Sanctimony does Greens no favours

Boy, does the Green Party do a good line in sanctimony. At the weekend, ousted former member and climate change stalwart Kennedy Graham spoke at the National Party ‘‘Blue Green conference’’ and elicited cries of ‘‘traitor!’’ and hand-wringing from Green Party staffers, supported by MPs.

‘‘No wonder he sabotaged us and Metiria [Turei] when it mattered most,’’ Green staffer and former candidate Jack McDonald wrote dramatically on an internal Facebook page.

In a post ‘‘liked’’ by Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, he went on: ‘‘We all need to work on bringing together the party and reaching out to those who disagree, but there also needs to be a line in the sand, and for me, Kennedy represents it.’’ Oh, come off it. Turei’s actions were ultimately what brought about the party’s near-disastrous run at the election.

Her controversial gamble to admit to benefit fraud may have paid off had she been fulsome with the truth about her living situation from the start and refrained from encouraging other beneficiaries to break the law, perhaps even showed a slight amount of contrition for defrauding the taxpayer.

As it happened, the party was nearly ousted from Parliament.

Graham and fellow MP David Clendon resigned from the party’s list just ahead of the 2017 election over the rest of the Greens caucus’ continued support for Turei, who then found herself under investigation by the Ministry of Social Development.

Graham, a former diplomat and academic, sought to rejoin the party list after Turei eventually resigned, but was rebuffed by the party’s executive.

At his valedictory last year, Graham was lauded for his attempts to sow cross-party accord on the need to attack climate change. This year, parties have never been in more agreement over the seriousness of the issue.

And while there’s clearly disagreement over how to tackle it, the Greens it would seem, do not condone the sharing of ideas even if it might bring a natural enemy round to a common way of thinking.

Leader Simon Bridges issued a challenge to his party at the conference: ‘‘resetting our approach to environmental issues’’.

‘‘It’s important that we are pushing the envelope and that we hear from thinkers from a whole range of perspectives ... We want to make sure that in opposition we’re thinking things through and challenging our thinking and resetting things in some places.’’

Graham would surely have challenged them in that.

There was no recruitment drive; he’s certainly not the first Green Party member to speak at a National Party conference and Graham has never shown a blue streak in his entire time in Parliament.

To suggest that’s where he’s ended up is as farfetched as the assertion Turei is blameless for the party’s run of bad fortune.

It’s hard to find a less appealing set of qualities than faux outrage and political tribalism. But that can be achieved when those two qualities come in to alignment to attack any attempts at open thinking and serious debate on climate change. The Trifecta? Add in a dash of hypocrisy to boot. This from the party that just did a deal with National to increase the opposition’s firepower at Question Time.