Swarbrick spoke to media after a meeting of Green Party delegates on October 17, 2024. Video / Thomas Coughlan
Opinion by Thomas Coughlan
Thomas Coughlan, Political Editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people's stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
OPINION
In the end, it wasn’t even close. Soon-to-be-former MP Darleen Tana’s fate was decided on Thursdaynight when a “consensus” (more on that later) of 185 Green Party delegates decided to sanction the use of the waka-jumping law against her, ejecting Tana from Parliament if she decides not to quit first.
The outcome wasn’t as significant as the way the decision was reached. The party sets a threshold for this kind of decision: a “consensus” or 75% support from a vote of party delegates, who represent the party’s many branches at the meeting.
Reaching these thresholds is hard. In 2020 it took 85% of delegates to ratify the party’s co-operation agreement with the Labour Party after consensus was blocked. Former co-leader James Shaw was ousted following a vote in which 75 votes were cast in favour of his reelection and 32 opposed. He was later re-elected 138 votes to 4. In 2023, an “urgent member assembly” called by supporters of Elizabeth Kerekere to try to resuscitate her political fortunes faltered when not enough support for her cause could be found. In that case, a formal vote wasn’t even taken. The party was so divided the question wasn’t even put.
Thursday night’s meeting was quite different.
Illustration / Guy Body
Greens love a talk. Delegates on the Zoom had settled in for the long haul, with some dual screening with something more interesting. Their worst fears were confirmed when the Zoom didn’t actually begin until half an hour after its scheduled start time. One member spoken to by the Herald did not dispute a comparison with JRR Tolkien’s Ents, treelike beings who speak so slowly it can take an entire day to say, “Good Morning”.
But it was not to be. By about 7.30pm there appeared to be an obvious mood for endorsing the use of the waka-jumping law on Tana. An early straw poll found only 4% of the 185 delegates disagreed with the motion, and even they didn’t disagree enough to block it.
It’s not to say there hasn’t been drama. A small group of Pacific members dramatically quit the party in July, in a move partly (though not wholly) to do with the treatment of Tana. There were fears that this group, connected with Kerekere, would try to white ant the caucus as it attempted to grapple with the Tana problem. Those fears turned out to be unfounded and it now appears the grassroots (flax roots, as they’re often called in the party) are as united as the caucus.
Underlining this unity was the reappearance of former Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei, who spoke on the Zoom call. Turei has kept an incredibly low profile since bowing out of politics in 2017 after admitting benefit fraud when she was a young mother.
The 2017 campaign that claimed Turei’s career was something of a sliding doors moment for the party. After achieving great success under the Russell Norman and Turei pairing, the party, modernised further under new co-leader Shaw, looked set for a barnstormer of an election. And so it proved, but not quite as the party planned. It lost its co-leader, two MPs, and about 4.4 points of the party vote, but it ended up in government.
Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, with MPs Ricardo Menendez March, left,and Teanau Tuiono. Photo / Mark Mitchell
That election marked the end of a period when the likes of Shaw, whose “theory of change”, as a member once put it, differed so starkly from the likes of Norman and Turei, were able to swim together. Government wasn’t easy on the Greens. Consensus-building institutionalists in the Shaw mould butted heads with the activist base. Leadership confirmation votes became more contentious and blow-ups over issues such as Kerekere became more common.
Turei hovered in the background of all of this. Many in the party felt she had been treated unfairly by Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, whose pledge never to allow Turei to serve in a Government she led effectively ended Turei’s career.
There was a nagging sense that with Turei gone, the party had lost an anchor to its past. A co-leader since 2009, and a veteran of the caucus of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, the party’s original leaders, Turei might have provided 2017′s modernising, compromising Government-ready iteration of the party with a bridge to its activist origins.
Instead, out of Parliament, she kept deathly silent after leaving politics, forcing the party to work its way through the messy, ugly compromises of Government on its own. Her interventions — including a frank call with Shaw after he lost the leadership, urging him to reconnect with members — were private.
Her return this week, described as “huge” by co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, drew a line under all of that. Her contribution to the call, according to those who heard it, connected the vote to the party’s history, and argued Tana’s transgression was severe enough to merit the Greens’ overcoming their longstanding opposition to waka-jumping laws.
Overcoming this ingrained opposition is a tall order for a party that tends to be wedded to principle and opposed to compromise. Turei’s support for the motion provided something close to absolution, linking an ideologically challenging motion to the party’s history.
The Greens could be excused for celebrating.
The consensus motion came just days after a 1 News-Verian Poll put the party’s support on 12%, a strong result for a party which, by Swarbrick’s own admission, hasn’t had the best year. It can be difficult to please both paid-up party members and the voting public; as Labour is currently discovering with its tax discussion, the desires of highly engaged party members aren’t always policies that endear a party to the voting public. But put together, the consensus motion and the poll suggest neither members nor voters are overly dissatisfied with the party’s direction.
But taking this overly rosy view would be a mistake.
The Greens’ chaotic year would suggest the party’s support is soft, and vulnerable to finding a new home. A more inspirational and progressive Labour leader could easily steal a few points of wavering support from the party as Ardern did in 2017. It can take some time for ill-discipline to manifest in a polling slump. Simon Bridges’ National Party endured a chaotic few years between 2018 and 2020, but consistently polled highly (often ahead of Labour), despite some truly torrid scandals. It was only the flat-footed response to lockdown measures that saw the party’s vote truly plummet, ending Bridges’ leadership.
Likewise, Act had a blinder of a term in 2017-2020, correctly reading the minds of its eventual voters on the likes of climate change and gun reform. Despite that, it was only when National’s vote started to crater during the pandemic that voters who might have been contemplating Act finally picked up the phone and confirmed that intention to pollsters.
The Greens’ big challenge is how to position themselves in an increasingly crowded left bloc. The party currently sits uneasily between Te Pāti Māori and Labour. The three parties, particularly Te Pāti Māori, look like a messy alternative Government at the same time the current coalition is surprising on the upside with the extent to which its three constituent parties can co-operate.
Swarbrick has a plan for this. At the party’s most recent AGM, she told members the party should “evolve” into a party that could “lead the Government in the not-too-distant future”, displacing Labour as the dominant party of the left. The thinking is the Greens, as the strongest party on issues such as renters’ rights and the environment, will naturally displace Labour.
Members of many minor parties would jump at this ambition — and some Greens do, but others are more sceptical, arguing the party’s role isn’t to supplant Labour, but to be its ideas factory. Being the Government isn’t as important as getting policy wins — and being in the policy vanguard isn’t always popular. This view did the rounds on Green Party social media shortly after Swarbrick’s speech, with several members pondering whether policy wins were a better measure of Green success than the party vote.
Ironically, this was a view shared by Shaw, who was fond of the old Margaret Thatcher joke in which when asked about her greatest success, she replied “Tony Blair”.
It hints at a theory of change popular in the Greens, who place a high value on lasting, bipartisan change. The gag itself, however, often went down poorly. The Greens have changed a lot, but some shibboleths will never be slain.
