Placing the current New Zealand Government into context

This is a speech I gave at the Otaki Summer Camp in January 2025.

Tēnā koutou 

I give greetings to the mana whenua of this place – Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Toa, Muaūpoko, Ngāti Haumia. I give greetings to the whenua of this place, the magical sandhills, and the lakes contained within them, especially Lake Horowhenua. I give greetings to the maunga, the Tararuas, and to the awa, especially the mighty Manawatū. The Manawatū was here before the Tararuas and, as the maunga rose up, the river continued to make its way west cutting a gorge through the mountains so that even today rain that falls on the central and northern Wairarapa plains heads west and reaches the ocean on the west coast of Aotearoa. 

I’d like to thank the organisers of this camp. All the volunteer hours that go into an event like this is an act of faith that humanity can do better by coming together collectively.

Friends, here is the paradox of our situation.

We face well-understood global climate and biodiversity crises. Yet, at the same time, many corporations and governments, including our own, are weakening their efforts to cut emissions and protect biodiversity. In fact, they are pursuing policies that will increase emissions and increase biodiversity destruction.

We face a well-understood global inequality crisis, at the same time many governments, including our own, are pursuing policies which result in more poverty and further concentrating wealth in fewer hands. And with that concentrated wealth comes concentrated power, undermining our democratic rights.

In Aotearoa, we have one of the most reactionary governments in our history. A government that is deliberately rolling back policies that protect the environment, deliberately introducing policies that make the inequality crisis worse, and deliberately rolling back policies to deal with the legacy of colonisation.

So how did we get here, and what does that tell us about how we can get out of here?

Historical context

In order to understand our current predicament, we need to place it in a historical context. People do make history but not on their own terms; they make it on the back of what has come before. 

I’m going to start about a century ago. 

Here is the short version of this speech. A century ago, we had largely unconstrained capitalism that was not under democratic control, and it led to mass suffering and repeated economic crises; this led to a rise in social movements that demanded that capitalism be controlled to achieve common human dignity; these movements had a lot of success and from the 1930s to the 1980s capitalism was placed under a degree of democratic control and for most people there was a significant improvement in living standards and stability; however corporations and their political allies were eventually able to throw off these constraints and neoliberal reform in the 1980s and 1990s led to a new era of deregulated capitalism; this, in turn, led to more poverty and a series of economic crises that have required more and more government intervention to save the so-called free market. 

In spite of the relentless failures of neoliberalism, governments from the 2000s to the early 2020s have not properly democratically re-regulated this system, and there has been something of a political stalemate.

And now we have the current far-right government attempting to restart the neoliberal reform agenda. They are attempting to remove the already weak environmental regulations, abolish Te Tiriti, weaken unions, cut social security, cut public health and public education funding in real terms, and privatising whatever they think they can get away with, while delivering tax cuts to the rich and more.

We have come full circle in a century. And like those who have come before us, we can, and we must place democratic constraints on capitalism in order to address the wrongs of colonisation, in order to end the misery of systemic poverty, in order to protect the life-supporting capacity of planet Earth, and indeed to protect democracy itself from an ever more powerful oligarchy.

That then is the short version of this speech. 

So let me take you on the longer version starting with a structured journey in five stages through the last century.

First phase – capitalism without constraint – 1920s and 1930s

If we go back a century to the 1920s and 1930s, we find ourselves in a period of pretty unconstrained capitalist excess and inequality. In Aotearoa, the wars of colonial land theft had largely ended, though further colonial policies were to follow. Boom and bust economic cycles dominated, and democratic constraints on capitalism were very limited. 

This period culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s when governments, including in New Zealand, responded to the rise of poverty and unemployment with austerity. They cut spending and made the unemployed do pointless work for receiving the dole – a more savage version of what we are experiencing today. There were food riots in Auckland and elsewhere as people desperately tried to keep themselves alive. Fascism was on the rise around the world, offering people the false solution of scapegoats, blaming people who looked different to us for the economic crisis.

But progressives didn’t take it lying down, and they organised people here in Aotearoa and around the world. The United-Reform Government of 1931-1935 was a one-term austerity government. The election of the Labour-Rātana Government in 1935, really marks an inflection point in New Zealand political economy. 

Second phase – the democratic control of capital – 1930s to 1980s

In the decades following 1935, capitalism in New Zealand and elsewhere was domesticated by democracy and regulated in important ways to make it more humane.

There were many drivers to this change. The rise of trade unions, the strengthening of multitudes of social movements, the growth and unity of the Labour Party since the unity conference of 1916, the organised radical left, the socialist and communists, and the challenge posed by the Soviet Union internationally which together created a strong incentive for capital to compromise, the political wing of the Rātana church which aligned many Māori with the new government, and the social credit movement which united many small farmers and businesses in the call for change. All these together ultimately led to the first Labour Government elected in 1935. 

This Government stayed in office through to 1949 and really set the terms of the great compromise between capital and labour that remained until 1984. This was a period in which capital was highly regulated, especially financial capital, and over the decades, the proportion of GDP going to wages versus the proportion of GDP going to profits significantly moved to workers. Working-class people slowly improved their living standards. The welfare state and a managed market economy were hallmarks of this period.

The policies introduced during this period of democratic constraint on what was previously unbridled capitalism are too many to list comprehensively, but here is a flavour:

• 40 hour working week with annual leave entitlements and public holidays, penal rates for overtime and weekend work
• Work for the dole replaced by unemployment benefit, which was increased
• Public works programme on full wages
• Minimum pay rates for workers
• More powers to unions with compulsory arbitration and unionism
• Workplace health and safety laws
• Cheap government mortgages to buy first home
• Rent controls
• State house building programme funded by what we would now call quantitative easing or state money creation and with quality standards that mean those houses and apartments are still here even as the leaky houses of the 1990s are torn down
• Landlords could no longer forcibly take and sell their tenants property to pay rent debts without going to court
• Government spending to stimulate the economy
• Land taxes and high income tax rates on high incomes
• Abolished the head tax on Chinese immigrants
• Largely free hospital healthcare and pharmaceuticals with highly discounted primary healthcare
• Infant mortality rates dropped dramatically for Pākehā and Māori though still remained higher for Maori
• Catchment management under the soil conservation act
• A comprehensive social welfare system was introduced including family benefits, old age pensions or superannuation, invalids, single mothers, sickness, emergency benefits and increases to existing benefits
• Mothers could apply for family benefits without reference to the father, something which my own mother used in the 1960s. Payments for deserted wives
• Most fees for secondary education removed
• Increased teachers salaries
• Free school milk
• Country library service
• Abolished the country quota which was a gerrymandering of the electoral system against city people
• Public servants were allowed full political rights
• Abolished whipping in childrens courts
• Women allowed into legislative council, juries and police
• Highways were nationalised
• Māori given same rates of pay on public works, benefits, 
• Series of settlements with iwi signed
• Funding for Māori housing, health

It is quite a list. But it profoundly changed the life chances for ordinary people. You no longer had to be born into wealth to have a reasonable expectation of decent healthcare and education for you and your family. You no longer had to live in deathly fear of unemployment and a life of poverty.

The democratic domestication of capitalism using popularly elected state power was a model that was replicated across many countries such as the New Deal in the US, the Atlee government in the UK, the Chifley government in Australia among others. 

As the modern environmental movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, it was simply common sense at the time that economic activities could and should be regulated directly in order to protect the environment. In the US, which led the way in many respects, there was of course virulent opposition from corporations to the regulation of their pollution, but some of the most important environmental regulation was won by the environment movement in the 1960s and 1970s such as the various clean air laws and regulations on vehicle emissions.   

But just as the environment movement was starting to make some progress, the era of democratic control of capitalism was about to face a fundamental challenge.

Third phase – neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s

Which brings me to the third stage of the story – neoliberalism 1980s to 1990s.

The long period from the 1930s to the 1980s, during which capitalism was subject to democratic restraint to achieve social goals, came to an end with the rise of neoliberalism throughout the 1980s and 90s. Neoliberalism is a far-right ideology whose advocates push to restrict or entirely remove democratic control of capitalist economies. They advocate for deregulation of corporations especially of the financial sector, cuts to government spending on social programs, low taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and privatisation of the state sector. They seek to retain a strong state to repress opposition to neoliberal policies and bail out markets when they fail.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there developed a global network of neoliberal groups funded by large corporations and wealthy individuals pushing for these policy changes. Groups like the Business Roundtable and today’s New Zealand Initiative, and globally the thinktanks affiliated with the Atlas Network. They occupied air time and were accepted by mainstream media as independent voices, even as they are funded by oil companies, tobacco companies and other vested interests. And they were successful beyond their wildest dreams. 

In Aotearoa, we experienced radical neoliberal reform during the Lange/Douglas Labour Government from 1984 to 1990, followed by the Bolger/Shipley government from 1990 to 1996. These two governments covering 12 years systematically pursued a radical far-right program of deregulating capitalism and removing democratic control.

It was a worldwide neoliberal movement – Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US, Hawke/Keating in Australia, Pinochet in Chile and elsewhere. The historic compromise was torn apart as the rich launched a class war against the poor. 

Everywhere, it produced similar results. 

These policies directly and predictably led to increased inequality and increased poverty and the litany of social disasters that flow from that. Social insecurity spread to larger and larger groups. Foodbanks are not a natural state of society, they are the result of deliberate policy to impoverish people to the point where they need food handouts so they don’t starve to death. 

Deregulation of key sectors of the economy led to systemic failures. 

The deregulation of the building industry with the Building Act 1991 led directly to the leaky buildings disaster, which has cost the country tens of billions of dollars, and houses are still having to be repaired or demolished. 

Financial market deregulation led to financial crisis after crisis, culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis. All of these financial crises have to be bailed out by the government, showing what a farce the whole ideology really is. 

Deregulation of health and safety led to the Pike River mine disaster, where 29 men died in an underground explosion and dozens of deaths in forestry. The deregulation of forestry also led to the mass of slash pouring down rivers in major weather events taking out roads, bridges and homes. 

Privatisation of monopoly sectors of the economy such as banking, electricity and telecommunications led to super profits for those sectors. The state-owned companies in these sectors were privatized, resulting in an oligopoly with few market players and low competition. Without state-controlled corporations to influence these markets and without state regulation of these markets, there was nothing to stop a handful of large players from setting high prices.

It was in the middle of this neoliberal revolution that the Resource Management Act was passed in 1991, and it bears the scars. The RMA philosophical approach was to manage the environmental effects of business activities rather than regulate the activities directly. Moreover, it managed the effects within a balancing approach – balancing a bit of environmental destruction against a bit of economic development rather than having environmental bottom lines. Regulating business activities directly to protect the environment is not acceptable in a neoliberal framework. If you’ve ever wondered why the RMA failed to achieve the environmental goals that were claimed for it, this is one of the key reasons, alongside the relentless opposition to any environmental protection by corporate lobby groups in government and in the courts.

The failure to regulate to protect the environment led to the freshwater crisis we are experiencing in Aotearoa now. The dairy explosion in New Zealand after 1990, in which the dairy herd nearly doubled to 6 million, happened in the absence of regulation to control their numbers or pollution. The landscape-scale poisoning of groundwater and the demise of rivers and lakes is a direct result of the victory of neoliberalism.

Now, it wasn’t entirely bleak.

For example, the peace movement was about to win the nuclear-free New Zealand policy. Māori activists won the long battle to open Waitangi Tribunal claims back to 1840. When the Waitangi Tribunal was established in the 1970s it could not consider retrospective claims. Maiu Rata had split from the Labour Party to form Mana Motuhake over this issue in the 1970s. But the general policy direction was neoliberal.

And once again, capitalism, raw in tooth and claw, produced a strong, organised civil society response just as it had in the 1930s. 

This expressed itself in part in the fracturing of the political system. The two major parties, National and Labour, which had embraced neoliberalism in direct contradiction to their election promises, fractured in multiple directions. The emergence of NZ First and the Alliance parties were in direct opposition to the embrace of neoliberalism by National and Labour. NZ First and the Alliance stripped 10% off both of the old parties.

The political system as a whole faced a legitimation crisis which led to the victory of the 1993 MMP referendum to change the electoral system. This was a constitutional attempt by the majority to rein in a political system that was out of their control. The introduction of proportional voting made it much harder for another neoliberal revolution.

The fourth phase – stalemate 2000s-2020s

This next phase, the fourth, of New Zealand’s political economy is messy, as the new parties and the new electoral system operated in the context of popular opposition to neoliberalism. 

From the election of the Bolger/Peters/Shipley government in the first MMP election in 1996 through to the end of the Ardern/Peters/Shaw Government in 2023 there was something of a stalemate. 

The radical neoliberal reform process largely came to a halt, as the electorate found ways to punish political parties that pursued it. But nor was there a sustained and systematic effort to re-democratise capitalism as we saw with the first Labour Government. Re-regulation where it happened was patchy and not systematic, income taxes barely moved, and taxes on wealth did not happen in spite of widening wealth inequality, privatisation was rarely rolled back and sometimes rolled forward, environmental policy was threadbare and often for PR purposes like the zero carbon act. 

But alongside this failure to really challenge neoliberal anti-democratic policies there were two emergency periods of state intervention. The response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 required a full-blown government bailout of the deregulated financial sector with massive government intervention in the form of quantitative easing. The Covid crisis of 2020/2022 likewise required dramatic state intervention in the economy. These two massive interventions certainly demonstrated that neoliberalism was a fraud because they showed that the entire economic system depended on state underwriting, and in the case of the global financial crisis, state intervention was necessary because of neoliberal financial market deregulation. But these two emergency periods didn’t lead to a broader use democratic regulation to make capitalism more civil.

During this period of stalemate from the 2000s to the early 2020s, there were a series of four coalition governments and I’ll touch on them briefly. 

The single-term Bolger/Peters/Shipley government from 1996 to 1999 slowed neoliberal reforms to a standstill but was wracked by internal tensions as Shipley tried to push the neoliberal agenda further. The internal tensions within that government led to its implosion and the election of the Labour/Alliance coalition in 1999. 

The Labour-Alliance Helen Clark-led Government from 1999 – 2008 offered a real opportunity to reverse neoliberalism but was a limited reformer. There were reforms: Kiwibank was established as a state-owned bank, employment law was made more union friendly, rail was re-nationalised, working for families payments were given to those in work though those on benefits missed out, the West Coast forests were saved from logging, the building industry was reregulated after the leaky houses fiasco. But climate and environment policy was left too late to have much impact. The finance industry remained unregulated, the housing market was left to market forces as housing costs doubled, wealth remained untaxed, the electricity market remained deregulated. And of course the foreshore and seabed bill sought to strip Maori rights. Overall the government made limited progress on rolling back neoliberalism and re-democratising capitalism.

The National Party / Maori Party John Key led Government from 2008 to 2017 was largely a status quo government. But again, not entirely. On the one hand it engaged in large-scale fiscal stimulus spending in response to the global financial crisis, which was the global status quo policy response; it also re-regulated health and safety after the Pike River mine disaster. On the other hand it advanced some neoliberal policies such as partial privatisation of electricity companies, but stepped back from further privatisation as it faced strong resistance from civil society. It started to privatise education

Then, there was the Ardern Government from 2017 to 2023. This was another timid reforming government, similar to the Clark government. There were a few policies that took us forward such as the ban on new oil and gas exploration permits which really broke the neoliberal rule that the government must not directly intervene to tell business what it could not do. There were modest social security improvements, a ban on offshore purchases of houses, ending moves to privatise education. But tax on the wealthy remained untouched even as inequality of wealth increased over the course of the government. 

Climate policy was caught up in the bureaucratic Zero Carbon Act and the ineffective emissions trading scheme, and agribusiness were given yet another extension of the delay in action. Lawyers for Climate Action went to court to try to use the Paris Agreement commitments referenced in the Zero Carbon Act to force the government to take proper climate action. However, the Climate Minister argued in court that the Paris targets in the Zero Carbon Act were purely ‘aspirational’ and not binding on the government. He won in court and blocked the effort to use the courts to force the government to take climate action, a true scandal greater than any scandal that may have engulfed the Greens before or since. 

The Ardern Government did breach the confines of neoliberal environmental management with the introduction of a cap on synthetic nitrogen use on dairy farms. The cap was a direct intervention on business activities to control the application of a pollutant at the top of the funnel that was leading to widespread freshwater pollution. Alongside this the RMA was replaced with the Natural and Built Environments Act which introduced the concept of environmental bottom lines to replace the balancing approach of the RMA. Unfortunately because the government was reforming at snail’s pace, to the extent that they were reforming at all, the new Act was only passed in the lead up to the 2023 election and was immediately revoked by the incoming Luxon government. 

Managing the Covid crisis was clearly a major issue for the Ardern Government but with crisis comes opportunity. When governments are required to spend tens of billions of dollars in order to manage an economic crisis, like after the Global Financial Crisis, the Canterbury earthquake or the Covid crisis, how they spend that money is ideological. The Ardern Government had a conservative response to the crisis and much of the Covid stimulus money went to propagate the status quo – just build more motorways. 

This period of stalemate in the 2000s to early 2020s led to some policy gains and losses. Given the dramatic failure of the neoliberal project the policy gains were timid, the attempts to democratically regulate capitalism were uncourageous. However, rust never sleeps and neither does the far right…

Fifth Phase – Neoliberal Resurgence 2023 onwards

Which brings us to the fifth phase of this story, the current Luxon/Peters/Seymour government which is an attempt to restart a neoliberal reform agenda. 

There are so many policy examples, but let me start with the sustained attack on environmental regulations:

• They stopped agribusiness facing a price on their climate pollution;
• The fast track law gives projects approval to proceed while circumventing almost all environmental protections, without public input, in fact it is hard to see how any project could be turned down once it enters the fast track process;
• They aim to restart oil and gas exploration;
• They want to fast-track seabed mining in the south Taranaki bight, overturning the Supreme Court decision blocking it, in the process blocking offshore wind farms;
• They aim to fast-track coal mines, housing developments on flood plains, irrigation projects to expand intensive dairying;
• They aim to remove protections against freshwater pollution, as weak as these protections are currently;
• They want to allow mud farming and intensive winter grazing;
• They plan to remove the regulations that require councils to prioritise human drinking water ahead of irrigation companies water access;
• They cut funding to new cycleways entirely;
• Removed the requirement to consider climate when making transport decisions;
• They dramatically increased funding to new motorways;
• They blocked councils sustainable transport plans and freshwater protection plans;
• Ended subsidies for low emissions vehicles;
• Weakened fuel efficiency standards;
• Blocked moves to limit bottom trawling in the fishing industry;
• Removed limits on the number of seals that can legally killed in fishing nets;
• They want to change the way methane warming is measured to suit the livestock industry;
• Their emissions reduction plan relies on magical technology to cut methane emissions in cows and store carbon underground; but of course…
• They kept the greenwashing zero carbon act, because they understood it.

This litany of attacks on environmental protection was promoted by the biggest polluters like Fonterra and the neoliberal government hastily danced to their tune. Sometimes the polluting industries or their lobbyists wrote the new policies and suggested political management strategies.

But it’s not just environmental issues, and I’ll touch on a few to illustrate their radical neoliberal agenda. 

The Government’s outrageous Treaty Principles Bill, alongside the proposal to remove Treaty references from 28 pieces of legislation, is an attempt to eliminate Te Tiriti o Waitangi from public policy considerations. They are targeting Te Tiriti because it stands in the way of neoliberalism, as much as it is an attempt by the Act Party to mobilise racist votes. Te Tiriti provides a framework for a collective response to the legacy of colonisation, the antithesis of corporate freedom to profit. 

To give one example, the Supreme Court ruled against seabed mining in the South Taranaki Bight in part on Tiriti grounds. Greenpeace, Iwi and others won the case on both environmental grounds and Tiriti grounds. The mining company TTR has now been forced to attempt to use the fast track process to circumvent this Supreme Court decision (though it will face enormous community opposition). 

But it goes further than this. Te Tiriti action is carved out in all New Zealand’s international trade agreements – under those agreements our government can take action that otherwise breaches trade agreements if it is to achieve Tiriti goals. This means that a government could regulate against seabed mining or other environmentally destructive activities using Tiriti as a defence against any trade cases that foreign companies took against New Zealand. If the Act Party can once again turn Te Tiriti into a nullity, as Justice Predenghast called it in 1877, then they can nullify these trade agreement clauses.

Then there is the Regulatory Standards Bill, which is a classic piece of neoliberal legislation. It aims to require any kind of regulation to prioritise benefit to private property rather than collective good and compensate private owners if necessary. Regulations that save lives, like health and safety regs, inevitably impinge someone’s individual freedom but they are worth it. Banning new oil and gas exploration is necessary to save the life-supporting ability of the planet, but we would need to compensate oil companies under this bill. This Bill was designed by none other than the Business Roundtable from the 1980s, and first introduced into Parliament by Roger Douglas.

The government is cutting taxes for property investors while cutting public health and education. As the (now former) Health Minister Shane Reti said, he doesn’t have an ‘overt’ agenda for privatisation of health, which rather implies he has a covert one. There are proposed changes to strike laws to make it harder for workers to take action to advance their collective interests. 

There is of course so much more. 

But it is part of a global pattern to attempt to resuscitate neoliberal policies after they failed so spectacularly. We saw it with Liz Truss in the UK, Milei in Argentina, and of course Trump in the US. These new efforts are often marked with nationalism – Brexit, Make America Great Again and so forth. The far right is responding to the reality that, as a result of neoliberal policies, many ordinary people feel that the world is out of their control and are seeking ways to make sense of the world and to bring it back under control, and nationalism can seem like the answer. When Trump attacked (neoliberal) free trade agreements for stripping union jobs out of America, he had a point. And yet his answer is to give more tax cuts to oligarchs, keep migrant workers on visas that treat them like indentured labour, cuts to welfare, gifting the oil and gas industry free range to destroy the life support system of the planet. The nationalist right has a lot in common with the neoliberal right and are often the same people with the same policy prescriptions.

So, having given you a tour of the last century from a political economy perspective, I want to change tack with the remainder of my time. I want to talk about some of the contemporary issues with which progressive activists need to grapple.

Nationalism or globalism?

The first issue is nationalism or globalism. 

One of the characteristics of neoliberalism was its globalism – they were trying to build a global neoliberal world order, George Bush’s New World Order underpinned by the US Government, in which capital was free to go where it wanted and do whatever was profitable. 

But it was globalist of the kind we generally didn’t like. They sought to include binding provisions in free trade agreements that prevented governments from introducing regulations that limited the profit-making ability of multinational corporations. For instance, when Mexico banned seabed mining, they were sued by a multinational company and, last September, were forced to pay compensation of NZ$65m to the company for seabed mining that never happened. Even as neoliberalism retreated at a national level, it entrenched itself in various global institutions such as the WTO.

On the other hand, we know that the solutions to things like climate change require global action and a global mindset. If we only think about our own nation then we will all act as freeriders and the world is doomed. Hence, many climate activists have spent untold hours travelling to events like the Climate CoP in order to try to influence outcomes towards global solutions to global problems. Tax avoidance by the very wealthy and multinational corporations also requires global cooperation.

A further complicating factor is that the rise of the nationalist right often uses the rhetoric of nationalism and national identity and portrays the left as some kind of global conspiracy. The national is far right mobilises the rhetoric of nationalism while at the same time aligning themselves with global multinational corporations and pushing their policy agenda!

Now, I do believe we need to think globally and build a sense of global identity. But it is also true that democracy only operates at a national and local level. Our only site of democratic influence on capitalism is national and sub-national. Hence, I think the old adage is still true – we need to think globally and act locally, where local in this context means national and sub-national.

ESG – Environment issues, Social issues and corporate Governance

The second issue I want to raise is how we should relate to moves within capitalism to reform itself in terms of social and, particularly, environmental issues.  

This falls under the general rubric of ESG – environment issues, social issues and corporate governance. The ESG idea is that companies and investment strategies that prioritise ESG will do better for people and the planet, and can get returns on investment that are at least as good as business as usual, if not better. A win-win outcome. 

ESG advocates tell us that green capitalists will save us while making themselves even more wealthy, and there is hence no need for the heavy hand of the state to regulate business to achieve social and environmental outcomes. 

ESG is an extremely convenient narrative if you are a policy maker who wants to please voters, who care about social and environmental issues, and you also want to please business lobbyists (and their cheque books and publicists) who care about having no government regulation. Hence many conservative politicians attached themselves to this bandwagon – remember Boris Johnson! 

This was a very popular narrative over the last decade or so especially around climate policy. Many billions went into ‘green’ funds.

But there are some problems with ESG. Firstly there are a stack of companies that are simply greenwashing –  we are taking Fonterra to court currently on just this. They want to look good.

But more importantly ESG is often used as a reason to oppose government regulation. They argue that if businesses are doing it anyway, who needs government regulation? But the truth is that regulation is essential to achieve our social and environmental goals. 

Without regulation, companies that do the right thing will be outcompeted by companies doing the wrong thing more cheaply. And as consumers we seldom have full information about the supply chain that sits behind all our purchasing decisions no matter how hard we try, and often we simply don’t have the time or energy to find out even if the information is available. We need government regulation to make sure that products made using human slavery for instance never get a chance to enter the market. We need government regulation to make sure that businesses are simply not allowed to offer cheaper products by dumping their pollution in the local river.

And voluntary ESG commitments can be easily manipulated. Fossil fuel companies are still investing most of their cash in new fossil fuels not renewables, in spite of their extensive ESG commitments. ESG commitments can be easily abandoned as we’ve seen recently with US banks leaving the Net Zero Banking Alliance and many multinational companies dropping their various climate commitments. 

In terms of the argument around return on investment, fossil fuel companies have performed extremely well since the war in Ukraine has driven up prices. There are still superprofits to be made in planetary destruction. 

Hence ESG is limited in how much it can really solve the problems we face, and ESG can be used to oppose the necessary changes to government regulation that will actually save us.

So what should we make of these efforts? 

I think there are plenty of good people genuinely trying to do the right thing here and we should encourage them. When companies do the right thing we should congratulate them as well as calling them out when they do the opposite.

But ESG and voluntary measures will never deliver the change we need – democratically driven government regulation is essential. 

Getting involved in real campaigns

The third issue I’d like to flag here is that we need real world campaigns. In fact it is so great to see you all here today because real change will come out of real campaigns led by people like you in real life as well as online. I believe we all need to be armed with the history and background that I’ve spoken of today but that is not enough, we need to get real campaigns on the ground. Greenpeace will present a couple of our current campaigns in the campaign session on Monday – one on seabed mining and one on agribusiness irrigation projects. But there are a bunch of other campaigns that need support too. By getting directly involved in organising real campaigns you will change the course of history.

A century of struggle to democratically control capitalism

It’s been a long tour through history so let me wind it up.

Friends, there is no way to protect the life-supporting capacity of planet Earth, no way to live in a socially just society, no way to come to terms with our colonial past, without democratic government action to regulate capitalism. Left to its own devices, unconstrained capitalism leads to widespread human misery and ecological collapse. 

And this does not happen in an abstract way. The lobbyists for large corporations are daily and weekly seeking to weaken protections for people and the planet. Neoliberal politicians and think tanks daily promote this agenda in the public domain. And on the other side, over decades activists have attempted to introduce democratic laws and regulations to allow for human dignity and planetary thriving.

As we stand here at the beginning of 2025 we have inherited a century of struggle over whether we have the democratic right to regulate capital. From the unconstrained capitalism of the 1920s and 30s, to the democratic constraint on capitalism from the 1930s to the 1980s, to the removal of constraint with the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, and finally to the stalemate of the last couple of decades. A stalemate which the current government, with its Act party core, seeks to unlock with a new round of neoliberal austerity capitalism.

But it doesn’t have to end this way. People in the 1930s faced similar challenges to us, in many ways harder and in some ways easier. They organised. They focused on the real enemy. They built unlikely alliances. They reached out to ordinary people beyond their close circles. They developed progressive policy platforms and mobilised to pressure political parties to adopt them. We stand on their shoulders.

At the time they had no way of knowing whether their efforts would succeed or fail. Just like us. So let’s give it a crack, we have a world to win.

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