New Zealand’s right-wing coalition government has pushed through a divisive piece of legislation that blocks civil climate liability lawsuits against private companies, immediately ending a high-profile ongoing case against six of the nation’s largest corporations. The legal amendment passed its final parliamentary vote Tuesday night by a margin of 67 to 53, capping weeks of heated debate over the balance of government climate policy, corporate interests and public access to legal recourse.
The legislation was drafted directly in response to a lawsuit brought by Indigenous Māori climate activist Michael Smith, who targeted six prominent New Zealand firms — including global dairy giant Fonterra — seeking to hold them legally accountable for their contributions to climate-related environmental harm. The new law retroactively halts Smith’s active case, a move that has drawn fierce condemnation from activists, opposition lawmakers and climate experts.
Speaking to New Zealand’s national public broadcaster RNZ, Smith called the vote a dark turning point for democratic accountability in the country. “If parliament can cancel a live court case simply because it becomes politically inconvenient, then no legal claim is secure at all,” he argued. Opposition Green Party MP Steve Abel echoed that criticism in parliamentary debate, framing the change as a deliberate handout to corporate polluters at the expense of the public interest.
“Six dirty polluters versus one activist — they had the best-paid, most skilled lawyers in the country and they still were losing the case,” Abel said. “So what did they do? They turned to this sitting government and begged them to extinguish the case, wipe it from the books, nullify it entirely.”
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith defended the government’s action, arguing that the legislation is necessary to create clarity for businesses around their climate obligations. He argued that ongoing High Court litigation over corporate emissions risked creating an ad-hoc regulatory framework that directly contradicts the national climate policy structure already enacted by parliament.
“These ongoing claims create deep uncertainty for business confidence and domestic investment,” Goldsmith said in an official statement. “Climate change is a complex issue that intersects with environmental, economic and social priorities across the nation. It is not a matter that should be resolved piecemeal through individual court cases. Our national climate response is best designed and managed by the elected government at a national level.”
The passage of the law comes as New Zealand faces growing pressure to step up its emissions reduction efforts, following a stark warning from an independent statutory climate advisory body last month. The Climate Change Commission, established by federal law in 2019, issued a report warning that current policies under Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government put the nation at severe risk of missing its legally binding emissions reduction targets.
The commission highlighted a series of controversial policy changes made by the current government that will increase overall national emissions: excluding the agricultural sector from emissions pricing, rolling back clean vehicle emissions standards, reducing mandatory emissions reporting requirements for businesses, and moving forward with plans to build a new liquefied natural gas import terminal. The report noted that the emissions increases from these policies will outweigh any emissions cuts achieved through other government programs.
Commission chief executive Jo Hendy called the findings an urgent wake-up call for policymakers. “While emissions have declined gradually over recent years, progress stalled entirely in 2024,” Hendy said. “Current policy settings are simply not delivering the rate of reduction we need to hit our targets, and the window to correct course is now closing quickly.”