New Zealand's Travelling Envirocrats

Expensive Self-Congratulation Is Always Ugly

Wars are expensive undertakings.  International bureaucratic talkfests crafting war plans, strategies, targets, timetables, and bloated bellies are likewise very expensive.  But since it is all necessary in the "war against climate change" such spending is absolute, industrial grade, highest quality kosher salt.

Of course communication via electronic means has never been more pervasive and cheaper.  But this has merely seemed to convince our spendthrift government masters of the need to revert to ancient forms of global communication.  In order to "fight" against climate change, face-to-face communication is absolutely essential.  The electronic age has strangely ushered in a global, "whites of their eyes" old-style model of communication.

According to Stuff, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent and wasted by our travelling climate change warriors:

The Ministry for the Environment spent $45,000 a month to jet its staffers around the globe.  Policy experts were sent on 116 individual international trips - to countries including Korea, Jamaica, Germany, France, Africa, Canada, the United States and China.

An Official Information Act request by the Taxpayer's Union has revealed the ministry spent $769,955 on international travel between July 2017 and December 10, 2018.  In a single return trip in October 2017, it appeared the ministry had sent a senior policy analyst to Santiago in Chile with the airfare totalling $23,826. However a spokesman later clarified the trip was for two people. 

Jordan Williams, director of the Taxpayers Union, bristles at the hypocrisy involved.  The New Zealand government, as part of its ostensible commitment to combating climate change, hectors everyone else of the duty not to fly.  It's far too damaging to our environment, don't you know.   But apparently, such considerations do not register with the self-same governmental climate change warriors who quite happily buy air tickets to travel from the bedroom to the lavatory.

Williams said sending policy analysts on first class trips to international conferences was an "insane use of money for a ministry who tells Kiwis not to fly”.  As the battle to protect the environment from the effects of climate change heats up, the Ministry for the Environment is defending a $760,000 travel bill over less than 18 months.

The ministry's website offered advice to New Zealanders looking to reduce their carbon footprint, including flying less, working remotely and using video conferencing. 

 The fact that we New Zealanders have to sustain and support such waste is creating a slow burn of mounting anger.  The picture that intrudes relentlessly is of Neville Chamberlain flitting about Europe in the late nineteen thirties,  in meeting after meeting in an attempt to talk Hitler out of going to war.  He returns after the Munich Conference waving a piece of paper on which was Hitler's signature, committing the Nazi government to peace.  Chamberlain was greeted by thousands.  He waved Hitler's "token of peace" and declared to the British people that all the travel and talking had achieved "Peace in our time!".

Instead of Chamberlain, we now have envirocrats flitting from meetings in Bogota to South Sudan, each clutching their white papers affirming triumphant progress in the great War against Climate Change.  They are manic.  They are self-deceived.  But our taxes fund it all.

Wars are expensive undertakings.  At least our travelling envirocrats are able to enjoy the experience of bloated self-importance as they repeatedly whisk and jaw their way around the globe.  That's worth something, is it not?