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United Future New Zealand promises sustainable development coupled with economic progress and balanced by environmental responsibility. We favour natural resource accounting systems which ensure we place proper value on our environment.
Good economic decisions must also be good environmental decisions. We want all consumers to take proper account of the true environmental costs of economic decisions and ensure prices reflect environmental impact.
To these ends, we will expect environmental impacts to be reflected, where practical, in all public sector accounting and reporting. We aim to see the format of the Public Accounts altered to ensure that they provide an accurate account of the current state of the environment. Over time, we will work to establish, similar forms of accounting and reporting within the private sector.
Principles
- Use market mechanisms and economic instruments (such as eco-taxes and tradeable permits) to regulate environmental behaviour.
- Support current targets for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and the introduction of a fiscally neutral carbon tax, should these targets not be achieved.
- Provide assistance to business and market development to demonstrate government's commitment to environmental sustainability.
UNITED FUTURE WILL
- Encourage a greater degree of co-ordination amongst all levels of government, the private sector and communities, in order to make the Resource Management Act (RMA) work more effectively.
- Provide strengthened central government support for the RMA. We will work closely with local government to provide better policy guidance, strengthened environmental data, and further research into how the impact of human activity on the environment might be minimised.
- Set concrete goals and quantified targets for environmental policy at all levels of government.
- Establish specific goals for the phasing out of the use of ozone depleting substances.
- Devise national policies on energy and climate change; sustainable land management; and the conservation of indigenous bio-diversity.
- Seek greater use of multi-stakeholder decision making processes and voluntary agreements.
- Ensure New Zealand remains nuclear free and a world leader on disarmament issues.
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