Luxon’s War on Nature Timeline

When the Luxon-led coalition took office nearly two years ago, its war on nature started within days of taking office. In that time, the government has 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.

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It has been nearly two years since the 2023 election that led to the formation of the Christopher Luxon led Government, a coalition between the National, Act and NZ First parties.

It has been two years of a veritable war on nature. New Zealand and the world is already facing a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, and 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, it is hard 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 two years of the Luxon Government to pull out their environment policies and laid them out below. I’m afraid this is really more of a reference document than an easy-to-read narrative, and it is unpleasant reading at the best of times. So here goes.

2023

October – December 2023

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.

Two years after Luxon cancelled the NZ Battery project, New Zealand is facing major security of supply issues, as well as high wholesale electricity prices, in part due to insufficient storage. A wave of deindustrialisation has followed as factories have closed up.

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 economic risk of declining gas supplies. 

The oil and gas lobby group celebrated the end of the 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. 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 for zero ferries. Efforts are underway to find replacement ferries, at higher cost.

On December 14 2023, to the joy of agribusiness, the Luxon Government announced the beginning of the process to replace 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 likely to grow 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 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 may have been 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. 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 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

January 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.

February 2024

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.

March 2024

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 spaces.

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.

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.

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 28th 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 2024

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. There was a six-fold increase in reported dolphin deaths and a three-fold increase in 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 Luxon Government rounded out the month on 30 April 2024 by abolishing financial support for lower public transport fares for young people.

May 2024

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 applications to take millions of litres from Hawkes Bay’s already overallocated aquifers for agribusiness. 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.

June 2024

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 aim to change the purposes of the Act to promote oil and gas exploration. And they aim 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 price incentives 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 and then celebrated its demise under a new Government.

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.

July 2024

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, theoretical storage of carbon dioxide in empty gas and oil reservoirs off Taranaki, was not cost-effective and is now stalled (see later).

On July 10 2024, the Climate Minister Simon Watts announced their five-point climate plan. It is so vague and thin as to be not worth the time even detailing here. You can read it yourself, it will only take a couple of minutes.

They followed this up on July 11 2024 announcing they were weakening carbon efficiency standards 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.

Then on July 17 2024, the Government published its draft Emissions Reduction Plan. The Plan 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, but 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 2024

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.” 

It is worth reading his statement slowly: he accepts that the court decision will result in less water pollution: due to more pollution discharges needing consents, more of those discharge consents being declined, and more of them having restrictive conditions. Then he states that this lower level of water pollution makes it harder to improve freshwater. The rest of us believe that less water pollution makes it easier to improve water quality, but not Todd!

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 are heavily weighted towards the profit interests of business, and 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.

September 2024

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. 

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.

October 2024

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 – and with a word which seldom passes the lips of Simeon Brown he 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).

November 2024

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.

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

A GNS study, which we found out about on November 14 2024, found one half of rural schools have drinking water with nitrates above 1mg/L, which is linked with increased rates of colorectal cancer.

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.

December 2024

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 released its final Second Emissions Reduction Plan 2026-2030, which still relied on magic methane inhibitors, magic carbon capture and storage, and lots of pine trees on private and public land. As would become clear soon enough, this was a work of fiction.

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. 

2025

January 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, suggesting they didn’t really take this climate stuff too seriously. 

They do however take coal mining seriously which is why on January 31 2025 they declared it to be a ‘critical’ mineral. 

February 2025

But the climate was serious for the insurance companies. In February it was revealed they were suing councils over their 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 adaptation 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 were being vetoed by the New Zealand Government on February 25 2025, and other governments were pretty mad about it.

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.

March 2025

March 7 2025 found them stopping the scheduled phase out of polystyrene and PVC food and drink packaging. 

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, pending the Government’s mooted 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 regional 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.

April 2025

On April 4 2025 we saw the last day of an eight week court case in which Ngāi Tahu sought to, at least partially, take over 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 Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released his forestry report on April 9 2025. His number one recommendation was a phase out of ETS rules that allow 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.

May 2025

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 23, 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 36 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 2025

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 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.

July 2025

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 relevant Minister, ie Shane Jones, gets to decide if oil companies have to pay for decommissioning. It was a present to the oil industry, who can once again hand over the decommissioning costs to Government if they can get Jones 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.

August 2025

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 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 will 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.

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.

September 2025

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 (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 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, 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. Once again the Government showed terrible judgement in pushing this project down the fast track.

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.

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 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.

October 2025

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. 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 give water abstraction consents to a particular group of agribusinesses, one of which happened to be owned by her colleague, National Party MP Suzy Redmayne. 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.

The State of the Marine Environment report was released by Statistics NZ and the Ministry for the Environment on October 9, 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.

And finally on October 12 2025, the Government announced that it plans to weaken New Zealand’s methane reduction target. 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. 

Two years of the War On Nature

This brings us up to the two year anniversary of the election that led to this Luxon led Government. 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, you need to join us.

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