The Green party won in Auckland by reaching beyond its own bubble
Iwas making toast in my tiny apartment kitchen four weeks ahead of election day. Not that I really had track of the days. They had melded into one ever-extending runway as Auckland went through its second Covid-19 lockdown and New Zealand’s election date was pushed back a month.
We were a few months into an insurgent campaign for an electorate seat at the centre of the country’s largest city. We’d built a team of hundreds of people – particularly young people, some so young they couldn’t even vote yet – who, despite their claims to the contrary, were all doing a lot more than the least they could do. They were about to make history.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, a “minor” party hasn’t won a general electorate seat in well over 20 years without the tacit or explicit endorsement of one of the two “major” parties. So, it confounded more than a few commentators when at around 11.50pm on Saturday 17 October, with 100% of the preliminary votes counted, it was confirmed that a Green party candidate had won Auckland Central. Especially because we ran a campaign on an unapologetically progressive platform of urgent climate action, guaranteed minimum income, and wealth tax to pay for it. We flew in the face of two major opinion polls, the “red tide” of the Labour party’s majority win, and conventional wisdom.
There are still half a million or so special votes (that is, overseas and on
the-day enrolments) to be counted, so the results cannot be taken for granted.
But what can be granted is that so-called convention in our politics is disappearing.
Convention is the echo of repetition to the point of predictability. Mainstream approaches to electoral politics have lost the right of convention. Mechanisms of conventional, incremental political change – literally the least we can, and know how to, do – have failed to rise to the challenges that the deeply entrenched and inextricable crises of climate change and social and economic inequality present.
Citizens are smart enough to recognise the need for an alternative. It’s in this alternative where we can continually redraw the boundaries of the possible, because possibility in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power.
In these “unprecedented” times, the centre-left Labour party won a historic single-party majority, growing its nationwide vote to previously unimaginable heights under New Zealand’s proportional representation voting system. But so too has our Green party grown our own vote, shaking off the convention of give-and-take amongst the parties of the left bloc.
In Auckland, we flipped a seat Green, which had been held by centreright National party politicians for 12 years.
We did it by bursting our own bubble.
In our bubble, we can’t fathom that working-class people would vote against their own self-interest for a strong-man built on strawman logic. It’s wild to reckon with how policies to fairly tax millionaires are warped through talkback radio to scare tradies and hospo workers into thinking their jobs are on the chopping block. In our bubble, it’s slanderous to question the orthodoxy of our university educations and how the vernacular they normalise may alienate the very people we say we want to help.
But we’ve graduated from the once-derided online “slacktivism” to regularly showing up at protests in solidarity, to shutting up when it’s obvious our lived experience isn’t the one requiring a platform, and to organising our way into mass-scale conversations with people we’d never share a Facebook feed algorithm with. We’ve still got a way to go in self-reflection, but more urgently, we’ve got to create a place in our movement where people – so many of whom already have the inkling that the status quo is not working – can belong.
Right until the end of the Auckland Central campaign, we kept expanding our community. That mess of human reality and social evolution, changing and challenging ideas cannot be delivered through a Twitter feed, but meets you at the doorstep. At the polls, we heard they were running out of on-theday enrolment forms for people who had not planned to vote but decided to turn up.
You don’t grow a movement with perfection. You don’t spread an idea when only one person can articulate it. You don’t empower communities when they don’t have a place to belong.
Our local campaign was one small proof-of-concept microcosm of work that Indigenous organisers, climate activists, and justice advocates have been doing for decades. It’s based on a radical notion in increasingly individualised societies: grassroots organising, human connection and conversation changes our world.
What if we all did the least we could do? And what if we did it together?