JAMES SHAW : BLAMING LABOUR FOR THE GREEN'S OWN FAILINGS

James Shaw : 'I'm with you, Grant!'

Despite the fact that the Green Party has been the Labour-led Government's loyal and uncritical servant for the past three years, co-leader James Shaw wants us to believe that New Zealand's descent into centrist hell has got nothing to do with the Green's. It must be an election year...

THE LATEST ROY Morgan poll shows the Green Party at a dismal four percent support. Its just one of a series of polls that have the Green Party floundering around the crucial five percent eligibility mark. The danger remains ever present that the Green's will be kicked out of Parliament altogether this election.

It shouldn't be this way. In a time of a pandemic that has severely weakened an already fragile and dysfunctional economic system to the point of collapse and that has exposed its ingrained inequalities and injustices and at a time when this very same economic system is in danger of propelling the planet over the cliff, the time has come for real and fundamental change. The Green Party should be leading  the charge for such change, yet it isn't.

The need for real change is  being increasingly recognised by New Zealanders. Last September over 100,000 folk demonstrated throughout the country, demanding more urgent action on climate change. And while Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson made some sympathetic noises, they did nothing else. When the call was for urgent action, the Green Party decided that it was going to remain loyal to a policy target of achieving supposed carbon neutrality by 2050. This flies in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that has warned us that we have nothing like thirty years to get our act together. As it stands, we should be aiming for carbon neutrality by 2030. That is what being proposed, for example, by the Icelandic government and by the British Labour Party. And its what's been proposed in the United States by politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, not to mention the Sunrise movement.

The fundamental problem with the Green Party is that it remains committed to corporate environmentalism or what is sometimes referred to as 'green capitalism'. This has led to a policy approach that thinks that we just have to tinker with the levers and dials of the very machine that is eating up the planet in order to effectively combat climate change. But as much of environmental movement now recognises, we can only fight climate change by transforming our failed economic model and building something better.

As Naomi Klein notes In her book This Changes Everything: 'What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered growth . . .'

It is the inherent conservatism of the Green Party leadership that has prevented it from proposing a Green New Deal for New Zealand, despite the fact that there would be widespread public for a GND. It would be something similar to that being proposed by the UK Labour Party or by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States.

The GND represents an opportunity to transform a failed economic model that has benefited no-one but the one percent. But it is this failed economic model that the Green Party continues to uphold and defend. Indeed in Parliament co-leader James Shaw has claimed that it is you and me ('the people') and not capitalism that are to blame for the climate crisis.

But it must be an election year because James Shaw and the Green Party are now trying to present themselves as the 'progressive' face of New Zealand politics. Unwilling to acknowledge or perhaps even oblivious to any of the Green Party's deep failings, Shaw wants us to believe that New Zealand's descent into the centrist quagmire is all the fault of the Labour Party. According to Shaw:

 'If I have a frustration with Labour, it’s that they could have spent more political capital than they have.'

What's wrong with the picture that Shaw is trying to paint? The Green Party is not an innocent bystander. It has walked hand in hand with Labour while it has not been spending 'more political capital'. The Green Party's poodle-like loyalty to Labour has even extended to it not wanting to ask the Government any critical parliamentary questions because it might risk embarrassing Jacinda and co.

Let us not forget too, that it was James Shaw who co-wrote the Budget Responsibility Rules with Finance minister Grant Robertson and which marked the continuation of austerity.

As writer Arundhati Roy has written, our mission must be to 'disable the engine' of capitalism. But that's not a mission that the Green Party are prepared to undertake. Maybe if it had shown something more than just deference to Labour over the past three years it might not be languishing in the polls right now.