It’s not easy being Green without a Labour agreement

In terms of electoral success, Jacinda Ardern still has rivals in her party, but only in the ghosts of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser.

In the Greens’ history books, there are no rivals to Marama Davidson’s and James Shaw’s triumph.

Under MMP, no small party which has formally supported a government has managed to break the 5 per cent threshold at the next election.

Davidson and Shaw not only smashed that apparent rule, but the Greens’ party vote has increased from 6.3 per cent in 2017 to 7.6 per cent, and could go a smidgen higher with overseas votes.

Shaw deserves a huge part of the credit for holding the party together in 2017 after the debacle following Metiria Turei’s welfare speech and for the multi-party agreement on the Zero Carbon Act. His abject selfcriticism after the Green School scandal underlined his reputation for integrity..

But any party that has even a second member becomes a coalition of some sort. Very inexactly, Labour is a coalition of South Auckland office cleaners, middle-class teachers and Grey Lynn pseudo-intellectuals, and National one of conservative provincialists and more liberal urban business owners. The Green coalition similarly spans a spectrum from Audi e-tron drivers in Remuera to actual communists in Aro Valley.

Davidson leads this part of the Green alliance but is sufficiently respectful of Shaw and his faction that the coalition has held together.

With the weekend’s triumph, the Greens must decide how formally to tie themselves to the Ardern juggernaut. Ardern and her innermost circle of Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins and Megan Woods will of course have the major say, but the three main options are a coalition agreement, a confidence and supply arrangement or to sit on the crossbenches and deal with issues as they arise. Ardern may choose to work with the Greens for her own benefit but she need not listen to them — or even speak to them — on anything at all. In practical terms, the Greens — and also the Ma¯ori Party — have no more leverage over Labour than National or Act.

For wiser heads, the Greens have no real choice but to opt for a more formal agreement with Labour, assuming Ardern offers one. To have any real power, they need to be ministers who operationally control departments and budgets, and attend Cabinet committee meetings as equals with their Labour rivals.

The radicals will rightly point out this also involves existential political risk. When push comes to shove, the Greens will still have no real power over Labour, but their ministers will be bound by Cabinet collective responsibility, obliged to publicly support decisions they don’t agree with. Green ministers will be in danger of doing little more than applying a Green stamp to Labour’s agenda, to the extent it turns out to have one.

There are no good options here. But if the Greens get the decision wrong, in last night’s triumph may well lie the seeds of a disaster in 2023.