Greens need to move on from scandals - Matthew Hooton

Greens co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick (left) and Marama Davidson. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION

The Greens are finally paying the price for the evermore pantomimic scandals plaguing them this year. They certainly need not panic, still polling above 10 per cent, close to their record 12 per cent at the election.

But there’s a clear decline from their even higher numbers before Christmas.

The Greens have the strongest brand in Parliament, protecting them from the usual swings and roundabouts of politics. Their brand has its origins in 1960s and 70s anti-capitalism, and the damage it supposedly does to people and planet.

Yet even the Greens know their product needs to remain true to label.

Former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman shopping at the country’s most expensive boutiques, let alone stealing from them, is like Hermes selling its handbags through the Warehouse.

Allegations current MP Darleen Tana was involved in a business exploiting migrant labour are worse.

Before the election, there were bullying allegations involving former Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere. It looked bad when Ricardo Menéndez March, still a Green MP, was accused of trying to jump the MIQ queue during Covid.

It’s difficult to get quite so worked up about Rongotai MP Julie Anne Genter bellowing at Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey. I too raised my voice at him the last time I saw him.

But there’s a reason the two blocs in Parliament sit two-and-a-half sword-lengths apart. MPs really aren’t allowed to cross the floor in anger. If they want to duel, they’re meant to take their rapiers to the courtyard.

Green strategists know the party has to lift its game, first to help limit the National-led Government to a single term but secondly to secure the same power over a second Chris Hipkins regime as Act and NZ First have over Christopher Luxon’s.

The three months between former Green co-leader James Shaw announcing his resignation on January 30 and his valedictory on May 1 haven’t helped.

While Shaw was doing his 90-day victory lap, his co-leader Marama Davidson and new co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick were left to deal with the various messes.

Swarbrick’s friends deny she feels aggrieved by Shaw’s hospital pass, having to deal with problems that developed when he was in ascendency, but she has every right to.

Party strategists say he tended to interpret the Greens’ principle of non-violence as a licence to avoid dealing with conflict – especially when problems involved women MPs, the overwhelming majority of the Green caucus.

His critics say he was naive in taking at face value anyone who showed up with the right credentials rather than recognising that any powerful organisation, as the Greens certainly are, will attract bad actors interested more in personal advancement rather than the party.

In Government, Shaw focused on achieving and then maintaining the historic multiparty consensus on climate change. But while that may have been good for export branding and maybe even the planet, more cynical Green politicos understand it blurred their ability to differentiate from National and Labour on the issue.

With Green MPs barking at every passing car, voters now risk knowing more about what they think about Hamas than what it thinks about domestic social and ecological degradation.

Some on the right argue, often mischievously, that the Greens should go back to being a “true” green party, dropping social justice issues and focusing exclusively on the environment.

They claim there is political space for such an environment-only party sitting between Labour and National and calling the shots, like NZ First.

The first problem with that idea is it fails to recognise the connection Green Party activists see between social justice and environmental issues, historically subsets of their main anti-capitalist message.

More prosaically, it’s been tried twice before and failed. Despite being led by some of the doyens of environmental activism and having no shortage of cash, the so-called Progressive Green Party won just 0.26 per cent of the vote in 1996. The so-called Sustainable New Zealand Party did worse in 2020, winning just 0.1 per cent.

Greens MP Julie Anne Genter.

Commercially, New Zealand is not like Australia, as so many big New Zealand businesses have learned to their shareholders’ cost. But nor is it politically similar. There was space for Australia’s Teals in 2022 because neither Australia’s Liberal-National coalition nor Labor Party is anything like as environmentally friendly as our National and Labour.

Both Australian blocs are pro-mining, pro-Aukus and pro-nuclear and more sceptical than our major parties of whether their country can do much to slow climate change if China, India, Russia and Brazil won’t.

What exactly would a Kiwi Teal Party offer that Labour and National are not?

Yet elements of the Greens’ formal GreenLeft faction are just as out of touch when arguing the party ought to drop the middle-class environmental claptrap in favour of policies like abolishing prisons. The Greens win the majority of their vote from the wealthiest parts of the country, who don’t like criminals any more than oil companies or banks.

If anti-capitalism has been a bit passé since 1989, the Greens could unify their Remuera recycling and Aro Valley radical wings under a very broad interpretation of sustainability.

This would include sustainability of the environment, as the term is usually understood, through climate change policy and opposing nuclear weaponry and Aukus.

It would include social sustainability, their worry society will break down if the gap between rich and poor is not radically reduced.

It could extend to concerns like the sustainability of a middle class, which is currently evacuating to Australia, leaving a more sharply socio-economically split country. Instead of National’s solution of middle-class tax cuts and handouts or whatever Labour is offering, the Greens could unashamedly promote European-style big government.

If daring enough, the Greens could even lead on the issue Labour and National ignore – fiscal sustainability after 2030, with government debt forecast to keep growing permanently until default and economic meltdown around 2050.

The Greens’ solution would be much higher taxes. But that would at least be something more than Labour and National just pretending New Zealand is economically sustainable without either that or a radical rightsizing of the state.

Some Green strategists describe Swarbrick as Jacinda Ardern with brains. Like Act’s David Seymour, her fellow graduate of the University of Auckland philosophy department, she has the intellectual equipment and political skills to sell a very different path from the inexorable decline offered by Labour and National.

First, though, she and Davidson better focus on stopping their MPs stealing stuff, allegedly exploiting workers, and generally behaving like the out-of-touch and entitled brats they cannot afford to be.

Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.