How to win votes and influence

By KEVIN TAYLOR

When Waikato band Mr Wiggly start their set at the Lake Karapiro Camping and Pursuits Centre tomorrow night, the audience should really be in the mood to let off some steam.

Delegates at the Green Party annual conference will have spent two days locked in their own special form of protracted consensus-making.



Nearly a year after the last general election, with their campaign fought largely over genetic modification, the conference is a chance to both review campaign strategy and look to the future.

Underlying discussions will be the sneaking worry that the Green wave may have subsided; and apart from the matter of their standing with the electorate is the question of the party's sliding relevance in the machinery of government.

Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons told the Weekend Herald there was nothing wrong with the Green relationship with the Labour-Progressives Government.

But compared to the last term, they have lost influence. Withholding confidence and supply votes, the party has not been given new budgetary initiatives.

The party hovers around the important 5 per cent threshold in polls. In the most recent TVNZ Colmar Brunton poll support was down 2 points to just 3 per cent, although such a poor showing may just be a rogue result.

Victoria University political science lecturer Dr Tim Bale says the Greens have a perennial problem: the big issues like genetic modification and free trade that get its supporters going are precisely the ones that make its relationship with Labour so difficult.

He points to other clouds on the horizon as well.

Bale suggests a rising concern might be poor election results from Green parties overseas over the past year, and these will certainly be discussed at this weekend's conference.

The Belgian Greens, for example, almost completely lost their parliamentary representation in the recent election.

"So the Green wave as it were, across the world and across Europe, seems to have subsided. The tide's been out on it this last year."

Bale also cites Maori sovereignty, and in particular the party stand on Waitangi Tribunal recommendations over Taranaki Maori claims on royalties from oil and gas reserves.

"They took quite a strong stance on that towards the Maori owners' side of things, and I think that would worry some in the party," he says.

"There are already some people in the party a wee bit concerned that they don't focus too much on something that is a not core issue for essentially an environmentalist party."

Greens co-convener Catherine Delahunty says word of any discord over that issue has not reached her, but she points out the Greens are not only an environmental party. "Our principles are a lot more complex than that. I would hate to be in a party that had a very simplistic, narrow conservation perspective."

Other commentators also raise issues of party direction - at times it can look like a bunch of personal agendas from legalising dope to food safety are being driven with little thought to the whole.

But Delahunty says the two-second media soundbite marginalises a party like the Greens.

Questions also arise about whether the public is sick of the Greens' "we know best" attitude. One example is their recent campaign to name and shame firms wasting power - and they've already named some - on the party website.

The move prompted one angry letter to the editor of the Herald asking if the Greens understood the need for security of small businesses and calling them a "party of fascists".

But Bale says the Left, both Labour and the Greens, always have the problem of being seen as moralistic.

"There's a moralistic element in all socialist or environmentalist ideology.

"There's always the feeling that perhaps they are saying that they know better than the rest of us, so they have got to be careful about that."

But Fitzsimons says the party is probably less worried about image than most political parties, because they are a party of principle.

And it is clear the long-term is occupying the party with its strategic review in full swing, and will be discussed tomorrow at closed sessions at the conference.

The grassroots-up review started last year, and she hopes it will be ready for release at the end of this year. Fitzsimons says the review will not look at election strategy for 2005 but at "long-term, big-picture thinking".

"One of the things we want to come out of it is a fairly crisp vision statement of what the Greens are all about."

But ask Fitzsimons what some of the difficult questions the review is supposed to answer are, and she won't say. "It's the sort of thing that could be used against the Greens. We want to work through them first."

However, she offers that it is partly about identifying what it is to be the Green Party in the present world, and how to implement its core principles. "It makes ordinary politics look easy by comparison."

But ordinary politics is one important way the Greens will get at least some of what they want, and at some stage they will want to go into government.

The party did pretty well out of the last election compared to 1999. Fitzsimons may have lost her Coromandel seat but the party gained two MPs and increased their share of the party vote from 5.16 to 7 per cent, although there was a marked fall in fortunes during the campaign.

Fitzsimons says the review will inform the question of when it is right to go into government.

"That's what we went to Parliament for, so the question is only how soon and under what circumstances."

She will use her keynote speech to the conference today to outline achievements so far this term.

"Obviously if the Government needs you less than the previous term you get less of your policy implemented, but we don't feel irrelevant at all.

"The whole nine of us are absolutely flat out on issues, and I will be listing at the conference the things we have managed to achieve since the last election, and there are quite a few."

She says the Greens are still working well with Labour on issues of common ground. This is despite a Budget debate speech by the party's other co-leader, Rod Donald, denouncing the Government on everything from a failure to move on child poverty to a failure to protect the environment.

More denunciation from the Greens will undoubtedly come when the moratorium on the commercial release of GM organisms is lifted in October.

But Fitzsimons says the party is pioneering a new approach this term as a truly independent party neither in government nor opposition.

On some issues the Greens try to work closely with the Government. On others they are free to oppose.

"We don't regard politics as personal. If people disagree with our policies in some areas that doesn't mean we can't agree with them in others."

It may be difficult for voters to see how the Greens can go into coalition with Labour given the GM stoush last year and the heat that will undoubtedly rise again when the moratorium goes.

But ultimately Labour still needs the Greens to get some of its programme through, such as workplace reforms - and possibly to help it govern after the next election.