For those of us who care about the environment, social good, the poor, or just humanity in general, Aotearoa New Zealand's election the other night had pretty much the worst plausible outcome (I say worst plausible outcome, because a review of the fringe tiny parties show that it could always have been worse – which is little comfort).
A good friend of mine put it like this: "Well, apparently meaningless tax cuts and accelerating the destruction of the planet are the preferred option, so I guess I might as well start banging my head against the wall too." He'd previously described the thought of watching the election night coverage as worse than wanting to "stab myself in the eye with a sharp stick."
Background
Some would have looked at the last term of the Labour government and asked, "How is a National-ACT government going to be worse? Things are pretty bad already", and they had a point: while Labour promised a lot, they didn't really deliver much. In a lot of ways, Labour's last term was just a "more of the same: not much" when it came to environmental progress. Or, more specifically: standard neoliberal capitalism. (Labour did better in their earlier term, including establishing things like the Carbon Neutral Government Programme).
The discussion of why extractive neoliberal capitalism is so destructive to the planet is a long one, but the short version is that the pursuit of profit and GDP growth above all else leads, unsurprisingly, to ecological and social breakdown. The primary goal of this system is to extract value, not add value. Trickle-down economics does not work – which means the whole platform on which right-wing economics depends (free up corporations, reduce tax spending, cut public services) is based on a lie.
So pervasive is neoliberal economic thinking that it seems easier for many people to "imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (Mark Fisher).
Unfortunately, with slick, well-funded campaigns, parties like National and the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers 1 ACT, can tap into this belief and get us to buy into deeply unfair and destructive economics. Worse, neoliberalism has us believing that the very things that could fix the problems it created 2 are the causes of our problems (better welfare systems, more spending on health, socialism in general, etc). In the lead-up to this election, National received 7.5 times the funding of Labour, and ACT nearly 4 times – much of this from wealthy individuals. Basically, voting for those parties meant voting in the interests of the super-rich, not the "middle" that National campaigned to.
The NZ First party are similar, if far less predictable and with more racial dogwhistling.
For those of us who care about the environment, who tend to generally be left-leaning politically, 3 this election's result felt like a stab in the gut.
Now What?
While the temptation might be to say, "Wake me in three years when this is all over", our ability to influence a democracy doesn't stop at the polling booth. Voting is one of the most important actions we can take, but I wanted to look at what else we can do – especially what else we can do when we care about the environment and our government does not. There are some things we can do specifically when the government doesn't care.
But before the doing, there's an important first step: grieve.
I saw a post in Parents for Climate Aotearoa Facebook group that said "grief work is essential climate work for parents (and all of us)."
If you care, seeing the world and what we're doing to it is hard on our emotions.
I read an article in The Guardian recently, entitled Anger is most powerful emotion by far for spurring climate action, study finds. I actually found this freeing, because it affirmed that it is ok to feel angry. Knowing that people are ruining our only home and millions if not billions of lives for the sake of profit should make us angry. We are justified to feel livid. It's normal, and healthy – as long as we can find a constructive output for it, and not just simmer in rage and depression (which are real risks for us). Anger can be the flip side of love: it shows that you care. Being angry about climate injustice is ok.
Almost all of us would have heard of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (though others have seven stages, and grief rarely progresses in a clean linear process through each stage). One can easily add "climate", "climate change", or "climate crisis" to any one of those stages: "climate denial" or "climate depression" are probably already familiar terms, even if we hadn't connected them to the stages of grieving.
I think the stages of grief are a good framework for us to understand our own reactions to climate change: why we deny or avoid thinking about it, why we get angry, how we try and come to terms with it, why we get depressed, and how we come to an acceptance of what is to come – though cruelly, a progressing crisis means there's no end point to accept until we have been able to curb our emissions.
Like grieving a lost loved one, there are things we can do to help ourselves process that grief. And in this case, many of those things also bring us closer to real solutions.
[As an aside, a potential trap with examining our own climate grief is that it can become self-focused when the focus needs to be outwards. Our emotions are important, they are valid, but they are also not going to reach proper balance until we solve the cause, which is external, not internal. A tendency in our hyper-individualist consumer society is to make problems all about how we feel instead of focusing on the real victims.]
So what can we do? This list of potential actions isn't meant to be exhaustive (in both senses of that word), but hopefully you can find a start here:
1. Talk
One of the most powerful things we can do is also one of the simplest: talk about climate change. Talk about the environment. Talk about climate justice.
This achieves two things: one, it normalises climate change being part of everyday life, and two, it erodes opposition. Believe it or not, despite everything happening in the world and the attention that is given to major climate disasters, for a bunch of people, the climate is an issue they can successfully ignore. For most people in developed countries, it's possible to ignore the issues until they affect us directly; we just turn up the air conditioning and act as if nothing is happening. (The deep selfishness and injustice of this is also something they manage to ignore). By talking about climate change, it both challenges people's thinking and makes it something we cannot ignore. We still encounter loud deniers, but they are becoming rarer and to the majority losing credibility (not that they had any). Now it is much more common to encounter softer forms of opposition: "Sure, climate change is real, but it's not a priority right now" (basically how this election went, with the cost of living crisis being the issue that was supposedly more important); or "It's too expensive/hard/impossible, so why should we try?"; or "I/my country won't make any difference – look at China's emissions!" 4
Making climate change a common conversation topic also makes it harder for those who have reasons to deny, ignore, or minimise it. Holding a fringe belief is harder when others around you hold a different belief. As humans, we are social creatures and will naturally conform to our surroundings. This brings me to...
2. Connect
"The only way forward is together." 5
As well as talking about climate change, we need to find others who are passionate about the environment, and not only because it's a problem that will require the efforts of nearly everyone to solve. This can feel like a lonely fight if you're not surrounding yourself with others. Seek out groups who want to engage. Go join a protest. Spend time with friends who feel as deeply as you about the climate. This is a place where we can make social media actually useful: to help us find communities of others near us who care about the environment (such as the Parents for Climate group I mentioned earlier).
Depression – common among those who care about the climate crisis, especially among young people – is not something we can usually work through alone. We need community. The five ways to well-being promoted for mental health all apply to the climate crisis (and some map to my list above): connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, and give.
3. Write
By "Write", I don't mean journalling, though that's also worthwhile. Here I mean writing to Members of Parliament or submitting responses to Government consultations (as token as they sometimes feel). Make it very clear to our leaders that they are elected by us the people and that we are not going to stand idly by while they ruin the planet. Use writing as a way to normalise talking about climate change. Remind our leaders that there's a growing majority who care about the environment, and who will become more active as it becomes more urgent. (This has already been said by others, such as 350 Aotearoa outside Parliament).
Open letters signed by a large group of more people are more likely to be effective than just from an individual, though lots of individuals with their own words are potentially more impactful. If you want to further increase your effectiveness, be specific and/or target your local electorate MP instead of a generic email address, as electorates bring issues more local.
Remind them that some people are going to...
4. Resist
My kids and I went to a climate march the weekend before the election. It was a wonderful experience, being surrounded by so many passionate (and sometimes weird) people – environmentalism has, unsurprisingly, always attracted plenty from the fringes of society (I liked the ones dressed in polar bear suits). Not a huge number of people were involved (unlike the earlier school strikes), in part because the weather didn't cooperate (we were soaked by the end of it). As far as I can tell, it didn't make the headlines, but it was a really encouraging day.
But one particular placard caught my eye: it said something to the effect of, "I'm facing prison time for peacefully protesting." (Afterwards, I was kind of kicking myself I didn't talk to the lady holding it, as I find the motivations behind being willing to get arrested for the sake of the environment fascinating). I don't know what would drive me to break the law for something I believe in, but there is a limit somewhere where I know I'd stop lying down.
To be clear: I'm not encouraging you to break the law. Some of the more controversial or disruptive actions I think can even be counter-productive, but conversely, most big societal shifts only happened because people were not willing to take no for an answer and give into being bullied. If we gave up when authority told us to stop, women would probably still not be allowed to vote. At least for now, I think protest within the lines of the law is more effective (as a risk in pushing too hard is a harsher backlash from authority, which we have seen in some places overseas). But I can definitely empathise with someone putting the fate of humanity and the biosphere ahead of their own legal standing.
Resistance can include more than protests, too: anything we do to oppose further expansion of fossil infrastructure can help (all the way from strikes to something as simple as petitioning decision-makers to make better choices). It helps that the facts are on our side: fossil infrastructure is already an economic dead-end (and here I'm deliberately saying "fossil" not "fossil fuel"). Solar and other renewables are more cost effective over their lifetime, so anyone investing in expansion of fossil fuel use is wasting money, and just dumb. Solar has been called the cheapest electricity source humanity has ever had by the International Energy Agency.
It does not take a prophet to predict that the "extra legal" forms of protest will only grow stronger as the climate crisis gets worse, especially where Governments are doing little about it – or making it worse. I think it's probably important for our incoming leaders to be reminded of protests that have already happened, so they understand that humanity will only lie down and take abuse for so long. (Again, I'm not encouraging illegal protest, this is only an observation of how humans behave: people resist injustice; the worse the injustice, the stronger the resistance).
Peaceful resistance can take the forms of other actions too, such as the writing I mentioned above – for example, opposing specific construction projects (such as new fossil fuel sites).
What else can we do?
5. Build
I've left this last point deliberately vague. By "Build", I mean do anything you would have done anyway, regardless of how much our Government might try to get in the way or slow down the transition, and accelerate what you could have done if they were helping.
Basically: if they won't build a better world, we still can.
This will look different for different people. It might be that you make changes in your personal life, like travelling less, biking or using public transport instead of a car, eating less meat, buying an electric vehicle, or installing solar panels, or buying secondhand clothes. It might be using your influence at work to change how things are done there. It might be starting a protest group or a collective of some kind. It might be organising repair days.
It doesn't particularly matter what you do, as long as you do something. The way our brains are wired, we will believe in and push harder for something if we have started to act on it. Belief without action is not belief; belief with action becomes more and more powerful. If you want be someone who changes a government, start with changing yourself.
One inevitable outcome in our collective future is that the extractive neoliberal capitalist system is going to end. This is simple maths: a system that relies on both extracting value from the environment and endless growth cannot last indefinitely. It simply cannot. Those who say we will be able to innovate to increase production while also reducing consumption are selling a lie. Maybe tomorrow or maybe a century from now, such a system must either adapt or fail. This is unavoidable, but the nature of how it ends is up to both Governments and us – as are the forms of the systems that will replace it. With a government beholden to the worse end of neoliberalism, waiting for them for the next three years seems less than ideal.
Neoliberal imperialism takes money to run; as the climate crisis sucks up more and more cash, that machine will become harder and harder to keep running. At some point, it will fail if it has not been replaced. (A deliberate and controlled transition to degrowth and/or steady-state economics will be a smoother path for everyone, so that's the preferred option if we can steer the core engine of democracy in the right directions).
This one point is a much longer discussion than my whole essay here (here I must hat-tip to an excellent video on the topic called "The World is Not Ending"; but fair warning, some might not like how that's presented, and it's over two hours long). But the short version is that eventually we will need to build systems of support for human needs that exist without the extractive capitalistic structures on which we currently rely, so we might as well start building them now. These can be worker collectives, food swapping or idea sharing groups, or anything else that helps supply human needs without the coercion inherent in an business owner/wage earner system. And yes, we can build non-extractive forms of this that still use money too, as long as everyone involved is treated fairly and given agency.
We don't have to wait for a government who will either do not enough (Labour over the last three years) or actively try to drag us backwards (as appears to be the goal of our incoming government).
There's a second thing we can build towards, too: the next time we collectively go to the polls. John Campbell wrote a piece called, "Just who the hell are the Greens?", and I drew an interesting insight from it: the Greens have not structured their campaigning around glitzy rich-man-funded ads, but instead have slowly built up a community through simple human connection and effort (that their donations also somewhat exceeded Labour's this year suggests it's a successful strategy). Regardless of your opinions of their party, I think this is something we can all learn from: long-term change comes through community and relationship, not through coercion or marketing.
Climate solutions, and a better, more equitable world, will also not come through coercion, government mandate, or marketing. It will come because enough of us decided to build it, then got together and did.
And yes, having the government helping not hindering would make this easier, so one of our goals over the next three years is to do what I tried for only a couple of weeks before this election: talk to people you think might be willing to change their mind on who they're going to vote for. Start our campaign for a better government now, not in 2026. I was surprised at how much people were willing to question their own ideas when I simply asked, "So have you decided who you're going to vote for?" It's a conversation I feel we make harder for ourselves than it needs to be.
Remember that we are in this for the long haul, and that we are building for many generations ahead. Against that backdrop, three years of bad governance will not mean much, especially if we use that time as wisely as we can.
Arohanui.
If you want to talk, please contact me.
1 "ACT" was actually an acronym for the "Association of Consumers and Taxpayers". Remember, almost every statement starting with "as a taxpayer..." is followed by something selfish and dumb. I'll leave it to the reader to determine how much that applies to the party thus named.
2 Over half of the climate emissions created by humanity since the beginning of history occurred in the last three decades, which have been since neoliberalism was adopted in the late 80s – and after the UN published its first Climate Change Assessment. Neoliberalism has led to dramatic increases in inequality and worsening outcomes in other metrics such as health.
3 I find it sad that caring about the environment (enough to act, at least) has become a political football, instead of being a common baseline on which we all agree. Misinformation seems to spread more easily among the right than the left, so take of that what you will, though there are a lot of people who vote to the right but are really caring.
4 Blame-shifting is a common tactic, and because countries like China have such a large population, they do have a higher current annual emissions than anywhere else. The other blame target is the USA, who have the highest total historical emissions. However, a little-known fact is that a more important metric, per-capita historical emissions (i.e. the share each of us individually have in all that has been emitted), puts Aotearoa New Zealand at number one, a dubious honour. (Look at the "Cumulative per capita emissions" column on the right-hand side of the table about half-way down this page). While a country like NZ is responsible for a small amount of the total emissions, when adjusted for population, we're the worst. That also means we have the biggest responsibility to do something about the climate crisis. Make what you will of how people want to blame China.
5 I don't actually know who originally said this, as it appears in a bunch of places. If you know the source, please let me know.
I have used "right" and "left" to describe the two main political sides, as terms like "liberal" can have opposite meanings to different audiences. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, "conservative" generally describes the right and, "liberal" the left. Some use "liberal" to mean "libertarians", i.e. the hard right (the local example being ACT).
