GARETH HUGHES : THE GREEN PARTY NEEDS TO FOCUS ON TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE

In his valedictory speech, outgoing Green Party MP Gareth Hughes was critical of his own party's political direction, suggesting that it is advocating polices that amount to little more than ' (re)arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.'

IN HIS VALEDICTORY speech, Green MP Gareth Hughes made some brief observations about our political and economic system which included:

'We need to think deeper into the systemic reasons behind growing homelessness, child poverty, the mental health crisis, plastic oceans, vanishing species, and unswimmable rivers. I believe these things aren't designed bugs; they're actually designed features arising from the neoliberal operating system installed in the 1980s.'

This observation isn't new from Hughes. Indeed since announcing his retirement last year such observations have sometimes come attached to criticisms of the political direction of this Labour-led Government. In November last year, for example, he criticised the coalition Government for failing to be the transformational government that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern claimed it would be. His criticism was blunt and certainly refreshing from someone within the usually docile parliamentary Green Party whose leadership has been more than ready to sing the praises of Jacinda Ardern and co. Hughes commented:

'I don't think the Government has been transformational. There's been pockets of transformation, but you know, I don't think historians are gonna look back at it and say 'This was a turning point on the scale of the 1930s or 1980s'. And I think that's desperately needed. It's a disappointment that we aren't seeing the change I think we need. As a father, I'm desperately worried about the future of the world.'

It is disappointing though that Hughes only began making such critical observations once he announced his retirement. He has normally kept such criticisms of the Labour-led government to himself. And, while he has now publicly expressed his opposition to market policies and neoliberalism he also has had little to say while his own party has continued to pursue, with ever greater dedication, a disastrous market-led environmentalism. This has been largely been propelled by co-leader James Shaw, who Hughes lost to in the 2015 co-leadership contest.

James Shaw, throughout the term of this Government, has continued to extol the virtues of 'the market' even going as far as telling business conferences that profit can be used as a tool in the fight against climate change. While the push around the world is for a Green New Deal and the complete transformation of local economies and the global economy itself, the Green Party leadership in New Zealand continues to peddle the fiction that the machine that is chewing up the planet can actually be used to save it.

This is clearly a view that Gareth Hughes doesn't share because he has urged the Green Party to adopt policies that reject the neoliberal status quo. In his valedictory speech he declared:

'My challenge to the country, the Greens, and the wider progressive movement is that if we aren't focusing on transformational change, we are simply arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Our wealth, health, and survival is imperilled if we continue with a system that encourages greed, corporate power, and excessive consumption.'

But under the conservative leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson there's little chance that this Green Party will end its mad infatuation with market environmentalism or 'green capitalism'. Even 190,000 folk demonstrating in the streets in September last year and demanding more urgent action on climate change wasn't enough to make the Green Party change its conservative ways. It still remains committed to so-called 'carbon neutrality' in 2050, even though the scientific community has warned that we've only got this decade to take effective action on the environmental crisis that confronts us. Otherwise we're toast.

This could also be the Green Party's fate come election time. Even as it has sniffed at the 'radicalism' of ecosocialism and applauded its own 'realism' and 'pragmatism', it has continued to shed electoral support. It now risks being kicked out of Parliament altogether. But would anyone really miss a Green Party that is more concerned about what the corporate sector thinks, rather than what ordinary people want?