Budget 2020: The Missed Opportunity

How green was the Budget?  Billed as transformational it contains big dollops of cash for the environment, rail, ferries, housing and insulation. So you’d think that climate campaigners would be happy. Errr, nope. The Budget is a missed opportunity to reshape New Zealand to a low-emissions, high-margin economy and leaves us exposed to that other imminent threat, climate change. I spoke to three experts to unpack the good, the bad and tragically missing from this epic spending spree.Rod Oram is a business journalist specialising in sustainable development, writing for Newsroom.Amanda Larsson is the Climate and Energy Campaigner for Greenpeace NZ and an author of the Green New Deal, a plan to accelerate NZ’s progress to a low-emissions future.Jenny Cooper QC is the president of Lawyers for Climate Action NZ.