Green Jobs For New Zealanders


100,000 green jobs for New Zealanders
GREEN PARTY PRIORITY 2011

The current situation
We need a pragmatic economic strategy to help New Zealand succeed in a competitive global economy — a global economy that is turning increasingly green.
The OECD has recognised that New Zealand’s long term competitive advantage lies in safeguarding our natural resources through mutually supportive economic and environmental policies. They recognise that our economy is our environment and that our 100% Pure brand is invaluable in a world worried about carbon emissions, water shortages, and contaminated food.
The current Government’s economic approach has been to risk our brand for the sake of a quick buck. The majority of our lowland rivers are now polluted due to the unregulated expansion of our dairy industry. Three lignite plants are under consideration and will escalate our contribution towards climate change. The Government is spending $20 billion on new state highways
while our trains remain an international embarrassment. And plans for deep-sea oil drilling are being fast-tracked despite what just happened with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

What we’re going to do about it
The Green Party has a plan to create 100,000 new green jobs — a plan that will add resilience to our economy and protect our natural environment, without going further into debt.
We’ll create 100,000 new jobs through direct government investment, changing the way our state-owned energy companies work, and shifting the drivers for green jobs in the private sector.
How we’re going to do it
Our plan is detailed and fully-costed. It includes plans for direct government investment, building sustainable infrastructure, supporting the greening of our small and medium enterprises (SMEs), driving innovation, introducing smarter regulation, getting the prices of resources and pollution right, protecting our brand, reforming capital markets, making our workplaces fairer, and measuring progress differently.
Here are three of the highlights:
Direct investment We will ramp-up the Heat Smart home insulation programme ensuring it is rolled out to a further 200,000 homes over the next three years, costing $350 million and employing 4,000 people directly — 10,400 if you include indirect and upstream employment effects.
Keep it Kiwi We will retain ownership of our state-owned enterprises while creating the right incentives for them to partner with clean tech entrepreneurs in the private sector and develop renewable energy solutions that we can patent and export abroad. With the right incentives in place, if we can capture just 1% of the global market for renewable energy solutions, we’ll create a $6 to $8 billion export industry employing 47,000–65,000 people in new green jobs.
Support for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Through a mix of government procurement policies, tax incentives, start- up funding, and a $1 billion boost to R&D funding, we’ll support SMEs to step up and drive new job creation in the cleantech sector.
To view the full plan, visit greens.org.nz/greenjobs

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