NZ: Political parties to be grilled over climate change this week

AUCKLAND (Oxfam / Pacific Media Watch): Several high profile environmental organisations will put New Zealand political parties on the spot this week with a live streamed  debate on climate change in front of a large studio audience.

The debate - which is already sold out - is part of a campaign by Oxfam, Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Forest and Bird, 350 Aotearoa and Generation Zero to have New Zealanders commit to putting pressure on the government to improve their efforts to combat climate change in next month's general election.

At the time of publishing, almost 56,000 people had signed on to the campaign as "climate voters".

"Being a climate voter means you care about climate change and you want all political parties to do something about it. It means you want real action on climate change and you’re prepared to use your vote to get it. It says you support strategies to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and grow New Zealand’s clean energy and low-carbon potential," said a campaign statement.

The debate, at Auckland's Q Theatre, will be hosted by TV3's Samantha Hayes and the confirmed politicians are National’s Tim Groser, Minister for Climate Issues; Labour deputy leader David Parker; Green co-leader Russel Norman; and New Zealand First deputy leader Tracey Martin.

The organisations have set up 13 live screening venues across the country for the debate.

An Oxfam statement said it was a crucial time to push climate change higher up the election agenda.

"Now is the time to ratchet up the pressure. The more climate voters, the bigger our impact," said Oxfam, adding that already over two percent of the 2.26 million people who voted in the last election had signed on as climate voters.

"This means climate voter is more popular than any of the government's current coalition partners!" said Oxfam.

The live-streamed debate on climate change takes place here at 19h00 New Zealand time on September 3.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.