants to continue with its approach of further weakening freshwater protections. The judge is thinking about their decision.

April 8 2025 saw the government closing the Green Investment Fund.

The Ministry for the Environment released a GNS study of groundwater on April 8 2025 which found 41% of testing bores had elevated nitrate, particularly in dairy intensive areas like Canterbury. 

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released his forestry report on April 9 2025. His number one recommendation was to stop the planting of unlimited amounts of pine trees to offset emissions from burning fossil fuels. The Government ignored his recommendations on ETS reform and doubled down on fossil fuels, as we shall see later in 2025.

On April 16, 2025 after stopping the rollout of freshwater farm plans that were designed to meet environmental outcomes, Cabinet agreed that freshwater farm plans just needed to align with industry best practice. Whether this resulted in more or less pollution was not the issue. Agribusiness had been pushing for this outcome ever since freshwater farm plans were floated as an idea. 

On April 23, 2025 the Government decided to increase the speed limit on the Otaki to Levin road from 80kmh to 100kmh, in opposition to the local community’s wishes. The local Mayor opposed the increase and pointed out that there had been zero deaths since the speed dropped, as opposed to the average of two per year. Incidentally five months later the Transport Minister called the same road a death trap.

On April 21 2025, at an international meeting, the NZ Government abstained on putting a price on international maritime climate pollution as part of global efforts to cut shipping emissions. At this point we might count ourselves lucky they didn’t vote against it.

The next day, April 22, they announced they would halve the frequency of environmental indicator reporting. 

Finally, on May 7 2025, after 310 days of a vacant Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor role, the Prime Minister nominated John Roche to the role, a dairy industry insider. Roche previously had a leadership role at the industry lobby group Dairy NZ, which lobbies against measures to cut climate and freshwater pollution. 

The majority of members of the government science advisory panel also had dairy and agribusiness backgrounds. But, to be fair, one of the panel members worked for an energy company, Genesis, which runs Huntly coal power station.

On May 8 2025 the Government moved quickly to protect mines and motorways from skinks and kiwis. It followed a court ruling that developers had to try to avoid incidental killing kiwis and skinks and other endangered animals.

On the same day it was revealed that there was a shortage in funding to the predator-free programme. So two kinds of predators were set onto native wildlife – mining companies and ferrets. 

The Hauraki Gulf was back in the cross hairs on May 14 2025, this time to give the green light to bottom trawling in the entire Gulf. Under the previous government this destructive activity was going to be restricted to a small area.

On May 19 2025 it became clear that the Kapuni Carbon Capture and Storage project was not feasible. This one project was responsible for one-third of all projected emission reductions in the Government’s Emission Reductions Plan. CCS is a fraud in plain sight and its failure means the Government’s Emissions Reduction Novella has a new hole.

Budget day on 22 May 2025 brought new attacks in the War on Nature.

They allocated $200m in the budget to co-invest in new oil and gas exploration and have signalled that it may be more. This is a straight subsidy to increase climate pollution. This was alongside an unlimited and uncapped 20% tax write-off for new investments, which included fossil fuel investments – along with most everything else in what may turn out to be the biggest corporate welfare program since the ETS. The International Energy Agency stated that there can be no new fossil fuel investments if we are to achieve our climate targets.

In the budget, we discovered cuts to the predator-free NZ program, which was already underfunded. Predator control is one of the ways our native forest could absorb more carbon while protecting native species. 

And they cut overseas climate financing from $250m to $100m.

The Nature Heritage Fund was cut in the Budget, which had previously purchased important pieces of land to add to the conservation estate.

The Regulatory Standards Bill passed its first reading on May 22, 2025. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment opposed the Bill stating that its ‘provisions could be interpreted to mean that regulations cannot prevent people from polluting or damaging property in public or common ownership.’ Or in plain language it protects corporations’ right to pollute the commons. The Bill meant that if regulations to protect freshwater resulted in limits on the size of a dairy herd, then there was an expectation of compensation. The Bill’s future is yet to be determined, even though 99% of the 159,000 submissions opposed the bill.

The EPA has the job of running the fast track process and it had been keeping applicant information secret from the public. But on May 26 2025 they were forced to release it after they lost a court case brought by EDS.

And then on May 27 2025 it was back to weakening rules on pesticides with Cabinet making final decisions on fast tracking agrichemicals. Agrichemicals in New Zealand are pretty loosely regulated, with not a single prosecution for breaching maximum residue limits of pesticides in food for at least a decade, in spite of offenders exposing consumers to organophosphate at 360 times the legal limit. We can expect it to get worse.

And on May 29 2025 the New Zealand Government released a series of proposed changes to RMA regulations. These changes are additional to, and sometimes overlapping with, the two RMA amendment bills (the first already passed in October 2024 and the second passed in August 2025). The proposed changes to RMA regulations would mean: 

  • Stock would be allowed to graze in natural wetlands that have endangered species;
  • It would further entrench the changes to the hierarchy of water allocation and mean that freshwater can be allocated for dairy expansion even if it means there is not enough water for the ecosystem or human health;
  • Removing or weakening the nitrogen fertiliser cap that currently exists for dairy farms;
  • Weaker environmental bottom lines for freshwater – such as nitrate, sediment, phosphate – to allow more water pollution;
  • Forestry slash could no longer be regulated by local councils to a higher standard than central government allowed;
  • Making it easier to consent mining in ecologically important areas like wetlands. 

The fact that only 10% of original wetlands remain, that most lowland rivers and lakes are highly polluted with nutrients mainly from intensive agriculture, and that three quarters of native freshwater fish and two thirds of our freshwater birds are threatened with extinction, does not appear in the discussion documents. All of the proposed measures would make this even worse by allowing more intensive agribusiness.

June 3rd 2025 found the Prime Minister attacking international climate scientists who had called out the New Zealand Government for attempting to change the measurement of methane warming. The scientists’ concerns ran on the front page of the Financial Times.

Next up on June 5 2025 was the Government’s move to gag the Fish and Game organisation. Fish and Game has played a crucial role over decades in raising issues around freshwater pollution, drawing attention to the role of intensive dairying, and litigating to protect rivers and lakes from pollution. Fish and Game were trying to protect the freshwater habitat of trout and salmon from dairy pollution. Hence it has been relentlessly attacked by Federated Farmers, which called for its advocacy function to be removed, after Fish and Game (and Forest and Bird) won a court case to restrict water pollution in Southland. 

And hey presto, the Government announced plans to legislate to restrict Fish and Game’s advocacy function, which had allegedly ‘overstepped the mark’. Under the Cabinet paper, Regional Fish and Game Councils will only be allowed to file court proceedings ‘with the authorisation of the [Fish and Game] National Council or the Minister [for Hunting and Fishing] as appropriate”. The Minister was also given the power to review Fish and Game Councils at will, and sack elected councillors. If Fish and Game dares to challenge dairy pollution in court again, they can be overruled by the Minister.

On June 11 2025 it was revealed that a New Zealand fishing vessel bottom trawling a seamount had pulled up six tonnes of protected stony coral in a single trawl. This was after Winston Peters had re-announced a $10m contribution to global efforts to, wait for it, protect corals. The Government rejected calls to protect seamounts from bottom trawling.

But not to be outdone in biodiversity destruction, on June 17 2025 it was revealed that another fishing boat had killed hundreds of seabirds – tītī sooty shearwaters – in a trawl net. Many of their chicks on land would have consequently starved to death as well. While New Zealand now has rules to protect seabirds from surface long-line fisheries, after much campaigning by the environment movement, the measures to protect seabirds from trawl fisheries are still voluntary.

The Government’s fast tracking of seabed mining off Taranaki was not only opposed by iwi but also the local council on June 25 2025. But the Government persisted.

The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance is a global group of countries committed to moving beyond oil and gas. The decision by the Luxon Government to subsidise fossil fuel exploration meant it was only a matter of time before it got kicked out, so on June 25 2025 it left.

On July 2 2025 it was revealed that the biggest orange roughy fishery had collapsed down to 8% to 18% of original biomass and the Ministry of Primary Industry was consulting on options to cut quota. As usual this quota reduction proposal came after the fishery collapsed, when the industry could no longer land their quota. The overfished orange roughy fishery had been in a bad state for some time. In November 2023 the industry was forced to relinquish the blue tick provided by the greenwashing organisation Marine Stewardship Council. The representative of the deepwater fishing firms said at the time that they didn’t believe there was a sustainability issue! 

MSC had given the orange roughy fishery ‘certification for sustainable fishing practices” and, just 70 days before the revelation of total collapse, the MSC put out a release celebrating the sustainability of the orange roughy fishery! The fishery should be closed until stocks rebuild but as we shall see in September that option was not chosen.

Intensive agriculture on the Canterbury plains is driving the nitrate emergency and the Government decided to hand out $56m in loans to irrigation schemes at the heart of the pollution crisis on July 3 2025. Which will only make it all worse.

The Climate Commission produced its latest emissions projections on July 25, 2025, which showed New Zealand is 7Mt CO2e over its 2022-25 emissions reduction target. The PR spin was that New Zealand was on track to meet the 2022-25 budget but it only appeared to be on track because of a change in methodology which reduced calculated emissions by 7Mt CO2e. The Climate Commission requested that the Government adjust its budgets to account for the change in methodology, but the Government refused and then claimed to be on track!

The changes to the Crown Minerals Act passed on July 31, 2025. The headline was the grossly irresponsible overturning of the offshore oil and gas exploration ban. But the changes to decommissioning costs were also important. 

One of the global oil industry tactics is to take the profits from productive oil fields, but, as the field is exhausted, they pay another company to take ownership of the field including the end-of-life decommissioning liability. The last company then goes bankrupt and the government has to pay for decommissioning. This happened with the Tui oil field and taxpayers had to pay $300m to decommission it after Tamarind Oil went bankrupt. The Ardern Government changed the law after the Tamarind experience so that the company that made all the money from the oil field retains responsibility for decommissioning costs – it’s called trailing liability. 

But with this new Jones amendment to the Crown Minerals Act, the Resource Minister and the Finance Minister can allow the sale of an oil field without the decommissioning liability. It was a present to the oil industry, who can once again hand over the decommissioning costs to Government if they can get Ministers to agree. Jones you may remember is the person who couldn’t be trusted with a ministerial credit card. He defrauded the government by using his ministerial credit card to buy hotel pornography in 2010 and was forced to pay back $5000 when it was revealed.

On August 2 2025 the Government announced changes to the Conservation Act to allow more commercial operations on the conservation estate. The especially problematic part of the plan is opening the door to the disposal of five million hectares of conservation land.  

August 4 2025 found the Government celebrating the decision by the four oligopoly electricity generator-retailers to subsidise the survival of the Huntly coal fired power station. Huntly generates the most expensive electricity in the country, so when it runs it sets the price all generators get paid at a high level, regardless of how low their actual generating costs are. The four gentailers have constrained new cheap renewables to keep Huntly in the mix.

On August 6 2025, the Luxon Government announced that it was progressing with law changes to fisheries legislation to remove public access via the Official Information Act to the footage of the cameras on boats. They also plan to restart dumping of unwanted fish by commercial operators.

The second RMA Amendment Bill (Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Act 2025) passed its third reading on August 14, 2025. This Act delivered a number of changes including:

  • As demanded by Dairy NZ and other agribusiness lobby groups, Freshwater Farm Plans can be signed off by agribusiness industry bodies approved by the Minister, and now apply to fewer farms;
  • The changes to section 70 of the RMA empower a regional council to authorise the permitted discharge of contaminants to freshwater that may cause disgusting pollution (or in legal language ‘may result in the production of conspicuous oil or grease films, scums or foams; a conspicuous change in the colour or clarity of the receiving waters; any emission of objectionable odour; the rendering of fresh water unsuitable for consumption by farm animals’); or significant adverse effects on aquatic life in the receiving waters.
  • It restricted regional councils ability to protect biodiversity in the inshore marine environment by giving the Director General of Ministry of Primary Industry the ability to veto any regional plan that restricts fishing (ie the new law overturns the Motiti court decision to protect inshore marine biodiversity);
  • Coal fired or gas fired power plants must now have their consent applications fast tracked and processed within 12 months;
  • It allows the Minister to change regional council plans and policy by regulation without normal consultation, overriding local democracy; 
  • It stops councils planning processes while the government’s new RMA replacement is being developed, but allows private plan changes to proceed. Private plan changes are used by private developers to override existing planning constraints.

EDS stated that “There’s nothing balanced here. The Government is systematically dismantling our environmental laws.” 

The changes that Chris Bishop, Andrew Hoggard, and Todd McClay have driven through the RMA via these two amendment bills, will make a lot of activities that are currently illegal, legal. Most dairy corporation pollution is already legal, that which was illegal was seldom detected, and where it was detected it was very seldom prosecuted. The law changes mean that even less pollution will be prosecuted – no doubt the lower level of prosecutions will be claimed by agribusiness and the government as proof that pollution is improving when of course it will be the opposite.

August 14 2025 also saw consultation from the Government about what to do about crayfish numbers crashing in Northland. A closure of the fishery seems unlikely but there are so few left it may be unavoidable.

The cost of inaction over climate change also reared its head on August 14, 2025 (busy day) as it became clear the government will need to increase the Natural Hazards Commission levy, due to the cost of climate-amplified extreme weather events. The levy is added to the cost of home insurance. Ironically the Minister responsible is David Seymour, who opposes action on climate, yet he planned to increase the levy by about $200 per year to pay for recovery from climate-amplified disasters.

And at the same time, councils will be required to improve their response to natural disasters made worse by climate. But there will be no further government funding to help them so it will have to be covered by rates, further adding to the cost of living crisis.

One of the Government’s hand picked fast track projects had its application frozen on August 14, 2025 after being unable to pay the application fees. The incinerator in Te Awamutu would be burning toxic materials which could pour poisonous smoke over local communities. So being unable to even pay the application fees doesn’t instill confidence that the company can operate a dangerous incinerator safely. It also draws attention to the hopeless judgement of Government Ministers pushing this project down the fast track. Six weeks later the fees were still unpaid.

The controversial Sunfield housing development on a floodplain south of Auckland, another of the Government’s chosen fast track projects, was also suspended on August 14, 2025. The project faced opposition from local authorities due to concerns about flooding, stormwater, water supply, transport, land subsidence and more. The project had been rejected through normal planning processes but had gained entry to the fast track. The company behind the development is Winton Land. As Radio NZ reported: “Its director Christopher Meehan gave $50,000 to Act in 2023 and $103,260 to National. Speargrass Holdings, a company Meehan is a director of, also gave $52,894 to National in 2022. In total, $206,154.23 was donated.” Chris Bishop, National Party Campaign Chair, had publicly supported the company in its legal battle with the former Government.

On August 15 2025 the EPA’s list of company emissions didn’t include some of the biggest climate polluters, after the government changed the rules so that agribusinesses no longer have to be transparent about their pollution. That covers half of New Zealand climate emissions.

In a sign of things to come, on August 20, 2025 Tower Insurance moved to increase the cost of insurance for those houses at risk of climate flooding and withdrew cover entirely for some. Tower earlier warned of the need for a climate adaptation framework, which the Government has failed to deliver.

Also on August 20 2025, the operator of Maui, New Zealand’s biggest gas field, confirmed that it was coming to the end of its life and would need to be decommissioned at some point soon, possibly as early as March 2026. This would add to the energy crisis. The Government’s decision to abandon the NZ Battery Project, the Gas Transition Plan and the Decarbonising Industry Investment looked pretty stupid.

August 21 2025 found Chris Bishop weakening the clean vehicle standards.

The Waihi North gold mine is being fast tracked by the Government even though it has significant impacts on the Coromandel Forest Park, home to endangered Archey’s and Hochstetter’s frogs. On August 29 2025 Forest and Bird lodged a formal comment on the proposal with the panel hearing the application. This is the limit of general public involvement in this highly significant and destructive project.

On September 3, 2025 the courts found that the consents previously given to MHV irrigation scheme in Canterbury were illegal, as they  breached section 107 of the RMA. The court found that the intensive agriculture facilitated by the irrigation scheme had caused ‘significant cumulative adverse effects on aquatic life.’ But the Government had subsequently changed s.107, so the courts saw little gain in overturning the consents as they could be re-issued under the new s.107. It was allowed to continue.

On September 11 2025 the Canterbury Regional Council revealed that half of private drinking water bore tests in the Selwyn district were over the legal limit for nitrate pollution (a legal limit which is itself eleven times above the level that increases rates of colorectal cancer).

On September 15 2025 the collapse in hoiho (yellow eyed penguin) numbers led Shane Jones to introduce temporary restrictions on set netting around the Otago Peninsula, otherwise he would have faced court action. Hoiho drown in fishing nets and reported numbers of drownings in set nets have risen (presumably with the camera rollout). We shall see if this becomes a permanent closure.  

On September 16, 2025, we found out that efforts to protect the famously pure water at Te Waikoropupu springs were threatened by Chris Bishop’s freeze on council plan changes, and Federated Farmers are trying to scrap the efforts permanently. The springs are facing rising nitrate pollution from dairy intensification which has led the local council to seek a Water Conservation Order which would restrict additional pollution. It is this WCO that is now in jeopardy. Federated Farmers want to abolish all WCOs altogether, and the Government is thinking about doing this.

The Government tried to have its cake and eat it on September 16 2025 by claiming that seabed mining and offshore wind generation are compatible in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Another of the Government’s hand picked fast track projects, an Ōrewa housing project (Delmore), fell over on September 16 2025. Auckland Council, Watercare and Auckland Transport submitted that there simply wasn’t the infrastructure available for one of the Government’s highlighted pet projects. There was not the water supply, waste water treatment facilities, roads, or public transport. Watercare alone said it would need to spend $1.4billion of ratepayers money to service the project. Jones warned officials not to hobble the project, led by a failed property developer who was previously banned from being a company director. Delmore was encouraged enough to lodge a revised application in January 2026.

Canterbury regional council – ECAN – declared a nitrate emergency on September 17, 2025. Nitrate levels are rising to dangerous levels across the region driven by intensive dairying. Public health academics and scientists applauded the declaration, pointed to the extra 1.1million dairy cattle in Canterbury since 1990 and the 300% increase in synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and laid out steps for addressing the issue.  However, as we’ve seen above, the government’s initiatives allow for more nitrate pollution, and place restrictions on regional councils ability to control dairying, and hence nitrates. Like an arsonist condemning a victim for shouting ‘fire’, the Government called the regional council declaration a ‘gimmick’. Meanwhile some Ashburton residents can no longer drink their bore water due to nitrate and faecal contamination, Gore town water had too much nitrate for safe consumption, as did Waimate.

The Government is fast tracking a consent to lower the level of Lake Hawea, which will mean that many local drinking water bores will go dry upsetting locals at a September 18 2025 public meeting. The lower lake levels are being sought to allow more power generation – an energy crisis the Government has made worse.

The scale of diversion of funds from the so-called ‘International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy’ was revealed on September 18 2025 as $139m per year. We are telling visitors that the Levy is going to support conservation efforts and tourist facilities but much of it is just going into general revenue.

On September 19 2025 it was revealed that the Government is looking to take the Independent Climate Commission out of the process of providing advice on Emissions Reduction Plans. The Climate Minister Simon Watts had previously denied any such proposal existed.

The full extent of ‘kina barrens’ became apparent with the publication of MPI research on September 19 2025 showing that these were present on at least a third of rocky shores of northeast New Zealand. Kina barrens are caused by overfishing of kina predators – snapper and crayfish. This leads to an over population of kina (sea urchins) which in turn eat the kelp forests and create a barren rocky area (‘kina barrens’). The collapse of kelp forests leads to cascading ecological effects as they are the nursery for fish. Shane Jones’ earlier decision to not close the Outer Hauraki Gulf to crayfish fishing looked particularly short sighted given the widespread kina barrens in places like Hauturu-o-Toi (Little Barrier Island 77% loss), the Noises (72%), Mimiwhangata (57%) and Great Mercury (40%). 

The September 22 2025 EPA expert review of the TTR seabed mining proposal was in the news – the expert review found a long list of problems. Here’s a sampler:

  • One part of the application said no chemicals would be discharged to the ocean, another said they would. 
  • The 2025 ‘updated’ environmental impact report was actually based on decade old reports. 
  • The application was disorganised with some documents still in draft state, missing appendices, unfinished sentences, large number of missing references etc.
  • The core extraction technology – roasting to extract vanadium – had only ever been done in a laboratory and even there had many problems and toxic outputs.
  • Many many other problems

This project had been around for more than a decade or more, had been rejected by the Supreme Court and sent back for more work, and was still a mess. Yet this is what the Government was pushing down the fast track, blocking offshore wind generation which we desperately need.

On September 23, 2025 Fish and Game withdrew from the court case to restrict diffuse water pollution in Southland. Fish and Game, together with Forest and Bird, had won at the Court of Appeal, but the Government’s subsequent changes to section 70 of the RMA made it harder to keep winning. Federated Farmers were very pleased. The Southland Federated Farmers President Jason Herrick was reported as saying that having the Minister actively involved in setting the direction for Fish and Game meant it will be easier to collaborate in the future. The project to gag Fish and Game’s advocacy function, to gag civil society, was working as they had hoped.

To add to the assault on democratic norms, September 24, 2025 found Act Party Minister David Seymour telling the regional council that they should not enforce current laws on consenting. However, rule of law applies to the regional government whether Seymour likes it or not. As Prof Andrew Geddis pointed out, the regional council is required to follow the existing law, not some mooted whim of a Minister. This was similar to the actions of another Act Party Minister, Andrew Hoggard, who in March unlawfully tried to get councils to ignore their legal obligations to identify significant natural areas.

But still the scientists were not silenced yet, and on September 25, 2025 they published a peer reviewed paper based on thousands of water tests showing that one in three rural New Zealanders faced high levels of nitrate in their drinking water – in Canterbury it was approaching one half. The Maximum Acceptable Value (MAV) is 11.3 mg/L NO3-N, but there is evidence of elevated risk of pre-term birth at half the MAV and increased risk of colorectal cancer at 1mg/L. “Based on an estimated 646,600 rural residents in New Zealand using groundwater-sourced drinking water, there could be upwards of 21,200 people drinking nitrate contaminated water above MAV, and 101,000 people drinking water above ½ MAV across rural New Zealand.” Isotope testing found that dairy effluent was the main source of the nitrate.

Policy after policy was designed to increase industrial dairy and it was showing in Fonterra’s climate reporting. The 2025 Fonterra Annual report published on September 25, 2025 found that climate pollution had increased 2.2% from 2024.

And adding to the flood of science, on September 28 2025 Land and Water Aotearoa published data on 3500 river, lake and groundwater sites – 1200 of the testing sites have at least 20 years of quality data. The data showed “impaired ecological health at two-thirds of monitored sites across New Zealand, along with declines over time in pollution-sensitive aquatic species showing declining freshwater health in two thirds of the sites.” Two thirds of monitored sites are considered unsafe for swimming due to fecal contamination.

On September 29 2025 we got a glimpse of the wave of dairy conversions being approved under the weaker freshwater rules – at least 18,000 new cows in Canterbury alone – many in the most polluted zones. Each dairy cow has an effluent stream equivalent to 14 people, so the environmental impact of an extra 18,000 cattle is like 250,000 new people added to the Canterbury plains without sewerage treatment. 

Meanwhile on September 29 2025 the Fishing Minister released final decisions on quota in the collapsed orange roughy fisheries. He refused to ban bottom trawling on seamounts, despite having to slash the quota for ocean roughy because, once again, the New Zealand fishing industry collapsed the fishery and they couldn’t catch their quota. Seamounts form the habitat for orange roughy to breed and grow, and as the population collapsed the fishing industry was targeting spawning (breeding) events by bottom trawling on the seamounts – further collapsing the population. Shane Jones did open the door to ‘spatial’ measures to control fishing, which could mean restrictions on bottom trawling seamounts, so let’s see if any reason walks in through that door. The reality is that the fishing industry and MPI have once again collapsed the fishery and the Minister has once again failed to close it.

The Government finally released, on October 1st 2025, its package of energy reforms, ostensibly to address high prices and security in the energy sector. The package centred on taxpayer subsidies to build a fossil gas (LNG) import facility, subsidies offered to gentailers for new coal and gas fired generation, and re-announcing subsidies for oil and gas exploration – Trump would be proud. The LNG import facility would result in very expensive gas and electricity and at best would cover only one third of the dry year risk.  Cheaper renewable energy options were sidelined. Virtually nobody thought it would work to deal with the energy crisis – the three parties in the coalition could agree on very little other than they like fossil fuels and don’t care much about climate! The oligopoly gentailer electricity companies were left free to keep maximising profits by propping up fossil fuel generation, and hence their share prices rose after the announcement.

But the Environment Minister was busy, though not so much protecting the environment but rather pressuring environmental regulators to approve agribusiness projects with links in high places. 

On October 1 2025 we found that she had been pressuring Horizons regional council to renew water abstraction consents to a particular group of agribusinesses, one of which happened to be owned by her colleague, National Party MP Suzy Redmayne. Horizons had paid for an independent science assessment of groundwater levels in the area which found that they were dropping due to abstraction. The regional council was offering to renew these agribusiness abstraction consents, but with tighter conditions in order to protect the groundwater for all users and the natural environment. It was these conditions that were the reason for the complaint to the Minister and her intervention to pressure the Council.  Good to know she’s busy in the freshwater space.

On October 4 2025, the Canterbury regional council revealed that it had already approved 21,000 extra dairy cattle this year, with another 15,000 in process of being approved. This will add to the nitrate contamination of the region.

And after a decade of work by environment NGOs iwi and hapu, the law to increase protection in the Tīkapa Moana / Hauraki Gulf, finally passed parliament on October 7, 2025. The only change made by the Luxon Government to the bill was to allow commercial fishing in some of the so-called ‘high protection areas’ and to refuse to protect any of the seafloor from bottom trawling. 

Also on October 7 2025, the Prime Minister announced plans to change the fast track law to ‘further streamline planning approval for nationally and regionally significant projects’. This means that they want to further reduce democratic input and environmental protections for projects selected by the National Party Campaign Committee Chair, Chris Bishop.

Coincidentally on October 7, 2025 it was revealed that the Environment Minister had barely used her powers under the Fast Track Act to provide submissions on fast track applications. Under the Act most of the public are excluded from submitting on fast track projects but we were reassured that environmental interests are protected because the Environment Minister can submit. But she has only bothered to submit eight times on 43 projects sent her way. We can only assume that Penny Simmonds was too busy pressing regulators to approve water abstraction permits for National Party MPs’ farms.

The State of the Marine Environment report was released by Statistics NZ and the Ministry for the Environment on October 8, 2025. It found that climate change was causing rising temperatures and acidification in the marine environment which was a threat to marine ecosystems as well as fisheries. Climate driven sea level rise and storms are a threat to tens of thousands of coastal homes and infrastructure. Bottom trawling and killing of marine mammals and seabirds by fishing companies was a threat to marine ecosystems. 477 sealions and fur seals were killed in 2024/25 and 53 turtles were caught. Nitrogen and sediment from intensive agriculture, forestry and poorly regulated urban expansion was impacting coastal ecosystems. Virtually every threat identified in the report is actively being made worse by the Luxon Government’s policy.

And on October 10 2025 the Fishing Minister warned that he planned to take action against the Waikato Regional Council because it proposed to ban the destructive fishing practice of bottom trawling around the Coromandel. The regional council developed its new coastal plan over a number of years with many public and scientific submissions. Shane Jones and Chris Bishop had changed the RMA in August to make it harder for regional councils to protect the inshore ocean in this way, but the Waikato plan was already in development when the law was changed so it is harder to stop. Seafood NZ planned to take legal action against the Council for its efforts to protect the ocean.

And finally on October 12 2025, the Government announced that it plans to weaken New Zealand’s methane reduction target range to 14% to 24% reduction by 2050 from 2017 levels (currently the target is a 24% to 47% reduction). Methane is responsible for 48% of all New Zealand’s greenhouse pollution, overwhelmingly from agribusiness. The new target is built on the livestock industry’s preferred metric for methane warming (GWP*) rather than the science accepted by the IPCC, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and the Climate Commission. The Government also plans to ensure that agribusiness never faces a price on its methane emissions, at the same time its policies are increasing the dairy herd. Pacific leaders were unsurprisingly disappointed.

The Climate Minister was forced to concede that the new methane target may not be consistent with global obligations to limit emissions to 1.5 degrees of warming. Pricing agricultural emissions and associated mitigation technologies were responsible for 62% of all emissions reductions identified for the 2031-35 Emissions Budget! This single decision on weakening the methane target will result in increased warming equivalent to the entire UK annual emissions.

The world’s largest international climate adaptation conference was held in Christchurch on October 14 2025 but the Climate Minister was unable to go as his party whips would not give him leave from Parliament. Those 1800 attendees from around the world, including scientists and policy experts, will not be able to influence Simon Watts, and vice versa, which was a pity. 

The long awaited Climate Adaptation Framework was released two days later on October 16, 2025 – all two pages of it. It sidestepped the central question of who pays, and nor did it give a clear direction to stop building on floodplains and other climate exposed sites, which the insurance industry has been calling for. Of course it would be a bit embarrassing if the Government did do this given they fast tracked a housing development on a floodplain for one of their political donors. Maybe not attending the adaptation conference made sense after all.

The key vote to put a price on shipping emissions took place on October 17, 2025 at the International Maritime Organisation meeting – New Zealand abstained again.

Like a dog with a bone, October 20 2025 found the Government proposing to spend an astonishing $44 billion to $54 billion of our money on a hand picked group of 17 new motorways. These motorways were chosen by the National Party before the last election for political reasons. They were not run through a normal capital spending prioritisation process, in which you might decide we need a new hospital in Dunedin before a new motorway for example. In the latest release of costings, the Government changed the way that benefit-to-cost ratios were calculated to make it seem saner, but it is not. The Northern Expressway alone would come at a cost of $70 per vehicle per trip for 30 years assuming that traffic doubled. 

The Government announced that it would roll back mandatory climate reporting on October 22, 2025. The number of large corporate entities that must report climate pollution will be cut from 170 to just 76. And directors will no longer be liable if the entities fail to follow the law. Reducing climate disclosures makes it harder for customers and investors to understand which companies face climate risk and harder for the government to understand the national climate pollution profile to design policies to reduce emissions.

The Expert Panel concluded its hearings on the TTR seabed mining project on October 23, 2025. No doubt to the ire of Shane Jones, the Expert Panel allowed Greenpeace and other groups to present evidence. Aside from the environmental harms of the project, loads of evidence was presented showing that seabed mining is incompatible with offshore wind due to disruption of the seafloor. If we are successful in stopping the project, and if offshore wind goes ahead, following consultation with iwi and the broader community, then this may turn out to be one of the historic inflection points in New Zealand’s energy system.

The first national flood risk model was released by Earth Sciences New Zealand (NIWA and GNS amalgamated) on October 30, 2025 showing “more than 750,000 New Zealanders live in locations exposed to flooding from one-in-100-year rainfall flooding events. And this number could increase to more than 900,000 with a further 3 degrees of warming due to climate change.” This flood risk model did not include increased risks due to sea level rise or coastal storm surges from climate change. You might think this level of risk would give the Government pause on its climate obstruction agenda, but seemingly not.

On October 31, 2025 another new solar farm was approved, this time in the Wairarapa, through the normal consenting process. The Government tried to justify its anti-democratic anti-environment fast track law on the basis that it was needed to consent new solar generation. In fact large amounts of new solar has been consented through the normal RMA process with environmental guardrails. 

Chris Bishop introduced changes to the Fast Track law on November 4th 2025 to further speed up the processing of his hand picked projects and restrict public rights to protect the environment. 

  • The requirement to consult iwi and councils prior to seeking to enter the fast track process would be replaced with sending them an email.
  • Expert Panels would be required to reach a decision in only 60 working days even for the most complex project. 
  • The Department of Conservation would only be given 15 working days to provide commentary on applications to be referred to the fast track. 
  • Ministers would be given more power to intervene in the process by issuing Government Policy Statements defining ‘regional and national benefits’ which would advantage their pet projects. 
  • Expert Panels would face tight constraints on calling independent parties to make comments on projects, such as environment NGOs and community groups.
  • Appeal rights would be restricted to only those parties which Expert Panels were required to invite to give evidence.
  • Applicants would be given the ability to complain about individual panel members.
  • Ministers would be able to give direction to the ‘independent’ EPA running the fast track process.

All of these changes are aimed at restricting public input into the process and making it easier for polluting projects to be rubber stamped. The CEO of the independent EPA announced his resignation, much to the joy of Shane Jones who claimed the EPA had been an obstacle to approving projects.

Also on November 4, 2025 Shane Jones released his finalised fuel security plan for Aotearoa. Which is puzzling because the Government is trying to make the country more dependent on imported LNG for electricity and other uses, has cancelled the gas transition plan to make us less dependent on imported fossil fuels, has cancelled the big battery project to improve energy resilience in a dry winter, has weakened fuel efficiency standards for vehicles etc etc.  

And on the evening of November 4, 2025 the Government announced a raft of changes to gut climate laws and the ETS. The fake consensus on climate change was officially pronounced dead. 

  • The ETS will no longer be managed in a way to align with our Paris climate target. This follows the Government systematically dismantling efforts to cut domestic emissions (see above!) yet still failing to commit to purchasing offshore carbon credits to meet the Paris target. 
  • The independent Climate Commission will be stripped of its role of providing advice prior to the Government developing its Emission Reductions Plans. 
  • The Government will be able to amend Emission Reduction Plans at will, without public consultation.
  • The target of a carbon neutral public sector was moved from 2025 to 2050. 

The price of carbon on the ETS market immediately dropped. The policy of the government is plainly to increase greenhouse pollution.

On November 6, 2025 the Government announced it was expanding the fossil gas related activities that were eligible for government subsidies.

A November 13 2025 analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions of New Zealand’s largest companies showed that half have increased their emissions. The biggest increase came from New Zealand’s biggest climate polluter, Fonterra, which increased its emissions by half a million tonnes. Luxon’s pro-pollution policy settings are having exactly the result one would expect.

On November 14 2025 the CEO of the country’s biggest fossil gas user, Methanex, admitted that it was unlikely that the Government’s policy of restarting oil and gas exploration would make any difference to the future of fossil gas in New Zealand, as the gas fields were mature and earlier exploration had been unsuccessful. This was of course completely contrary to all the Government rhetoric.

On November 17 2025 the Luxon Government further weakened the fuel efficiency standards, which will make it easier to import more polluting vehicles. Chris Bishop said that vehicle importers told him there was a shortage of supply of low emissions vehicles in New Zealand. But of course it was the change in Government policy which caused the collapse in electric vehicle imports by 70%. 

Also on November 17 2025 the Government announced that its preferred transport spend in Wellington is a four lane motorway that would cut up to ten minutes off MPs travel time to the airport during peak hour. It would cost $4 billion and replace earlier plans developed by the Wellington councils to prioritise low emissions transport solutions to congestion.

The climate talks were underway in Brazil and on November 18 2025 New Zealand was awarded the ‘Fossil of the Day’ prize for the Government’s to slash methane reduction targets in the middle of a climate emergency.

The new Boston Consulting Group report on the New Zealand energy situation came out on November 19 2025 and like others poured cold water on the role of fossil gas, as the country is “not about to usher in a new era of abundant gas”. The Government’s favourite policies – restarting oil and gas exploration with government subsidies and an LNG import facility – were not the top policy options, rather they recommended accelerating investment in renewable generation.  

New Zealand dropped further in global league tables on climate action, released on November 19, 2025. And of course did not join the countries calling for a roadmap for the phaseout of fossil fuels on the sideline of COP30.

On November 20 2025 the Finance Minister revealed that the Government was kicking the can down the road on increasing the Natural Hazards Levy, which covers the increasing cost of climate disasters. Even though the Levy is estimated to be 50% too low to cover the likely cost of future disasters, the Government is leaving that climate liability for a future Government.

Meanwhile the Government was trying to reassure the carbon market that it really did have serious ambitions to cut emissions after the price of ETS carbon credits dropped significantly. The market was not convinced,prices remained low and the December 3 2025 ETS auction failed to sell a single 

Unit.

As if to prove the wisdom of the carbon markets, the very next day on December 4 2025 the Government announced its formal response to the recommendations from the Climate Commission to strengthen New Zealand’s climate response – the Climate Minister announced that the Government would reject the Commission’s recommendations, every single one of them.

And speaking of rejecting advice, December 2025 also found the Government rejecting advice from the Infrastructure Commission that rushing into an LNG import terminal was a bad idea when there were better cheaper options that needed exploration. MBIE officials had also stated that there was a ‘low need’ for the terminal – this advice was originally redacted from publicly released papers, and only came to light as a result of a complaint to the Ombudsman about the redactions.

December 10 2025 saw the rushed passage of the Fast Track Amendment Bill which gives more central control to Ministers and further restricts public rights in the process, as outlined above when it was introduced on November 4. Muldoon rides again.

Four days after introducing the Climate Change Response (2050 Target and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, the Government passed it under urgency on December 12 2025. No public submissions were allowed. The Bill cuts New Zealand’s methane reduction target from a minimum of 24% to a minimum of 14%. Officials told the Ministers that the new weaker target was consistent with 2.7 degrees of warming or higher – a level the UN has described as catastrophic. The Government said it acted to advance the profitability and trade competitiveness of agribusiness.

On December 17 2025, while it was continuing to weaken New Zealand’s efforts to cut climate pollution, it was releasing new guidance for carbon capture and storage. CCS is every climate polluter’s answer when asked to cut emissions.

On December 18 2025 it was revealed that new houses continue to be connected to the fossil gas network, locking in households to gas dependence, even though it is more expensive than electricity and more polluting.

Also on December 18, 2025 the Government gazetted changes to national environmental policy statements to facilitate the mining of wetlands and remnant significant natural areas. Only 10% of New Zealand’s original wetlands remain. Only the mining industry was consulted on the new regulations.

The year rounded out on December 19 2025 with the Supreme Court ruling that the Government must take climate change into account when making decisions on tendering blocks for oil and gas exploration. Shane Jones was not happy.

2026

The Government started 2026 by refusing on January 7 to take action to protect leatherback turtles which are being caught and killed by the New Zealand fishing industry at alarming rates. The industry killed 1% of all remaining western leatherback turtles just in the last fishing season.

On January 29 2026 it was revealed that major insurance companies are pulling out of Westport due to flooding risk made worse by climate change. Westport needs support to adapt but there is limited funding after the Government disestablished the Climate Emergency Response Fund in 2024.

Also on January 29 2026 the Government released its amended Second Emissions Reduction Plan covering the years 2026-2030. The Plan had to be amended after they decided not to put a price on agribusiness emissions. The Government has repeatedly claimed that pricing emissions is the key tool to reducing them, however the now amended ERP2 assumes that agribusiness emissions will follow roughly the same pathway of reduction without a price signal. They simply assumed that the lack of price would have no impact on emissions and hence there was no need to model the impact, so they did not, which is not credible. And as we shall see, Fonterra’s emissions were already rising rapidly.

On Waitangi Day, February 6 2026, the expert panel released its draft decision to reject TTR’s fast track application to mine the seabed off Taranaki. It was a defeat for the Government and a win for the planet. It was a direct consequence of the earlier victory of the environment movement to force the Government to backdown on direct ministerial decision making on fast track projects.

On February 7 2026 we found out that the annual Rakaia River salmon fishing competition was cancelled as there are no salmon. The competition has been running for over 40 years and used to attract 1000 anglers. Intensive dairying has killed the fishery and, as we have seen above, the Government intends to have more and more cows. 

The Government was back to its LNG import terminal on February 9 2026 announcing that it was planning to pay for the multibillion subsidy to fossil fuels by levying everyone’s electricity bills.

On February 11 2026 the Government was forced to admit that the UK Government has been raising concerns with New Zealand ministers about the backtracking on climate and biodiversity policy. Earlier Ministers had denied it had ever been mentioned.

Lest there be any confusion about their intentions, on February 17 2026 the Government announced that they would simply disestablish the standalone Ministry for the Environment and roll it into a mega ministry.

The Infrastructure Commission released its National Infrastructure Plan on February 17 2026 which threw cold water on the Government’s claims that the nation needs an LNG import terminal. The Commission agreed with most everyone that LNG is a high cost project which could lock us into expensive imported fossil gas and take capital away from developing cheaper renewable generation and storage. The Government refused to listen to reason.

And on February 19 2026, after TTR revealed that they were withdrawing from the fast track process because the expert panel delivered a draft decision to reject them, Shane Jones announced a new $80m slush fund to support critical minerals companies. The money was to come out of the Regional Infrastructure Fund. Are new mines critical infrastructure? Of course not but as we will see Jones bent the rules to suit his mates. 

On March 18 2026, Opuha Dam irrigators were denying peer reviewed science that their scheme was causing major ecological damage to the region’s rivers. The irrigation company had written to the Government asking them to pressure the regional council to not enforce the environmental conditions of their resource consents because their pollution was so great. Locals were getting sick taking their drinking water from local streams, streams that used to be clean and full of life before the irrigators arrived. Agribusiness celebrated Opuha irrigation as a boon for the environment, community and local agribusiness companies – in fact only one of this trifecta benefitted.

On March 19 2026 the New Zealand and Irish Governments announced a joint plan to pretend that they can cut emissions without cutting cow numbers. Both Governments are trying to overturn agreed climate warming science to claim that methane isn’t really such a problem.

Meanwhile UK officials were meeting with their NZ counterparts on March 24 2026 as part of the UK NZ free trade agreement and asking them to explain how the decisions to subsidise fossil fuels and weaken the methane reduction targets are consistent with the environmental provisions in the agreement. NZ risks breaching the UK and EU free trade deals, which include provisions not to weaken environmental protection, and this could result in costs to NZ exporters.

In a similar vein the Sustainable Business Council and the Climate Leaders Coalition released a report on March 31 2026 that argued there were significant economic benefits for pursuing decarbonisation. The Government pretty much ignored it. They did however listen closely to the secret lobbying of two leading members of the CLC, Fonterra and Z Energy, who wanted a law change to protect them from litigation for the harm their climate pollution was causing.

The Government rounded out the month on March 31 2026 by passing the Fisheries Amendment Bill through first reading. The Bill removes public access to cameras on boats footage, limits public input into fisheries decisions, restricts judicial review of these decisions, allows commercial fishing companies to dump more fish and more horrors. The Government later backed down on some aspects of the Bill but there are many more problems.

On April 1, 2026 Fonterra admitted it had been misleading customers by claiming its Anchor butter was “100% NZ Grass Fed”. In fact a large part of Fonterra cows’ diets is palm kernel, sourced from palm plantations responsible for destroying rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia. The Commerce Commission had refused to act against Fonterra’s blatantly unlawful advertising so it was left to Greenpeace to prosecute them.

And just to prove the point about the dire state of freshwater, on April 9 2026 the Department of Statistics and the Ministry for the Environment released their State of the Environment Report on Freshwater. Groundwater, rivers and lakes are all in trouble. Just to pick a few random stats: half of groundwater monitoring sites had e.coli levels above legal minimums at some point; nitrate pollution was getting worse at about 40% of groundwater sites; half of total river length was unsafe for swimming due to pollution; nitrogen pollution was getting worse in more than half of monitored lakes. And so on.

The growth in dairy pollution was also seen in the Greenhouse Gas Inventory report for 2024, released a week later on April 16 2026. Emissions rose from increased milk production and synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use even as they fell in other areas such as sheep.

The fast track fiasco was back on April 21 2026 as Auckland Council was forced to spend ratepayer money appealing the decision to give Winton’s Sunfield housing development fast track consent. Sunfield would result in hundreds of new houses on a greenfield site on a city fringe floodplain with no water or wastewater connections. If it proceeds Auckland ratepayers will have to cover the cost of infrastructure and buying out the flooded houses. Entities close to Winton are major donors to the ruling parties.

Sniffing around the fast track rubber stamp, the promoters of a lignite to urea factory announced they wanted to fast track their super-polluting business on April 22 2026.

Regional council plan changes were frozen by Chris Bishop back in July 2025, stopping the rollout of new regional freshwater plans, such as in Otago, that would have tightened rules on water pollution. So why did Bishop decide on April 23, 2026 to allow Canterbury regional council’s plan change 8 to partially proceed? He let the part of Plan Change 8 proceed which would allow water-take consents to be transferred between different uses, such as from wool scouring to new dairy irrigation. But he blocked the part that would have tightened the rules on dairy intensification. Say no more.

The Ombudsman was raising concerns about the Fisheries Amendment Bill exempting footage from cameras on boats’ footage from the Official Information Act on May 2, 2026. The cameras were inconveniently revealing high rates of killing of Hector’s dolphins by fishing companies.

Meanwhile on May 4 2026 the Government was announcing (in the middle of a 222 page technical publication) its decision to allow beef cattle and deer to graze in wetlands even if those wetlands had identified populations of threatened native species (p.135). Also it decided to strip councils of their ability to regulate forestry planting and slash (p.68-9), slash which had caused truly massive damage during Cyclone Gabrielle.

And right on cue the Climate Commission released its National Climate Change Risk Assessment on May 7 2026 which suggested that more extreme weather events like Cyclone Gabrielle are more likely due to climate change. So maybe we should help councils control forestry slash rather than help forestry companies avoid their responsibilities? The Commission also found that inland flooding would threaten 590,000 buildings, so maybe fast tracking National Party donors’ housing development on a floodplain isn’t in the national interest? And maybe we should, you know, cut emissions.

May 7 2026 was also the day the Government introduced its Conservation Amendment Bill that would open up 60% of public conservation land for sale, would allow the building of resorts, restaurants and shops in national parks, and give the Department of Conservation a new purpose to maximise economic development. Sounds like Trump.

The OECD released its report on New Zealand on May 11 2026 concluding that the Government’s proposed LNG import terminal risked locking New Zealand into expensive polluting fossil fuel energy. OECD economic and energy experts also concluded that fossil gas would not help with the dry year risk. They were critical of the subsidies to diesel vehicles and penalties on electric vehicles. Luxon’s intellectual deconstruction of the OECD report was to call it ‘a load of rubbish’ and he planned to proceed as per Muldoon with his Think Big fossil fuel project. 

In order to protect climate polluters from legal action, National announced on May 12 2026 that they would legislate to stop citizens going to the courts to seek common law relief for the harm that climate polluters have caused them. The law would retrospectively protect Fonterra and Z Energy from current court action brought by Mike Smith. 

In a major backdown on May 25 2026 the Government was forced to provide limited support for businesses to reduce their fossil gas use, in the form of an 80% loan guarantee for investments to cut gas use. The Government had abolished the GIDI scheme back in December 2023, which had provided grants to do the same thing. The Government had wasted two and half years, misleading businesses with magical thinking about oil and gas exploration, so that businesses didn’t invest in the transition and, even worse, thousands of new houses and businesses were connected to fossil gas that has no future.The loan guarantee scheme didn’t start till the end of July 2026 and will have little effect on cutting gas dependence in the short term.

Meanwhile it was revealed in court documents on May 25 2026 that Fonterra and Z Energy had been secretly passing their briefing documents to the private email address of the PM’s chief policy advisor and providing documents in hard copy form. These documents provided the template for the government’s legislation to block climate tort law. The PM’s office unlawfully failed to disclose these documents under the Official Information Act. Fonterra and Z Energy are leading members of the Climate Leaders Coalition – but where exactly are they leading?

Full year data on fishing company deaths of seabirds and marine mammals in 2025 showed the full extent of the horror on May 26, 2026. Over 1000 seabirds and 345 marine mammals were killed. And more than 8000 kg of coral and sponges (which means that 20 to 50 times that amount was destroyed on the ocean floor). 

Shane Jones went to Cabinet on May 27, 2026 to divert $50m of taxpayers money to two of his favoured mining companies, even though these two companies did not meet any of the criteria for receiving money from the Regional Infrastructure Fund. The Cabinet approved the funds nevertheless.

This $50m largesse for Jones’ favoured mining companies was in contrast to the Department of Conservation which had its baseline funding cut by $37m over four years in the Budget released on May 28 2026. The Budget maintained the $200m subsidy for fossil fuel exploration, but was missing around $1.4billion in revenue from the sale of carbon credits due to the failure of ETS auctions.

The Budget also revealed on May 28 2026 that, of $190m income from the International Conservation and Visitor Levy in 2025/26, only $33m went into new biodiversity initiatives.

The near collapse of the largest orange roughy fishery, after years of overfishing and benthic destruction by industry and mismanagement by MPI, resulted in partial closure of the fishery on June 4 2026. At around 8% of the original population a more permanent closure would be precautionary.

On the freshwater front there was another victory in the courts on June 8 2026 when the Environment Court approved Waikato Regional Council’s Plan Change One, which restricts water pollution in the Waikato catchment. The Plan Change was opposed by major polluters, such as corporate dairy farmers Wairakei Pastoral, in the courts for a decade. Entities linked to Wairakei Pastoral are major donors to the ruling parties and ominously these parties made noises to protect the interests of their donors.

On June 9 2026 the Government announced it was proceeding with an LNG import terminal but would no longer pay for it by levying individual consumers’ power bills, but would make electricity generators pay for it (and they will no doubt then pass the cost onto consumers). This was in spite of opposition by BCG, Meridian, OECD, Sapere, Concept Consulting, Infrastructure Commission and the climate movement.

On June 11, 2026 it was revealed that the Government had suppressed the part of an MBIE report in which the modelling by Concept Consulting found low need for an LNG import terminal.

No wonder the Government doesn’t want people to hear the truth about the cost of their fossil fuel obsession when the Treasury had to admit on June 11 2026 that it would cost $5 billion to buy offshore carbon credits to meet New Zealand’s 2030 Paris climate commitments, because of the failure to cut emissions domestically. It was a $5 billion bill for inaction.

The Director General of MPI was rewarding a recidivist fishing criminal, the Tasman Viking, with a permit to bottom trawl the high seas on June 12 2026. The Tasman Viking hauls up coral and illegally does not report it.

And as if to underline this inaction, it was revealed on June 17 2026 that the Government had decided to scrap the ban on coal boilers that was due to come into place in 2037.

And on June 18 2026 Shane Jones launched an attack on the Supreme Court for their December ruling that climate change was a mandatory consideration for the Government when deciding whether to offer up new blocks for oil and gas exploration. The permits at issue in the court case were those issued to Jones political donors, Greymouth Petroleum. Jones threatened new legislation to override the Supreme Court decision.

But with the election approaching, and opposition to the Fisheries Amendment Bill growing, the coalition parties decided on June 18 2026 to park the Bill until after the election. Watch this space.

And just as a reminder of what was at stake, on June 18, 2026 it was revealed that two of the last 150 orca left in New Zealand waters were killed by the fishing industry in May by drowning in set nets.

A few days later on June 22 2026, Shane Jones revealed that he is planning to put compensation clauses into the deals when he gives $200m to oil and gas companies, to protect oil companies from changes in government policy after the election. The $200m slush fund is overseen by a handpicked group of oil and gas people including John Pagani who was External Affairs Manager at New Zealand Oil and Gas when it paid Tamarind Oil to take over the end-of-life Tui oil field – Tamarind later went bankrupt leaving the taxpayer with the $300m decommissioning cost to which NZOG contributed nothing.

MPI opened consultation on management of tarakihi stocks on June 24 2026 revealing that stocks have dropped below 8% of original biomass. This shows total mismanagement by MPI and the fishing industry. Tarakihi, like orange roughy, is being caught using bottom trawling which is destroying their benthic habitat. The Government remains opposed to restrictions on bottom trawling.

In spite of the relentless subsidization of fossil fuels, their share of all energy use continues to decline, as revealed by EECA on June 24, 2026. This is a pattern repeated globally – fossil fuel companies are struggling to compete on price so are relying on government subsidies and regulatory protection.

But once again the election pressed on the Government, and hence on June 25 2026 they announced a princely $7m would be offered to support the installation of rooftop solar. Yep a whole $7 million. And they announced they would later change the Conservation Amendment Bill, which was already at select committee, so as to remove the clauses to open up 60% of public conservation land for sale. But pressed ahead with all the other terrible parts of the Bill. Of course this too, like the Fisheries Amendment Bill, depends on the election outcome.

Controlling land use (especially forestry) on extremely erosion prone land was the subject of Gisborne District Council’s Plan Change 7. The Council was responding to Cyclone Gabrielle’s dramatic impact on the east cape, in which erosion and forestry slash caused huge damage to people and the environment. Plan Change 7 would have given the Council the ability to control land use on the most erosion prone land and require permanent forest coverage, but it was blocked by Chris Bishop’s plan stop. And so back in December 2025 the Council had sought an exemption from the plan stop. Seven months later on June 28 2026, Bishop said no. The Government also declined to fund any transition of the erosion prone land.

The Climate Minister reprimanded councils for making planning decisions based on high impact climate change scenarios on July 1 2026. These are the same councils that the Government has blocked from taking action to reduce risks from extreme weather events, such as Gisborne trying to control forestry slash but blocked by central government, or Auckland trying to control new houses on floodplains but central Government fast tracking just such developments. Local Government NZ wrote back to ask the central government to develop a national adaptation plan with clear cost sharing, something which it has so far refused to do.

It was an interesting choice of day for the Climate Minister to upbraid Councils for proper planning process given that also on July 1 2026 the Ombudsmen upheld the complaint against the Prime Minister for unlawfully withholding documents his office had received from Fonterra and Z Energy regarding a law change to block the climate lawsuit they faced. Z Energy’s CEO said the Prime Minister’s office told them to hand deliver the key briefing note, presumably to ensure there was no official email trail. The Bill to retrospectively protect Z Energy and Fonterra from climate torts received its first reading the next day.

Mismanagement of fish stocks was on the menu on July 3 2026 as the courts found that Ministry officials had failed to give proper advice on protecting orange roughy habitat from destruction by industry. And hence the Minister’s decision, in the previous government, was unlawful. This was a judicial review process, and hence you can see why the industry-designed Fisheries Amendment Bill aims to fundamentally restrict the ability to judicially review government fishing decisions.

On July 6 2026 we found out that 40% of dairy agribusinesses were illegally not reporting their synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use, as they are required to under national regulations. The former head of agribusiness lobby group Federated Farmers, and now current Associate Agriculture Minister, said he wasn’t concerned about it. Increase in fertiliser use was identified in the national Greenhouse Gas inventory as a key driver of increased climate pollution, as well as water pollution.

There was some good news on July 6 2026 also, as the Government finally passed its offshore wind legislation. Most of the offshore wind consortia had already left the country due to the fast tracking of seabed mining in Taranaki, the same location that was identified for offshore wind. But after the environment movement blocked the seabed mining, and now the new rules passed, there is one offshore wind developer left who might proceed. Taranaki Offshore Wind partnership has been delayed for four years to start its 1000 MW plant by the Government’s seabed mining obsession but is now looking to proceed.

Ever obsessed with mining, Shane Jones gave $50m of our money to a couple of his favoured mining projects on July 6 2026. The projects didn’t meet the rules for the Regional Infrastructure Fund, not providing energy security, water security, connectivity or growth of a Māori-owned business, but Jones just got the rules bent to suit the projects.

And a small win on July 7 2026 as Levin locals forced central government to reinstate lower speeds on one of their dangerous roads, which Simeon Brown had sped up.

The UN forum on bottom trawling began on July 13 2026 but New Zealand boycotted the meeting, just sending a pre-recorded message of Shane Jones for the scientists’ amusement. New Zealand is the only country bottom trawling seamounts in the South Pacific and as seen with orange roughy and tarakihi is collapsing the fisheries by bottom trawling.

On July 14 2026 a landmark study linked nitrates in drinking water with increases in pre-term births. The nitrate levels were well below existing legal maximums. This means the increased cow numbers that the Government is driving is a major public health issue (not to mention bowel cancer). The study was widely endorsed by scientists in the field but was criticised by Peter Cressey from the Government-owned New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science, who initially claimed no conflict of interest but then had to admit some of his work was funded by… Fonterra.

On July 15 2026 the Government said it would amend the climate law to require councils to prepare climate adaptation plans, but without any funding it won’t mean anything.

New Zealand’s biggest solar farm connected to the grid on July 18 2026, the 202 MW Tauhei Solar Farm, near Te Aroha. The solar farm was consented under the COVID fast track process, which retained environmental guardrails, in 70 working days. Because of those environmental guardrails, there were many conditions imposed such as native bat habitat trees protected, a large wetland was restored, large amounts of riparian planting, and 100,000 native plants. Luxon’s new fast track law removed these environmental guardrails.

And in a key moment for the Luxon Government, the RMA replacement bills were reported back from select committee on July 20 2026 and they were an environmental disaster. The Government plans to require councils to pay compensation for environmental protections affecting private property (regulatory relief). Councils won’t be able to afford this. There is no clear requirement to protect nature or impose limits on pollution. There are further limits on public participation in decision making. And much more.

While the Climate Commission is entirely powerless to cut emissions it can nonetheless issue reports, and it put out a scathing Emissions Reduction Monitoring Report on July 22 2026. The Commission found that New Zealand’s emission reductions stalled in 2024 and we are on track to miss the reduction targets, which surprised no-one. Dairy cow emissions increased 1.1% in 2024 compared to 2023 – they pointed out the obvious: without a price on agricultural methane agribusinesses will not take steps to cut emissions, and indeed only 7% intend to do so. 

But Cantabrians are drinking the results. On July 23 2026 Environment Canterbury information showed that over a third of Cantabrians on private bore water faced levels of nitrate contamination that were increasing the risk of preterm birth for pregnant mothers.

Agribusiness is never far from the Government’s mind and on July 28 2026 they announced that they would deregulate the setting of maximum residue limits for pesticides on foods. Currently up to 9% of food samples have illegally high levels of pesticide residue but MPI never prosecutes or fines. The plan is to allow agribusiness to rely on overseas standard setting – like when the EPA relied on a paper ghostwritten by Monsanto to say that glyphosate was safe.

Shane Jones will let the fishing industry kill four hoiho a year, even though there are just 115 nests remaining across the mainland and Rakiura – down from 739 in 2008.

And to much fanfare the Government celebrated the issuing of the first new offshore oil and gas exploration permit on July 29 2026. It was to a three man company in Australia who are hoping to get some of the $200m in subsidies as they do a desk based assessment. So it isn’t too serious but nonetheless it is incredibly stupid in a climate crisis. 

July 30 2026 found the Government locking in spending billions on a new motorway north of Auckland with a benefit to cost ratio of 0.7.  The true cost of this one motorway is about $9 billion or 10% of the entire national land transport budget. This means a lot of affordable transport projects with much higher BCR cannot be built as there will be no money.

On July 31 2026 they opened the doors on the Gas Transition Loan Scheme, reversing their previous policy. The delay has cost us dearly as many businesses assumed that the government had a realistic plan to support their use of fossil gas when all the government really had was culture war talking points. It was later revealed that the loans, to replace gas dependent equipment, can be used for more polluting equipment like coal!

On August 8 2026 they announced new measures to support the rollout of EV chargers. Which sounds good until you realise that they had previously promised 10,000 EV public points by 2030. There are only 2000 charge points currently, only 600 were added since they came into government, and the rate of new installations is dropping. They are nowhere near meeting the target.

And in a similar vein on August 10 2026 the Ministers Brown, Jones and Bishop were crowing about the first solar farm approved through their fast track – Lodestone Energy in the Mackenzie country. What they didn’t mention was that Lodestone’s previous nine solar farms went through a normal consenting process, in less sensitive ecosystems. There are over 6000 hectares of solar farms lining up to get individual fast track approvals in the Mackenzie region, which will collectively have a large impact if they proceed on a fast track with no environmental guardrails.

Bishop also welcomed the fast track approval of the Delmore housing development on August 10 2026. This development is strenuously opposed by the Auckland Council as it is completely out-of-sequence and doesn’t have potable water, wastewater, transport, or any other amenities and will cost Auckland ratepayers billions of dollars to supply them. The Council is challenging the approval in court. 

Oddly enough the Government did not put out a self-congratulatory press release about the firing up of Glenbrook Steel’s new electric arc furnace also on August 10 2026 which will save the country about a million tonnes of emissions a year (about the same as Fonterra’s increase in emissions). The project was part funded by the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry fund that the Luxon Government shut down.

The Climate Commission released a report on climate change adaptation on August 11 2026 which was highly critical of the government’s lack of progress. The cost of climate related disasters is increasing but the natural disaster spending by the government is 97% on response and recovery and only 3% on reducing future risk.

And as if to underline the point made by the Climate Commission, also on August 11 2026  it was revealed that Chris Bishop is blocking efforts by Gisborne District Council to control the harm caused by forestry slash and erosion during major weather events. He was refusing to allow a plan change to proceed which would control forestry on highly erodible land, which had been the source of the massive damage caused during Cyclone Gabrielle. The Government stated that the forestry industry did not like the proposed changes. No kidding.

New climate pollution figures released on August 13 2026 by the EPA showed the big petrol companies were not cutting emissions. However the nation’s largest climate polluters are no longer required to report their emissions after agribusiness was excused from reporting by the Government, meaning that the EPA reporting covers less than half of NZ’s emissions.

But it seems not enough emissions for Shane Jones who issued a new oil and gas mining permit to Matahio Energy on August 13 2026. Matahio is headed up by Wai Lid-Wong, Susan Prior and Rob Fisher who previously had senior roles at Tamarind Energy. Tamarind went bankrupt and cost New Zealand taxpayers over $300million to clean up the mess they left behind at Tui oil field. Sounds like Jones’ kind of people.

Given all these policies to increase climate emissions and block efforts to adapt to climate change, it was no surprise that on August 14 2026 it was discovered that Erika Stanford the Education Minister had removed all references to climate change in the year 1 to 10 curriculum. Best people don’t know about it I guess.

And speaking of hiding things, the Ombudsmen ruled on August 14 2026 that the Government should not have hidden the key conclusions in a consultant’s report on the proposed LNG import terminal. The consultant concluded that the LNG terminal wouldn’t have much impact on electricity prices, and that conclusion was redacted when documents were released publicly. The Government was telling the public the proposed LNG import terminal would reduce future electricity prices, so the consultants’ conclusion was inconvenient (futures prices for electricity are trending lower but the Electricity Authority said the lower future prices were due to the influx of new renewable generation, not more fossil gas). 

And then on August 17 2026 the government handed out $250k to councils to help them recover from extreme weather events earlier in the year. Included in the list was Gisborne District Council, which the government had previously blocked from controlling forestry to reduce impacts from extreme weather events. The press release did not mention climate change.

The Government used its Parliamentary majority on August 18 2026 to pass a law retrospectively blocking citizens from going to court to seek redress for the harm caused by companies’ climate pollution. Lobbying by Fonterra and Z Energy, kept secret in breach of the Official Information Act, led to an urgent law change to block a current court case against them by Mike Smith, even after the Supreme Court ordered that it could proceed. There was a wave of opposition.

They followed this up on August 19 2026 with an announcement that they would make a raft of last minute changes to the Natural Environment Bill and the Planning Bill, which are replacing the RMA, to make them even worse. This frenzy of last minute changes will lock in a profoundly anti-environmental resource management system which, if there is a change of government, agribusiness will say needs to stay in place to avoid regulatory flip-flop and uncertainty.

Included in these changes were new clauses to override the Environment Court decision on the Waikato’s Plan Change One, and Manawatū-Whanganui Plan Change 2. PC1 was designed by elected regional councillors, in consultation with local communities and iwi, to reduce water pollution. PC1 had been stuck in the courts for a decade as polluting companies and lobbyists fought to stop it. Having finally lost that battle in court the polluters asked the government to protect them from clean water rules, and they did. Similar story for Plan Change 2 in the Manawatū-Whanganui. It means more water pollution in rivers that are already heavily polluted. It also means the Treaty Settlement with Tainui, which included cleaning up the Waikato River, has been broken by the Crown

Other last minute changes essentially removed environmental limits from the NEB, including allowing new consents for pollution to waterways even when pollution limits were already breached. They removed the goal to avoid net loss of native biodiversity, and blocked regional councils from having higher environmental standards than the national rules (e.g. forestry in Gisborne).

The last minute amendments also removed the ability of regional councils to introduce protections for the marine environment in the 12 nautical mile zone (eg Motiti). Existing marine protected areas introduced by regional councils would be removed by 2030 – they are literally removing marine protected areas.

And freshwater farm plans, long a bugbear of agribusiness, were to apply to a smaller number of agribusiness operations and industry could self-audit them, under the rushed amendments. An audit was only needed once every six years. Agribusiness groups including Fonterra, Beef and Lamb, Dairy NZ, Federated Farmers had given the government a list of changes to weaken environmental protection and the government delivered.

On August 21 2026 Bishop announced they were keeping the Clean Vehicle Standard he had earlier gutted. The standard is so weak and ineffectual that the industry itself was happy to keep it.

Having engaged in good faith with central government ministers and officials over a number of years, spending significant resources providing detailed feedback on resource management proposals, environment NGOs finally had enough and called for the Natural Environment Bill and the Planning Bill to be dumped entirely on 24 August 2026. But it was too late. Ministers had used the feedback as an intelligence gathering tool to fine tune the most environmentally destructive elements of their new system, and then used the meetings with environment groups to claim they had consulted widely. 

On August 25 2026 Australian coal mining company Bathurst Resources lodged its fast track application to devastate the amazing ecosystems of the Denniston Plateau to mine more coal. The Department of Conservation spent over 500 hours of staff time just in a single month assisting in the preparation of the application – no doubt there was more. While the applicant needs to pay DoC for these hours, it is time that staff were not using to protect biodiversity.

The Ministry for the Environment confirmed on August 25 2026 that they were permanently stopping plans to phase out PVC and polystyrene packaging after years of work. Many businesses were disappointed because they had started to invest in equipment in anticipation of the change. But lobbying by meat and dairy agribusiness carried the day and the plastic pollution will continue.

Following this Jones crowed on August 27 2026 that he had waved through all prospecting, exploration and mining applications bar two. So much for proper scrutiny.

In preparation for the passage of the new Natural Environment Bill, the Government released drafts of the National Policy Direction that would be a regulation sitting under the new Bill on August 28 2026. It was predictably terrible: 

  • development objectives trump the protection of the ‘life supporting capacity of ecosystems’; 
  • assumes environmental limits will be breached with the remedy being a vague future non-regulatory pathway; 
  • requires councils to allow mines and forestry to continue even when environment limits are breached; 
  • blocks councils from requiring consents for farms if they have an industry approved farm plan; etc etc.After systematically 

After systematically dismantling efforts to improve the fuel efficiency of the NZ car fleet, the Government on August 31 2026 decided it needed to cancel a scheduled fuel excise increase, at a cost of $1.476 billion. This was because petrol prices are so high from Trump’s war and the car fleet is inefficient. How the Government will now pay for its country-bankrupting ambitions for new motorways remains unclear.

And speaking of Trump, on September 1, 2026 the New Zealand Government joined with the Trump Government in funding a new deep port in Penrhyn in the Cook Islands. The US Government sees the port as part of its push to obtain seabed minerals for its military, as it is conveniently near potential seabed mining areas. It can also support US navy operations. The US military is constantly talking about war with China and while it already operates dozens of military bases across the Pacific, it wants more.

And without a hint of irony, on September 2 2026 Shane Jones announced the Government would hand out $2m to attempt to restore the Tasman southern scallop fishery to the very company that previously oversaw its destruction – the Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company (CSEC). The scallop fishery was destroyed by bottom dredging by Jones’ donors, the fishing industry, combined with sediment flowing down rivers from his other donors, agribusiness. It’s sure to work out well.

The Government was under a lot of pressure over its terrible Conservation Amendment Bill so on September 3 2026 the Government members of the Environment Select Committee released a new version which took out the proposal to open up 60% of all public conservation land for sale. But it left in the new purpose for the Department of Conservation to enable commercial activities on public conservation land “to the greatest extent practicable” and the Visitor Amenity Areas that allows the Minister to approve luxury resorts, roads, sewerage, fencing etc on any public conservation land.

It can be confusing tracking all the government money being gifted to mining companies and on September 7 2026 it was the turn of Todd Energy being given $23m from the $200m gas slush fund – the Gas Security Fund.

On September 11 2026 it was revealed that the fishing industry had hauled up 35 tonnes of coral over six and half years. It is undoubtedly higher as the fishing industry did not report all its ‘bycatch’ before cameras were put on boats. Most of the coral destroyed by the fishing industry remains on the ocean floor so this 35 tonnes equates to 3,849 – 12,118 tonnes of actual destruction. In addition the industry killed hundreds of seabirds and marine mammals in just three months.

The Government was rushing through yet another legislative bandaid to the disastrous fast track regime on Sept 15 2026 to get developers to pay for some of the cost of infrastructure when they get fast track approval for sprawling suburbs on the urban fringes. Unlike the legislation to block Mike Smith’s climate court case, this law was not retrospective which left Auckland Council with billions in costs due to National party donors’ fast tracked housing developments. Auckland Council is going to court to try to stop them.

The Education Minister was backtracking on the removal of climate change from the year 1 to 10 curriculum on September 17 2026. She said she was not involved in writing the curriculum, however evidence over the next weeks would show that there was a close relationship between her and those charged with assembling the new curriculum but that they were deliberately hiding it.

Jones was following fishing industry advice on September 22 2026 when he implemented industry suggested changes to the tarakihi quota of just 20% cut. The fishery is down to 8% of original stock, and officials recommended cuts of 39% to 78%, but industry only wanted a 20% cut so there it was. Tarakihi is caught by bottom trawling which is destroying the ecosystems that support the fishery. Scallop anyone?

And in what Chris Bishop surely considers the highpoint of the War on Nature, on September 22 2026 the Natural Environment Bill and the Planning Bill, the Government’s replacements to the Resource Management Act, were passed through Parliament. The bills are a wholesale attack on environmental protection, as EDS said “The bills were seriously deficient when introduced, deteriorated at select committee and even further through extensive last-minute amendment papers”. Here are some lowlights:

  • Urban tree protections effectively removed.
  • Removed resource caps eg fertiliser caps
  • Regulatory relief means councils will have to compensate landowners for biodiversity protection etc
  • No enforceable environmental limits so eg dairy companies can pollute already polluted rivers even more
  • Removing marine protected areas introduced by regional councils
  • Removing the precautionary principle
  • Removing the hierarchy of Te Mana o te Wai – that ecosystem health and human health had to come before commercial interests when making water consent decisions
  • Climate change cannot be considered when making planning or consenting decisions
  • Public participation is highly limited

And while on the one hand on September 22 2026 the government was removing regulatory constraints on dairy pollution and expansion with the new Natural Environment Bill, on the other they were subsidising new irrigation projects that will lead to more dairy pollution with $36 million in cheap government loans.

The new welfare code for dairy cattle was released on September 23 2026. Dairy cattle in NZ are left to stand in deep mud up to their udders, as part of the controversial intensive winter grazing method of ‘mud farming’. The new welfare code does not ban intensive winter grazing, nor does it specify how much time each day cows must have access to dry pasture rather than mud, it just says ‘sufficient’ time whatever that means. Nor does the new code require that dairy cattle have access to shelter from the rain, snow or sun. Nor does it ban calving in mud. The guidance is so vague as to be unenforceable. Dairy cattle will continue to live in miserable conditions as industrial milk machines for five years before being turned into hamburgers.

But a small quirk is that Minimum Standard 5 – Drinking Water says “Dairy cattle must have easy access to sufficient palatable and clean drinking water.” People living in rural Canterbury could do better if this applied to them!

Also on September 23 2026 the Government announced they were providing a bit of cash to help clean up sites contaminated by agrichemical companies (and others), while simultaneously deregulating the oversight of agrichemicals going forward so there would be more contaminated sites in the future. It’s a makework scheme really.

And also on September 23 2026 the decision on spending billions on a new LNG import terminal and expensive imported fossil gas was delayed until after the election. The previously announced closure of Methanex, the country’s biggest user of fossil gas, plus the growth of renewable generation, was making it harder to justify the fossil fuel subsidies.

More subsidies to oil companies was the order of the day for September 24 2026, with $36m of our money handed over. Even the Government admitted it is unlikely to ever result in any oil and gas but they had $200m to give away and the election was approaching.

Not to be outdone on the climate pollution competition, Fonterra released its annual report on September 24 2026 showing its annual emissions have increased by one million tonnes in just two years. They are now up to 25.3 million tonnes per year, which is about a third of NZ’s total gross emissions or almost a half of the net emissions (though some of their emissions occur overseas). 

Of course there is no cost to Fonterra for all the pollution as the government exempted their emissions from the ETS, though under the Paris climate agreement the New Zealand taxpayer is responsible for buying credits to cover Fonterra’s pollution. But again, it’s unclear if the current government will honour the Paris agreement.

Fonterra’s climate pollution was only one part of the story and the other part became clear when LAWA published their annual survey of freshwater quality trends on September 24 2026. They found that over two thirds of all monitored sites were ecologically impaired while 90% of lowland lakes were in poor or very poor condition. When nine out of ten lakes are poor or very poor you can see that the industrial dairy system is having landscape scale pollution impacts.

On a happier note on September 25 2026 the coal company Bathurst Resources had their application rejected by the EPA due to insufficient evidence. The green movement was effective in making the fast track more than a rubber stamp for three ministers, as was originally proposed. Sadly Bathurst can come back.

Meanwhile Fonterra told us on September 28 2026 they are planning to increase milk processing capacity in the South Island as tens of thousands of new cows provide more milk (and urine, faeces and methane). Its South Island milk went from 618 million kg milk solids in 2022 to 685 million kgMS in 2026 with 20 more conversions this season.

On September 30, 2026 the environmental NGOs had enough and co-sponsored a complaint to the EU about the NZ Government breaching the sustainability chapter of the EUNZ Free Trade Agreement.

Three years of the War On Nature

Parliament has risen and the three years of the Luxon led Coalition Government is coming to a close. No doubt there are things I have missed in the list above but probably not much. The evidence is plain – we have a Government which is engaged in a systematic War on Nature. Greenpeace and many others are fighting back, defending nature. If you treasure the beauty and wonder of this living planet of ours, join us.