As a starter for 10% of the Party Vote, 'saving the planet' is a very respectable objective, writes Chris Trotter, but what does being Green really mean in 2024?

By Chris Trotter*

The Greens remain a persistent political puzzle. In spite of espousing ideas and promoting policies that would keep any other party well below the 5% MMP threshold, recent polling places the party between 12% and 14%. If replicated in a real election, that level of support would earn the Greens 16-18 seats, making them an indispensable player in any putative government of the Left.

Clearly, the Green brand is doing almost all of the party’s heavy political lifting. What New Zealand’s own Green Party is actually committed to achieving matters much less than what Green parties, as generally understood by the world’s voters, are assumed to be committed to achieving – the salvation of the planet.

As a starter for 10% of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

Young voters are not, however, the Greens only source of electoral support. They can also rely upon a substantial number of older voters to tick the Greens’ box on the ballot paper. Some of these will be unreconstructed hippies, the New Zealanders who cut their political teeth on the Values Party back in the early-1970s, and who then fell into the Greens’ welcoming arms with huge relief in 1990, following six years of the apostate Labour Party’s “Rogernomics”.

No one grasped the power of the Green brand more firmly than Jim Anderton, whose uneasy coalition of free-market-unfriendly parties, the Alliance, would not have been electorally viable without the Greens’ participation, and did not long survive their departure. As a centre-left politician determined to bring Labour back to its social-democratic senses, Anderton was determined to provide the many thousands of disillusioned former-Labour-voters with a progressive alternative that was guaranteed to win seats and, thereby, to wield at least some measure of determinative power over policy.

The Alliance’s demise, in 2002, left only the Greens to supply this critical support to the Labour Party. Precisely how many Green voters were voting for the global Green movement’s core principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy and Nonviolence; and how many were voting for the Greens to keep Labour honest; is difficult to calculate. Suffice to say, when Labour does well the Green vote tends to fall, only recovering when voter support for its progressive competitor declines.

Since breaking free of the Alliance in 1999 the Greens have never failed to crest the 5% MMP threshold. (Although, they have come perilously close to falling below it on a number of occasions). A reasonable working assumption would be that; in a good election for the Greens the ratio of strategic left-wing voters to ideologically-committed Greens will be roughly 50/50; and, in a bad election, that ratio will skew sharply in favour of the true-believers.

What the Greens’ true-believers believe, however, has changed.

Like the Values Party which preceded it, the Green Party that entered Parliament in 1999, under the co-leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, took pride in affirming its allegiance to empirical science. In conformity with the political practice of Green parties around the world, the New Zealand party drew a sharp distinction between the bought-and-paid-for “science” of the big corporations, and the findings of hero scientists who presented their findings to the world fearlessly and without regard to how many corporate toes were trampled on in the process.

This science-driven Green Party reached its apogee under Rod Donald’s successor, Russel Norman – now the Executive-Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Working alongside freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy – the very epitome of a fearless hero-scientist – Norman and the Greens waged an unrelenting war against “dirty dairying” and the pollution of New Zealand’s waterways.

The success of this environmentally-focused Green Party was reflected in the 11.06% share of the Party Vote it received, along with 14 parliamentary seats, in the 2011 General Election. (In the 2023 General Election the Greens received 11.60% of the Party Vote and 15 seats.)

More than a decade has passed since the Greens campaigned as an unequivocally environmentalist party. Along with virtually every other element of the New Zealand Left, the Greens have embraced what their conservative opponents delight in castigating as the politics of “wokeness”.

In less pejorative terms, the Greens’ re-orientation involves the forefronting of issues that, while always present in the party’s policy mix, were hitherto given less emphasis. The Greens’ straightforward recognition and celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, for example, is now couched in the uncompromising vocabulary of decolonisation and indigenisation. Simple support for trans-gender New Zealanders has morphed into the aggressive assertion and enforcement of radical trans-gender ideology. Any external and/or internal criticism of these developments is condemned by the party as “hate speech”. Freedom of expression is no longer an unchallengeable aspect of “grassroots democracy”, or, as the New Zealand Greens have re-named it, “appropriate decision-making”.

A sense of this change of tone in the Greens is readily apparent in the most recent Green Party policy document. Ostensibly a presentation of the party’s latest thinking on how best to reduce greenhouse emissions, He Ara Anamata, contains a great deal more than the promptings of environmental science.

“For generations,” writes Green Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick in her introduction, “extractive systems have treated the natural world as a resource to exploit, without regard for its limits or the intricate relationships that sustain life.”

Similar sentiments were expressed 25 years ago. It is, however, doubtful whether Swarbrick’s subsidiary claims would have been advanced so forcefully:

“Colonisation has done the same to people and cultures. It has severed connections between tangata whenua and their whenua, prioritising profit over protection, and imposing systems that strip away self-determination and reciprocity. The impacts of this legacy persist, deepening inequalities and undermining resilience.”

Certainly, the expression of unabashed hostility towards capitalism is a more recent rhetorical trend:

“These inequalities have their deep roots in violent land and resource theft of iwi Māori. Capitalism – this current insatiable, unsustainable economic system – requires colonisation and the constant assimilation of new frontiers to exploit and extract from.”

That the above is not simply the ideology of the Greens’ firebrand leader is made clear in the body of the policy document. Te Tiriti’s role in reducing greenhouse emissions will, if the Greens have their way, involve: “An equitable transition, developed by Māori and the Crown [which] will actively prioritise te iwi Māori and the Māori economy.”

Would any other political party (apart from Te Pāti Māori) that so openly attacked capitalism, promised to advance the interests of indigenous citizens ahead of later arrivals, and announced its intention to advance the entire population, whether it likes it or not, towards “[a]n economy based on climate justice [with] policies that are underpinned by Te Tiriti, [and supported by] circular systems, renewable energies, and just transitions for workers” be given such a free pass?

Another expression which encompasses the notion of “circular systems” is “autarky”. That history records a strong association between authoritarian regimes and autarky is probably worth remembering. So, too, the enormous difference between “just transitions” arranged for workers, and the securing of economic and social justice by workers.

But that’s the great advantage of having a brand as immune to critical examination as that of the Greens. Try calling anti-capitalism, ethno-nationalism, statist imposition of societal priorities, and a barely disguised disdain for the principles of democracy, by any other name – and see if it smells as sweet.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.