In 1973 Social Credit produced a 28 page document titled 'You and Your Environment'. It was way ahead of its time. Our monetary reform policy will enable us to continue to be the leaders in the protection, conservation, and enhancement of environmental resources, including land, water, air, and biodiversity.
Social Credit will:
• Ensure that human well being and sound ecology, not the profit motive, governs all our decisions
• Monitor the effects of such decisions to ensure the desired outcome is being achieved
• Replace the Emissions Trading Scheme with measures to reduce pollution and provide financial assistance to help agriculture and industry meet the new emissions standards
• Increase programmes for, and investment in, waste minimisation and recycling and explore innovative ways to make use of waste
• Not allow any further rubbish tips to be opened, but rather invest in waste-to-energy plants for disposal of rubbish that cannot be reused or recycled
• Establish a Conservation Code, and a system of environmental zoning for the land and its territorial waters. Zones will include a wilderness zone , a reserve and park zone, an open country zone, and a national development zone.
• Protect elite soils from urban or commercial development to ensure the best land is available for growing food crops
• Amend the Resource Management Act, to reflect these goals, and to reduce hearing costs and delays
• Implement regional development programmes for flood control, soil conservation, energy conservation and water quality, with nil interest loans from the Reserve Bank
• Reverse the drift to urban centres by production initiatives enhancing local employment opportunities
• Ensure New Zealand's marine environment is patrolled and protected, and seek an international agreement preventing the dumping of nuclear and other toxic wastes at sea
• Actively pursue prosecution of illegal gill-net trawlers within the Economic Zone
• Establish a NZ Environmental Research Institute, which will report on solutions to common global environmental problems, including biological and genetic control
• Phase out the use of 1080 aerial drops as quickly as practicable in favour of more environmentally friendly pest management tools
Chemicals and Toxins:
-
The future of humanity in the World depends upon protecting and caring for the natural environment, and the flora and fauna that inhabit it.
-
We will ensure that, in New Zealand, the environment, the ecosystem and human health and well-being take precedence over profit in human endeavour.
-
Pollution from toxic substances and hazardous wastes must be controlled if Earth's ecosystems are to survive.
-
Mechanical and biological control of noxious weeds will be preferred to chemical spraying.
-
We will promote safe biological control of agricultural pests in preference to chemical pest controls that are harmful to health or environment.
-
We will gradually reduce cumulative pesticide poisoning of the environment through careful research and introduction of pest resistant plant strains, more pest-specific methods of control, use of pesticides (if necessary) with short term toxicity, and by safe biological control of pests.
-
Effective monitoring of pollution, toxic substance use and waste disposal will be an essential community service.
-
Manufacturers and distributors will be made liable for the safe supervised destruction of toxic wastes and other pollutants that are not safely bio-degradable and are not recycled.
-
We will continue to develop wood feed-stocks for chemicals such as dyes, phenols, proteins and sugars.
-
We will re-examine the use of timber and wood wastes for energy production and motor fuels.
International concerns will include ocean resource management, nuclear testing and waste disposal, safety of nuclear installations, the use of toxic materials and disposal of toxic waste, Antarctic pollution, atmospheric warming and stability, treatment, recycling or destruction of non bio-degradable wastes and packaging, strategic water resource utilisation, genetic pollution from industrial, agricultural and bio-genetic processes.