Greens need to show their worth
The Green Party heads into its annual conference this weekend on a historic high built on shaky ground.
The party’s position right now epitomises the problem faced by parties new to Government everywhere: how do you keep your ideologically consistent opposition identity while doing the messy job of actually governing?
The Greens are ratcheting up some historic wins for themselves but can never stop looking over their shoulder at complete electoral oblivion. On the one hand the party’s MPs are doing everything they have wanted to.
They are crafting rigorous climate change legislation. They are getting a referendum they will probably win on personal marijuana use.
They are banning plastic bags, new oil exploration and bringing in a new kind of leave for victims of domestic violence. But, on the other hand, the party is voting for a waka jumping bill it has stated it despises.
Conservation Minister and Green MP Eugenie Sage has signed off on a consent for a water bottling plant she has problems with.
There has been a series of damaging leaks about those decisions.
And a party that has had strands of pure Marxism is letting its Government be reined in by a set of spending controls even bank economists think are too limiting.
So newish co-leader Marama Davidson has a lot to sort out this weekend, and for the rest of the term. This is the party’s first conference since coming to Government and first with her as co-leader.
While her male counterpart, James Shaw, is mostly focused on his climate change legislation, Davidson has to keep the rest of the machine going.
She has to convince both the base of her party and the wider group of people who could lean Green that her party is getting real wins for those votes – as much if not more than NZ First – while still looking like a responsible party.
One of the problems is that those wins are not always so obviously owned by the Greens.
When Economic Development Minister Shane Jones doles out provincial growth fund cash, everyone knows he is delivering for his voters. But while Sage got to finally ban single-use plastic bags last week, she ended up doing it with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and surrounded by children, both sucking up all the attention.
Part of the problem here is just how much crossover the young Left of the Labour Party has with the Greens. It was Ardern who said climate change was the nuclear free moment of her generation after all.
This ideological blend is useful for governing relations but can be tough when it comes to explaining why voters should vote for you.
The other problem is Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who gets different treatment by the public and the media.
When NZ First leader Peters or his protege Jones say something controversial or unbecoming of a minister, it gets noted and mostly laughed off by the public and media. The Greens get a lot less slack. Davidson used the c-word at a rally while quoting death threats aimed at her and it somehow deserved wall-to-wall coverage, despite the Greens co-leader making clear she was not undertaking some kind of serious political campaign to reclaim the word. Indeed, if the Green Party started talking about chief executives the way NZ First MPs do, the opinion sections of all of the papers would be worried about the far-Leftists in charge. But what the Green Party is doing is working – for now. Internal polling is said to put it at around 7 per cent – well above that terrifying 5 per cent barrier. The leaks have mostly dried up, even if the wider party remains worried about the waka jumping bill. The infrastructure behind the MPs – the members, co-convenors, branches – remains active and vibrant, meaning if the party ever did leave Parliament, it would probably survive to see another term.
After many months with the suitand-tie wing of the party pulling the strings, Davidson’s election has brought back some balance between social justice and environmental credentials.
Davidson needs to highlight those wins this weekend – that’s probably what her speech will be about today – and make the case that the best days are yet to come.
She’s been on a roadshow meeting members but one person can only meet so many people – the Greens won over 160,000 votes last year, and need to get more next time. Davidson and Shaw also need to make sure their caucus, split between high-flying ministers and lowly backbenchers, remains as one, especially as new MP Golriz Ghahraman faces an onslaught of online attacks.
The party looks fairly unified right now. The thing is it looked unified before their conference last year too – then Metiria Turei admitted to benefit fraud, starting a chain of events that eventually led to two MPs leaving bitterly just before an election. Davidson watched all that happen, and knows the political tensions that remain somewhat present just below the caucus table.
The trick is keeping them there.