Greens sharpen up pitch for campaign
A politician’s ego can mean they believe they’re perfect, that they can’t get any better, which prevents them from learning.
IThe Greens’ vote seems to track remarkably consistently.
n the weeks since Elizabeth Kerekere quit the Green Party to sit on the cross benches a weight appears to have been lifted from party co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw.
There was no one thing that Kerekere did that would have led to her leaving, but an accretion of things over a couple of years, beginning with an illegal trip under Covid-19 rules – while she was the party’s Covid-19 spokesperson. The leaders apologised for this, before stripping the portfolio from her. As Stuff reported at the time, that rebuke was apparently poorly taken.
By the time she resigned in early May after an investigation into her behaviour, the disputes between her and other caucus members and party officials had taken a significant toll on the parliamentary party.
There are always two sides to any story, but for just about everyone else, it appears that with her resignation a big distraction walked out the door.
The Greens are now turning their attention to the upcoming election.
Apart from a couple of blow-ups – Kerekere and last year’s surprise, but short-lived, non re-election of Shaw as co-leader – the party has cruised along, finding its groove as a party that has grace-and-favour ministerial roles but is in opposition on all other matters.
Shaw has continued to be an effective climate change minister, while Davidson has toiled away in her areas of homelessness and family and sexual violence. Davidson has not made a great success of her portfolios.
This is partly because her roles cross multiple ministries, none of which she really has any responsibility for, and partly because both of the areas, while extremely important, are sufficiently grim that it is difficult to turn them in to retail political products.
It remains the case that the
Greens’ vote seems to track remarkably consistently. While different public polls have the party either slightly higher or lower, its polling seems to float in the 7% to 10% range.
The Greens have a difficult balance to strike leading into an election. That’s because they can mostly only win voters from the Labour Party. That means there is careful attention in calibrating the party message to pick up more would-be voters. It can’t criticise Labour for being too slow or too useless because the voters it needs aren’t necessarily unhappy with Labour.
There is also little value in pointing out all of Labour’s failings from a Green perspective. After all, the party needs Labour to win enough seats in the middle and ward off the National Party in order for the Greens to make it into government.
Instead, the pitch will be about voting for the Greens so as to help Labour to get more things done.
As far as scrapping against National, the Greens don’t plan to spend much time railing against Christopher Luxon.
It’s the spectre of ACT playing a significant role in government that the party is more likely to home in on – seeing ACT as antithetical to everything it, and potential voters it might win, stands for.
It’s fair to say the feeling is reciprocated by ACT.
In practical terms this will mean
the Greens focusing on three key areas: climate change, protecting the environment and battling inequality. The party already has a schedule of policy launches sorted that will begin in the coming weeks.
It is expected that in the area of climate change, there will be a more practical focus on adapting New Zealand to cope with more frequent floods and natural disasters resulting from climate change.
While the party has been hot on making sure it continues to press for cutting emissions with all the institutional architecture Shaw has had a hand in – Zero Carbon Act, climate budgets, climate-related financial disclosures and the like – it will also probably make a play for greater adaptation measures.
These include building stopbanks, flood protection, thinking about where and how
things can be built and generally climate-proofed.
And of course, working out how to pay for all that, which will dovetail nicely in a generally high-tax agenda that also no doubt will be announced.
But a renewed focus on managing the built and natural environment to deal with climate change does point more to the Green’s environmental roots and will offer something practical to voters worried by climate change.
One of the interesting dynamics is that, for the first time in a long time, ACT appears to consistently be the third-largest party in Parliament – based on polls at least.
Both of the small parties won 10 seats in the 2020 election, but most polls now have ACT shaping as a potentially larger influence over a National-ACT government than that of the Green Party.
The latest 1 News Kantar Poll had the Greens at 7% compared with ACT’s 11, while the Newshub
Reid Research Poll published in mid-May had the Greens on 8.1% and ACT on 10.8%. The latest Taxpayers’ Union Curia Research Poll, also in May, put ACT at 12.7%, to 7% for the Greens.
The two parties might loathe each other, but what ultimately matters is not which small party ends up getting more seats, but which one gets into government.
Based on polling since 2020, the Greens will be a steady-as-she-goes prospect, that will probably win in line with its polling range. The party will, of course, be pushing for more, but it will be a balance.
Shaw still has to get through the party’s AGM in early July. Under Green rules, the leadership positions become vacant each year and co-leaders have to renominate. They have to win 75% support if they run uncontested – which Shaw did not manage first time around last year.
Given that it’s an election year, and that Shaw has doubled down on getting round the members since his shock last year, he is overwhelmingly likely to get the nod again. But the Greens are genuinely committed to their members having a say, so you just never know. Davidson’s spot is seen as safe.
One upside of its membership rules is that if the Greens and Labour have the numbers to try to form a government post-election, the Green members have to ratify any coalition deal.
Shaw and Davidson will be able to say honestly to Labour: our members have to agree to this. Despite having nowhere else to go, the party won’t be able to be bought off with some political trinkets.