Trust the science
Sunday, 5 July 2026
Matthew Hooton is editor-in-chief of the Sunday Star-Times and The Post.
OPINION: Former Prime Minister Helen Clark told me this week that she still regards the 2002 Corngate affair as “bewildering”. It certainly has had an out-sized effect on New Zealand politics and on our scientific progress and economy ever since.
Before the release of Nicky Hager’s Seeds of Distrust, Clark’s Labour Party was flying high above 50% in the polls and on track to become the first party under MMP to govern alone. Hager’s book and Clark’s furious interview with John Campbell put paid to that.
The enmity it created between the scientifically-minded Clark and the more sceptical green left also meant a Labour-Green Government was out of the question after the election. Instead, Clark opted to govern with Peter Dunne’s “common sense” United Future.
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Relations hadn’t improved by 2005 when Clark added NZ First to her assortment of support parties rather than explore a deal with the Greens and the first iteration of Te Pāti Māori - which would admittedly have also been difficult given acrimony over Labour’s nationalisation of the foreshore and seabed.
Looking back, we can only now speculate about how much more progress the Clark Government would have made on reducing New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions and wider climate-change mitigation measures had events unfolded differently.
Yet, as Clark also reminded me, there never was a proven so-called ‘contamination’ of corn-seed into the food chain. Nor had Clark’s Government covered one up, with then Biosecurity Minister Marian Hobbs having referred publicly to earlier fears there had been one - albeit quite far down a press release when she put firmer regulations in place.
If Hager’s 1996 Secret Power which revealed the existence of Five Eyes was his greatest work, Seeds of Distrust is not in the same category.
Clark also continues to see the disastrous interview with Campbell as a set up, with the Broadcasting Standards Authority agreeing it was neither impartial nor objective, and a serious breach of standards.
Her seething description of Campbell as “a sanctimonious little creep” became legendary - and to some extent aspirational for journalists trying to hold prime ministers to account ever since.
A new inside take on these issues - and other controversies from the Clark years - appears in a new book by her government’s chief press secretary, Mike Munro, who later served for 18 months as chief of staff to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The corngate chapter from his book, Ringside, is published here today in the Star-Times, along with an interview with Munro. It will be compulsory reading for every political junkie who remembers the Clark years.
But enjoying the politics of the matter shouldn’t hide that it may have done real damage to New Zealand’s agricultural competitiveness and global efforts to prevent climate change.
For 24 years, any potential benefits of biotechnology to New Zealand’s primary industries and climate change efforts haven’t just been unavailable - even debating them has largely been politically off-limits. Those who conducted focus groups on biotechnology at the height of the controversy heard fears straight out of The Day of the Triffids or Jurassic Park, while anti-biotechnology lobbyists ran advertisements warning of the risks of four-breasted women.
Hopefully a more rational debate is possible a quarter century later, which Rob Stock surveys in today’s Star-Times. We’ll never know, but maybe by now technologies would have been developed at Massey or Lincoln universities to not just stop New Zealand cattle from burping so much methane, but which could have been exported globally to make a major dent in global GHG emissions, far greater than anything New Zealand could do domestically.
If elements of the political left carry much of the blame for our anti-scientific attitude to biotechnology, fingers can be pointed at some on the right for a similar mindset to climate change over the same decades. The world’s failure to take the actions scientists have been recommending since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 mean climate change is here. As with biotechnology, we’d have been better off trusting the science on climate change.
Efforts to encourage China, the US, India, Russia and all countries to reduce emissions will and must continue, even if the current UN mechanisms to achieve that have clearly failed. But the primary challenge for New Zealand now is to accept climate change will force radical change to our economy, infrastructure and primary production and quickly adapt accordingly.
Market forces, most powerfully from the insurance industry, will do much of that work, but government agencies must also change their attitudes.
In today’s Star-Times, Kevin Norquay and Virginia Fallon tell the story of the Tūranganui River Bridge in South Wairarapa that was washed out by one of those “once-in-a-century” storms in February, then again last week. It would be funny were taxpayers and ratepayers’ money not involved and if it didn’t leave communities isolated from the rest of the country.
As part of the same story, Kevin and Virginia survey the likely effects of ongoing infrastructure costs due to climate change and what adaptations we may need to consider. Enjoy!
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