Well, good luck to James Shaw trying to convince Kiwis it’s a bad idea for National to give us that climate dividend as part of their tax cuts.

He's going as hard as he can. Yesterday, he said it "pissed him off" and it was “incensing him”, and today he’s put out a press release saying he’s “insulted”.

What he’s upset about is that National has used the ETS money to pay for their tax cuts. The ETS money collects from us all paying a little tax every time we do something that pollutes the planet.

So when you buy petrol, some of your bill is an ETS levy. When you pay your power bill, some of it is on the ETS, and so on.

Now, James and the Labour Government have famously used that money to help corporates cut their emissions.

So they used $140 million of the ETS money to buy the furnace for the Glenbrook Steel Mill owned by the Australian company BlueScope. And they used $90 million to help Fonterra cut back on coal burning. 

Both BlueScope and Fonterra could’ve paid for that themselves, because BlueScope declared a profit of more than a billion Aussie dollars and Fonterra declared more than half a billion Kiwi dollars.

National is instead giving us that money back. To be fair, they are wrong to call it a climate dividend, because it’s not. It’s something completely different- but they’re still giving it back to us.

And there is good reason for them to do this, because that ETS tax that you are paying is part of the reason life is more expensive.

Between February 2021 and February 2022, it sneakily pushed up petrol by 10 cents a litre, it pushed up your gas bills and pushed up the cost of your fruit and veges because the petrol and diesel cost more to truck them to the shops.

That is going to keep happening as we fight climate change and the ETS keeps taxing us more.

So good luck to James Shaw trying to convince us that as we pay more and more, the money should be given to corporates and not to us.

It is a weird day when the Green Party co-leader is more worried about helping an Australian company than Kiwis doing it tough. 

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