Opinion
Elizabeth Kerekere’s Friday night resignation cements this week as a dreadful one for the two governing parties.
MPs playing pass the parcel with their party affiliation is never a good look, particularly not in election year, particularly, particularly not (as in Meka Whaitiri’s case) when it appears you’re unaware of the correct way to trigger your own defection (or use rules you yourself voted for), and particularly, particularly, particularly not (as in Kerekere’s case), if you leave under a cloud of bullying allegations.
The left bloc has done the right’s work for them. Christopher Luxon and David Seymour want to portray the left as fractious and self-interested in the face of a cyclone rebuild and economic crisis. This week, two MPs from an electorate most hurt by that cyclone appeared to prove Luxon and Seymour right.
Still, the old cliche is true: a week’s a long time in politics, the five months to polling day 2023 are an age. Anything could happen, but there’s no denying this week has given Luxon a tailwind.
Kerekere’s resignation may be worse for Chris Hipkins than the Greens.
The Greens’ rusted-on base of 5-6 per cent has a high tolerance for party shenanigans. The only recent time the Greens came close to crashing out of Parliament wasn’t due to election-year infighting but to the remarkable rise of one Jacinda Ardern, and her decision to terminate Green co-leader Meteria Turei’s career by refusing to have Turei serve in her ministry.
The Green party vote is fine - for now. The perception of chaos on the left is probably worse for Labour, whose centrist, bread-and-butter pitch for the Briscoes Lady constituency is ill-served by parliamentary musical chairs.
But this does not mean the party is in the clear. Kerekere was a Marmite politician: many members were upset at her treatment of Chlöe Swarbrick, who is potentially the party’s most popular MP, but others were deeply committed to Kerekere. They were not convinced by the allegations and believed it was a stitch-up.
Some are contemplating quitting the party, although it’s impossible right now to gauge how many.
One unanswered question is whether Kerekere will go quietly or tell her supporters to back another party like Te Pāti Māori. Kerekere confirmed she had not been courted by Te Pāti Māori (who apparently have their eye on Green MP Teanau Tuiono instead), but she could still indicate to her supporters that they cast their vote with Te Pāti Māori instead of the Greens. Kerekere has not just resigned as a Green MP but as a Green member.
This could be a problem.
The Greens and Te Pāti Māori have co-existed for nearly two decades, but for most of that time, Te Pāti Māori were either a barely realistic proposition (as in 2020) or a party that propped up a National Government that Green voters despised.
That is no longer the case. Te Pāti Māori has reemerged with a kaupapa achingly close to the Greens’ own. For the first time in a very long time, Green voters have a credible option to the left of Labour with whom to cast their vote if they feel unhappy with what the current leadership is delivering. Some members are nakedly frustrated by the compromises of government, and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi are nothing if not uncompromising.
We’re not seeing this yet.
Both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori are polling quite well, but the Greens should be careful. Ironically, given where this started, if the Greens do get close to 5 per cent, it could be a Swarbrick victory in Auckland Central that secures the party’s next three years.
The Greens already seem to be guarding against this. Marama Davidson’s statement on Saturday morning was at pains to affirm the party was committed to honouring Te Tiriti and advancing the aspirations of Māori and had done so for three decades.
Davidson is well-regarded on all sides of the party. The side that believes the compromises of Government are worth it, and the side that doesn’t. She moves easily among the spectrum of Green factions in a way Shaw is unable to, explaining one to the other and holding them together. Davidson shouldered a lot of the work in keeping the party together during the Shaw leadership drama last year. She will need to do that again now.
On Saturday she began this work by trying to ensure Kerekere could not attach herself to Turei’s legacy of martyrdom.
“Metiria left in a completely different - completely different - circumstance and she was never accused of putting [...] her staff at stake,” Davidson said.
This crisis is yet another example of the difficult issue of what to do with difficult MPs. Parliament is no ordinary workplace. MPs, even list MPs, are elected with a mandate (albeit a lesser one than electorate MPs). They cannot always be understood as ordinary employers and employees. This is for good reason, but when relationships turn sour, it means there is no no conventional means to resolve things. The vacuum of a conventional resoltuon is too often filled with a political one.
The issue of what to do when there is clearly an issue between one MP and another is not an easy one. In Kerekere’s case, the issue appears to have been even broader than a falling-out between her and Swarbrick - rather, a much larger falling-out between Kerekere and almost the entire caucus and a decent chunk of Green Party staff.
What to do in a situation like that? What to do if an MP really does need to go because of internal issues? Not easy. No one, not even the pious Greens, has been able to answer that question. This style of investigation, which the Greens created last year in response to the Francis Review recommendations, clearly didn’t work.
The sheer volume of leaks suggested something definitely needed looking at. The problem the Greens face is that it now appears they used the “crybaby” incident as a hook on which to hang a much broader and wide-ranging inquiry that really should have begun much earlier.
The Prime Minister meets President Xi Jinping at an inflection point.