No deal on cards: Greens, NZ First
Green Party co-leader James Shaw has rubbished any notion that the party would force a second election if locked out of power by NZ First.
On Wednesday, Green MP Barry Coates floated the idea by writing that a Labour-NZ First Government would not be ‘‘acceptable’’ to the Greens in a post on The Daily Blog.
He was referring to a possible election scenario whereby National lacked the numbers to govern but the Labour-Greens team couldn’t rule without NZ First’s help – and, in a repeat of 2005, NZ First would only help Labour if the Greens were outside of government and supporting the coalition in a confidence and supply deal.
He continued the discussion on Newshub, saying this scenario ‘‘could’’ mean forcing another election.
It is understood that Coates has now apologised to Shaw, who went into damage control yesterday morning.
‘‘We would absolutely not force an early election. We are committed to changing the Government but we are only committed to changing it once in any three-year cycle,’’ Shaw told Radio NZ.
‘‘We get a lot of correspondence from people who are very worried about the influence that NZ First could have on the next government. What we have said is that it is unacceptable. That it is really important that New Zealand has a stable, responsible and progressive government.’’
Shaw said any discussion of how future coalition deals could be negotiated was ‘‘hypothetical’’ at this stage.
‘‘We’ll have to see what happens on election night.’’
He said the best course of action for any Left-leaning voters worried about the influence of NZ First was to vote for the Greens.
However, NZ First leader Winston Peters said Shaw couldn’t dismiss the comments as being the ‘‘brain fade’’ of a single MP.
‘‘[Coates] said that they’d had discussions in caucus, in their caucus. Mr Shaw denies that, someone is not telling the truth. ‘‘The second thing is the Greens have the knowledge of polls, which has them in a slide and they’re not third anymore, they’re fourth. That’s the reason why they’ve reacted in an attempt to try and stop what is a surge growing for NZ First and a surge it is.’’
He was surprised about how ‘‘naively arrogant’’ the Greens were being.
‘‘Now the real thing is we’re being attacked by all and sundry at the moment, and the only common factor here is every other party is running scared at this point in time.’’
Labour and the Green Party have an agreement to campaign together on changing the government at September’s election.
On current polling, Labour and the Greens could not govern without NZ First.