A year after Turei, the Greens are winning
One year ago this weekend, Metiria Turei took to an Auckland stage and told the country she had committed benefit fraud.
This single speech was probably the most important since Orewa. It set into motion a series of events that saw Andrew Little resign and Jacinda Ardern become prime minister. It helped send the Greens to government, but nearly sent them packing from Parliament.
The year since has seen the best of times and the worst of times for the Greens. There have been dizzying highs – polls in the upper teens, three Government ministers, real political victories on climate change – and devastating lows, like two MPs quitting in protest, a poll with them out of Parliament, and Turei’s eventual resignation.
As a moral stand, Turei’s speech had cut through like nothing else. The polls shot up in response, further weakening Andrew Little’s Labour Party. It was an acknowledgement that for many people just getting by and feeding your young child meant doing things the middle class might despise you for.
If politics worked on this moral plane, we might be calling the speech a masterstroke now. But it doesn’t.
Turei did not make the speech on a whim. It had been presented to a caucus meeting earlier in the week, and some were conscious of the fact that there might be fallout. But real risk management had not taken place. There was no immediate announcement that she was paying the money back, and no plan for what to say when media found out she had technically committed electoral fraud.
This was an incredibly minor sin – thousands of people have forgotten to change their enrolment address – but it looked like the story was growing and ‘‘more was coming out’’, eventually making her position untenable.
A year on, the party is adamant a mistake like that couldn’t happen again. But with a roughly halved vote, the Greens have half the parliamentary staff they had then, leading to embarrassing public blunders like forgetting to ask questions at Question Time.
Money is extremely tight. Stories about angry members wanting more from the party abound. And nothing a Green Party minister has said or done since Turei’s speech has had that kind of cutthrough – unless you count a throwaway line Julie Anne Genter said about ‘‘old white men’’ to a bunch of schoolkids.
Meanwhile, NZ First seems to extract win after win from the Government. Winston Peters very publicly slapped down Little over three strikes. Shane Jones has handed out millions to the provinces. And the Kermadecs solution – whatever it is – is likely to be much friendlier to the fishing industry than the Greens.
But as much as the Greens seem to be losing these day-to-day political battles, the party is winning the war. It consistently outpolls NZ First, with recent private polling putting it at about 7 per cent. DOC has got millions in new funding. James Shaw has got business, farming leaders, and the National Party onboard with real action on climate change.
The transport budget reads like a Green Party dream from 2016: vastly more money for public transport and walking infrastructure, and vastly less for multi-lane expressways.
Yet that wider victory is not seen as the Green Party’s. Labour has slowly moved to encompass many orthodox Green positions. NZ First might be technically inside the tent while the Greens are out, but it feels a lot like the tent itself has a green hue.
This makes what insiders call ‘‘differentiation’’ very hard. Indeed, if Shaw’s stated goal is reached, and climate change becomes a depoliticised issue everyone agrees on, it will be great for the planet, but terrible for the Green Party’s campaign strategy. So what to do?
Whenever one talks to Green staff or MPs about their troubles, they say the party is just now turning a corner, and things are going to be much better. But they’ve been saying that for a long while. Marama Davidson has been co-leader for months, but has yet to make a speech with serious political impact, and her closest aide, Jack McDonald, has left his job in the backroom office.
There are some signs of change. New sub-caucus groups meetings every month or so will make sure the party’s MPs are as aligned as possible, even as some are ministers and some are not.
A new general manager will be working on getting donations in for the party, which will need it before the next election. The gaping holes in staffing have finally been filled.
On the numbers end, the party expects to pick up the bulk of the people who voted for TOP in the 2017 election, bringing it another 1 or 2 per cent.
Getting into Government is supposed to raise your polling as you deliver victories to your supporters, so the goal is not just to survive in the mid-single digits, but get somewhere closer to 10 by 2020. (Party staff and MPs are realistic about the fact that polling in the midteens again isn’t likely while Ardern leads the Labour Party.)
It’s understood the Greens are keen to go big against Labour on an issue sometime in this term, in a public way, much like NZ First has gone against Labour on law and order policy. The rejection of the TPP was nowhere near enough, since the Greens weren’t needed to get it across the line anyway.
To make a really big splash you need to actually stop Ardern doing something – or force her to do something she clearly isn’t keen on doing.
A huge opportunity for differentiation is the maligned Budget Responsibility Rules, which the Greens signed on to with Labour. The rules constrain the Government’s spending heftily, even as the tax take is on the up and a surplus grows.
The idea was to make the Greens look like credible economic managers to voters. But a set of arbitrary targets far lower than what international lenders require doesn’t make you look like a credible economic manager; it makes you look like a technocratic Tory.
The future of the party might be Chloe Swarbrick and the urban millennials who now fill the backroom office, but a lot of the loudest supporters are still protest-hardened veterans who want to upend the economic order completely.
Thus far, these Marxist-leaning Green voters have got the least out of the party in Government, which is ironic, given it was arguably Turei’s big economic justice speech that got the party into Government in the first place.
Openly rejecting the Budget Responsibility Rules at the next election would be a fitting tribute to her legacy. It might even result in a year as wild as the last one.