CHLOE AND THE PLUTOCRACY

Green MP Chloe Swarbrick has been tweeting about how 'change-let alone equality-is really hard to achieve with power stacked against it'. But Swarbrick has been a member of a party that meekly followed the Labour-led government for three years. Does she intend to do anything differently if she manages to get re-elected?

GREEN MP Chloe Swarbrick is, of course, standing for Parliament in the seat of Auckland Central. Given the Green's dangerously low polling, which hasn't been helped recently by co-leader James 'green capitalism' Shaw supporting the public funding of a private school, a Swarbrick victory could prove to be the Green's only way of getting back into 'the Halls of Power'.

Swarbrick was at recent candidates meeting where she was clearly alarmed by the cosy consensus that emerged between Labour Party candidate Helen White and National Party candidate Emma Mellow. They both, according to Swarbrick, were dismissive of the Green's proposed wealth tax. This would see a one percent tax imposed on individuals with a net worth over $1 million. She tweeted:

'I was just on a Ak central business panel where the Labour candidate called wealth tax 'loopy' & the Nat candidate nodded happily along. Change - let alone equality - is really hard to achieve with power stacked against it. That's why politics needs you'.

Well, yes, change is inevitably going to difficult with the forces of the political establishment ranged against any efforts to tilt the balance of economic and political power, however slightly, back toward ordinary people.

The problem is that any attempt to bring about real change have been opposed by the policies of the parliamentary parties, including the Green Party. While there might be differences on individual policies, like tax, the parliamentary parties share a dedicated devotion to 'the free market' and neoliberalism. During the term of the Labour-led government there were no parliamentary speeches made railing against the injustices and inequalities of capitalism and neoliberalism. And that included silence from Swarbrick, now pointing out  the difficulties faced to bring about change.

Chloe Swarbrick's her own party displayed little enthusiasm to publicly oppose the policies of the Labour-led government, to the point that it decided it was no longer going to ask any parliamentary questions that risked embarrassing the government (That, incidentally, was also a decision made by James Shaw).

While Swarbrick might say that politics needs us, we don't need the politics of a system that protects the status quo and that has employed her on a generous six figure salary package and saw her party docilely trotting behind the Labour-led government for the past three years. It could have spent that time agitating for a Green New Deal - it didn't. The Green's are not even campaigning for a GND now - because that would upset the apple cart and really annoy Labour.

We're living in nothing less than a plutocracy that represents and defends the interests of the wealthy elite. While we have the seen the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, there was next to no effort made by the Labour-led government to upset the status quo. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern went from grandly talking about 'transformation' to declaring that a capital gains tax would never be implemented by any government she led.

We saw the Labour-led government swing into action to protect the status quo during this coronavirus pandemic. This is something that Bernard Hickey of Newsoom has pointed out, something 'progressive' Labour supporters have chosen either to deny or simply disregard. Hickey has observed:

It is a actually a 'K' shaped recovery.... The already rich are on the line heading upwards - getting rich because of a range of Government policies aimed at responding to Covid-19. Meanwhile, renters, beneficiaries and the working poor are getting poorer because their rents are rising, their incomes are falling and they have received barely any more direct help than they got before the pandemic....This has become the Covid-K recovery: fantastic for the rich and an awful repeat of the much talked about 1990-92 recession that Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have said they want to avoid repeating.'

Rather than telling us to get involved in politics as it is, Chloe Swarbrick should be telling us to how she and the Green Party intend to fight the plutocracy. She needs, in other words, to start walking the walk before starting telling all of us what we should do. James Shaw telling us what a reliable coalition partner the Green's would be for Labour simply won't do.