National MP moves to shield companies from climate liability

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

Southland MP Joseph Mooney has lodged a private members’ bill that would stop people suing companies they blame for climate change.

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Southland National MP Joseph Mooney wants to pass a law to abolish people’s right to take legal action against companies over the damage they cause to the climate.

Mooney has lodged his Climate Change (Restriction on Civil Proceedings) members’ bill with Parliament seeking to “expressly abolish any cause of action in tort relating to climate change”.

The Ministry of Justice says: “Torts are common law actions where a person seeks compensation for harm caused by a wrongful act.”

The highest-profile case in the area is Smith v Fonterra, where Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu climate activist Mike Smith is seeking declarations against seven companies under the common law torts of public nuisance, negligence and a proposed new tort relating specifically to climate change, and orders that they reduce their emissions.

Smith said he had heard rumours that an attempt would be made to shut down climate litigation in response to his court action.

“We’ve been expecting it for a while,” said Smith.

Climate and indigenous rights activist Mike Smith helps iwi to prevent and adapt to global warming.

The bill was “an affront to justice and the rule of law”, Smith said, and an attack on his his rights as a citizen to take claims.

The draft of Mooney’s bill said it sought “to prevent litigation from being utilised to address issues more appropriately resolved through legislative, regulatory, and market-based frameworks”.

Members’ bills by MPs from ruling parties do not necessarily represent Government policy intentions.

Mooney said he had received permission to lodge his bill from the National Party, but the bill was the result of him becoming interested in the issue.

He said the Government had a long list of priorities, and he had decided to bring the bill forward himself in hopes it would be drawn from the ballot of members’ bills to be debated.

Mooney’s bill would prohibit tort claims “arising from or related to climate change matters, including but not limited to alleged damages, injuries, or losses attributed to greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature changes, or environmental impacts associated therewith.”

Mike Smith is described as a climate activist, but he says he is just a citizen seeking to enforce his legal rights.

The intention was to “promote legal clarity, protect individuals, businesses and governmental entities from unpredictable and potentially boundless liability, and to safeguard the integrity of New Zealand’s climate policy framework, particularly the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme”.

“Activists are increasingly turning to the courts to hold to account those perceived as directly or indirectly contributing to climate change,” law firm Bell Gully said last year after the Supreme Court cleared the way for Smith’s claims to be heard in court.

The text of the bill says it was not intended to diminish the importance of addressing climate change, but that climate change was best tackled through “science-based public policy, market-driven initiatives like the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, technological innovation, and international co-operation”.

“The tort system, with its focus on individualised blame and diffuse causation. is ill-equipped to address a phenomenon of this scale and complexity,” it reads.

Smith described that rationale as “absolute nonsense”.

“The mechanisms they are talking about are clearly failing,” he said.

‘When we march in the streets for climate we’re told to use the legal system. And when we use that system? Well, the Government appears to now be proposing law to guarantee it can’t work for regular people,’ says Chlöe Swarbrick, Green Party spokesperson on climate change.

Private legal action asking courts to make polluters and governments abide by existing law was an effective mechanism to push forward change in a fair and independent way, he said.

Chlöe Swarbrick, Green Party spokesperson on climate change, said: “Who on earth asked for this law? The only possible answer is massive corporations making massive profit by setting our planet on fire.

“It’s clear who this Government is willing to fight for, and it sure as hell isn’t regular people who it’s expecting to pay the cost of climate change,” she said.

“Major polluters must be held accountable. It’s utterly insane that the Government would seek to protect those corporations ‒ taking away regular people’s legal rights ‒ from the damage they inflict on our shared climate, and inevitably people’s lives,” she said.

Simon Tucker, Fonterra group director of global external affairs, said the dairy co-operative had not been aware of Mooney’s bill.

“While we are still analysing the bill, it looks like it's a step in the right direction,” he said.

“We maintain our view that regulation of GHG emissions requires a sophisticated, economy-wide, regulatory response and we believe Parliament is the appropriate place to determine such wide-reaching public and economic policy on matters of significant public interest such as climate change,” he said.

Mooney said he had not drafted his bill as a result of being approached by industry.

“This doesn’t come from lobbying,” he said.

Smith v Fonterra had been set down to be heard in 2027. The defendants are Fonterra, Genesis Energy, Dairy Holdings, New Zealand Steel, Z Energy, the New Zealand Refining Company and BT Mining.

Members’ bills can be lodged by any MP who is not a minister, with a limit of one per member. They are entered into a ballot system, and if drawn they are debated.

If they can garner enough support, they can even become law as happened with Camilla Belich’s wage theft bill, which was supported by New Zealand First, even though National and ACT opposed it.