Greens reconcile price of being in government
In many ways, this weekend’s Green Party conference felt like a return to normal.
Two hundred or so members – mostly white-haired older folk, with a sprinkling of the millennial Left – packed into a high school hall in Palmerston North to talk about waste minimisation, the problems of capitalism, and the party’s complicated internal infrastructure.
This was as Green Party as you can get.
The stage was covered with pot plants, the walls covered with posters reminding members of the party’s achievements in Government, and just before the final announcement of the weekend, MP Julie Anne Genter posted on Instagram that she had just cycled to the hospital to have her overdue baby, something coleader James Shaw admitted was ‘‘very on-brand’’.
There were two major announcements that catered entirely to the more environmentally-focused wing of the party.
Co-leader Marama Davidson on Saturday announced the Government would be considering a ‘‘water-test’’ on foreign land sales.
This would give the Government the ability to halt a land sale to a water bottling company solely because of concerns over the implications for water – something Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage found she was not able to legally do earlier this year, to widespread disgust from the party membership. And then Sage herself announced yesterday the beginning of an ambitious work programme on waste minimisation, with the $10/tonne landfill levy being expanded to every dump in the country, and likely raised by 2020.
These are core long-held Green Party issues that suit the older more environmentallyfocused wing of membership well.
The party actually drafted the Waste Minimisation Act as a member’s bill in 2008, before the Labour Government picked it up and passed it.
Now they finally have a chance to really use it.
But even if it felt like just another conference, it was anything but.
This was the Green Party’s first annual meeting in Government, its first conference where it had to check with officials if a ministerial announcement was technically allowed (it was).
This was a chance for the party to wrestle with the fact that the cost of actually doing things was likely doing some things you aren’t proud of, sullying the ideological consistency one maintains in opposition.
That reckoning mostly happened in a room not open to news media. We do know that the party is reviewing all of its ‘‘documents’’ – basically its constitution and an agreement between the membership-elected executive and the party’s MPs.
The party has three interlocking ‘‘petals’’ – the caucus, the executive, and the policy committee – and before this Government there was never really a time where they couldn’t at least all talk about the same stuff, and instruct MPs to do what the membership wants. Now the Greens have ministers of the Crown, there are several things it can’t talk to its wider membership base about, and decisions that have to be made on New Zealand constitutional terms, not Green Party constitutional terms.
The review was not complete at the time of writing but it is likely it will give MPs a little bit more freedom to act without consulting members on every decision. Many expect the membership to be outraged about all of this, about the indignities of governing with NZ First, but from all accounts most of them are happy to make some compromises. Even co-founder Jeanette Fitzsimons, who is very upset about the party supporting the waka jumping legislation, was full of praise for the party’s wins.