Written By:
- Date published:
10:31 am, July 21st, 2026 - 8 comments
Categories: 2026 oil crisis, Chlöe Swarbrick, election 2026, energy, greens, james shaw -
Tags: how change happens, Kiwipower
Seven minutes on Morning Report: Chlöe Swarbrick on Green Party’s new energy policy
Swarbrick is in full electioneering mode, it’s great to see. Campbell reins her in a bit to explain the new Kiwipower and Power for Us All energy policies.
What we are seeing here is the strategic undoing of neoliberalim and replacing it with something else, that serves us. They are doing so without scaring the horses, and in ways that are easy for the mainstream to vote for and Labour to say yes to.
At the start, Swarbrick outlines the situation:
You’ve just been talking all morning about our exposure to imported inflation, in fact even the Prime Minister now is starting to foreshadow that those figures are not going to be particularly pretty today.
The reason for that is that there is a ticking time bomb, locked in, laced in, to the centre of our country and our economy. When we get new fossil fuel supply, we get to restart the countdown clock, but that is simply a process of continually feeding the beast.
What the Greens are proposing is inline with our 36 years of political history, which is to defuse the goddam timebomb.
If that’s not totally clear: we have a few weeks’ supply of oil fuels at any given time, on a renewing cycle. We are utterly dependent on oil for our economy, and not just fossil fuels but the long, complex supply chain from oil fields to petrol pumps, which we are at the end of.
Most of us have been largely unaware of this until the 2026 oil crisis where the US and Israeli war on Iran resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year. We were hyper aware for a few months, then we all moved on. The Strait is closed again. We are still vulnerable.
That’s the ticking time bomb.
The Greens want to replace that with electrification where we can, and not simply neoliberal BAU oil for green power swap. They want to at the same time start reforming the electricity industry, shifting power, so to speak, away from the corporates and back to government and the people.
Home and community generation reduces household costs, builds climate and oil shock resilience, and makes electricity a key strategic asset for us all again, instead of a endless transfer of household wealth to corporate profit.
Kiwipower, a government entity, would address our dry year issues with hydro by investing in renewables designed to account for the dry years, and regulate contracts with existing providers to create better provision when we are short.
You can read more detail about the policies, plus commentary, in The Greens: Kiwipower and Power for All of Us
One final thought. When the Greens decided to go radical, with Shaw leaving and Swarbrick stepping up, it was a risk. The idea was to free the party up from Shaw’s steady as she goes, work within the system, build stable systems over time, to… something else.
Shaw was a huge loss to parliament (and anyone who thought he was a centrist neoliberal shill really wasn’t paying attention). There is no doubt that the work done in his years set us up well for what would come next. I’ll admit I’ve been nervous about the radical shift. I thought it was necessary on climate grounds alone, but it’s been unclear how it would work in terms of gaining mainstream support to make the radical change we urgently need.
I’ll also admit I didn’t see this coming, what is happening now. This isn’t far left green radicalism, except at its core it is, and it’s done very canny. It’s the first time I’ve thought yep, the loss of Shaw will have been worth it, and it’s the first time I’ve had the feeling I understand what the Greens are now doing. This isn’t just great policy, it’s great strategy.
And it just shows the contrast with the government that has just announced they will throw $1B of our money at trying to find drops of oil that we don't want to dig up.
Except that it wasn’t “the government” but NZ First, and it wasn’t just to find “drops of oil” but a more encompassing subsurface survey.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/756443/a-very-high-risk-way-to-spend-1-billion-experts-on-nz-first-s-oil-and-gas-policy
I thought the TPU response was interesting: https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/smoking_a_billion_dollars_of_green_on_a_fourth_energy_company_is_madness
When a pontificator chooses rhetoric over evidence, you know they are trying hard not to seem out of their depth. Bluster in this situation disguises intellectual weakness.
Whereas Chloe presented the outline of the scheme well, looks like we have to reserve judgment until we see it working in practice. Another market player will affect the social investment ecosystem around electricity via both competition and collaboration, but how it does so depends on operational decision-making by the agency to be established.
Great post Weka.
I think it s an extremely attractive prospect, even to voters from the Right, that these islands become almost self-sufficient in energy, such that we import only very small amounts of specialised oil derived products.
This is entirely achievable. It will take some time-we will still be importing fuel for gas guzzlers for a while-but by adopting the Green's policies now imports of fossil fuels will be decreased quickly, especially if parliament adopts this approach in a bi-partisan manner.
Let's do it.
I genuinely want to hear legitimate criticism of this initiative. Legitimate, not typical ad-homs that get trotted out by the usual suspects at Green proposals.
As I commented on the other post, housing next. While the horses should be ok, landlords might get miffed. 12 months notice the Accommodation Supplement is going to be reduced to nil over a year. At the same time the tax breaks and interest deductions will cease. The more than $2.2B this frees up is used to build quality housing.
The future looks bright.
"It’s the first time I’ve thought yep, the loss of Shaw will have been worth it, and it’s the first time I’ve had the feeling I understand what the Greens are now doing."
Welcome back.
We currently have strong climate change policy written not by central or local government, but by house and building insurers, mortgage banks, and valuers and real estate agents, and power generators than we do by the whole of central government, and at this point in proceedings the private sector is where the strongest signals ought to be coming from.
The main thing Shaw did well was marshall the voice of the private sector FIRE economy about climate change.
There's no question about Swarbrick's message, but who other than the usual NGOs want to deliver it?
You think there won't be enough industry people on board?