Holocaust Centre urges Green MP to apologise for climate change remarks

In Parliament last Tuesday, Green MP Steve Abel reached for one of the twentieth century's darkest philosophical concepts to describe what he saw happening in the present. He invoked Hannah Arendt's idea of the "banality of evil"—the observation that ordinary bureaucrats, distanced from the human cost of their actions, can enable atrocity through sheer administrative routine. Arendt had developed this framework while observing the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Abel used it to describe corporate executives and complicit politicians who, he argued, were collectively "gassing our whole planet" toward tens of millions of deaths.

The comparison did not sit well with everyone. Deborah Hart, chairperson of the Holocaust Centre, heard the remarks and felt they crossed a line. She called Abel to tell him so. The concept he had borrowed, she believed, had been trivialized in the service of a political argument, no matter how urgent the climate crisis might be. Hart was direct about what she thought should happen next: Abel should apologize.

In his original parliamentary statement, Abel had drawn a stark parallel. Corporate leaders and politicians, he said, represented "a truer form of the banality of evil" than Eichmann himself, because while the Nazi administrator never personally witnessed the gas chambers, today's decision-makers were collectively poisoning the entire planet. When pressed in the House, Abel doubled down, noting that the consequence of this planetary gassing would not be six million deaths—the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust—but tens of millions, even hundreds of millions.

Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick defended Abel's use of the concept. She argued that Arendt's framework was precisely relevant to climate change: it described how people embedded in systems of power could distance themselves from catastrophic consequences. Swarbrick noted that other legislators, including herself, had invoked the banality of evil when discussing state failures in other contexts, such as abuse in state care. When asked directly whether Abel's comments were appropriate, she did not answer the question head-on, instead saying he would clarify his position himself.

Abel did call Hart that Tuesday afternoon. He told her he would be more careful with Holocaust references going forward and that he agreed the Holocaust should not be trivialized. But when asked whether he would formally apologize, he did not give a direct answer. Instead, he emphasized the value of his conversation with Hart and said they had found common ground. He also stressed that the lessons of the Holocaust must be learned and applied to present dangers.

What remained unresolved was whether acknowledging concern and promising future care amounted to the apology Hart had requested. Abel had not retracted his argument about climate change or its scale of potential harm. He had simply agreed to handle the historical reference with greater precision. The question of whether invoking the Holocaust to describe contemporary crises—even ones that might dwarf it in scale—remains contested ground in New Zealand politics.