FIRST IMPRESSIONS CAN BE DECEIVING

The Green Party has this past week publicly disagreed with the Labour Government's approach to both housing and welfare. While this might look like the Green's have woken from their slumbers, appearances can be deceiving...

AFTER REMAINING largely comatose  during Labour's first term in office, the Green Party appears  to have woken from its slumbers. This week co-leader James Shaw has given voice to the Green's dissatisfaction with the Labour Government's failure  to come to grips with the deepening housing crisis. His fellow co-leader, Marama Davidson, has also lent the Green Party's support to the campaign  to have benefits raised  before Christmas, a demand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has already rejected.

Shaw, in particular, has sounded genuinely exasperated over Labour's housing policies, going as far as to say it was 'irresponsible' for Ardern to permanently rule out a capital gains tax as a way of taking  some of the heat out of housing market.

'It incenses me,' Shaw told RNZ. 'You're getting these massive capital gains occurring as a result of the stimulus package and yet there's no action from government to try recover any of that or to mitigate it in any way...If they keep ruling out these options, I don't know what's left on the table. It's irresponsible not to entertain a tax on capital in some form, because ultimately inequalities... are being dramatically increased.'

Putting aside Shaw's assumption that there are only market-led solutions to the housing crisis,  the criticism is still quite a departure from the co-leader of a Green Party which resolutely refrained from asking any critical parliamentary questions of the Labour-led Government because it did not want to want to risk publicly embarrassing Labour. Similarly while Marama Davidson might want benefits to be raised now, that's not what she was saying in 2019. Then she and the Green Party supported the decision of the Labour-led Government to reject most of the recommendations of its own welfare working group, which included a recommendation to substantially increase benefits to alleviate the  growing level of poverty.

What a difference an election can make.

With the Green Party outside of any formal coalition and Labour no longing having to rely on the votes of any of the minor parties to get things done, the Green's are effectively left shouting from the sidelines. When they did have political leverage they refused to use it. Its also worth noting that the agreement the Green's have signed with Labour sees it committing itself to  'supporting the Labour Government to provide stable government for the term of the 53rd Parliament.'

The Green's could though serve a useful function in Parliament if it used its resources to provide  a progressive alternative to the centrist and neoliberal agenda of this Labour Government. It could be acting as a rallying point for progressive political forces outside of Parliament who would welcome the Green's campaigning for a Green New Deal. We should not forget that in September 2019 some 180,000 folk demonstrated throughout the country, demanding more urgent action on climate change. Nothing has changed since then.

Rather than firing potshots at various aspects of Labour's neoliberal agenda it could be offering a comprehensive and radical agenda to both tackle both climate change and growing poverty and inequality. But at a time when, in Naomi Klein's words, we need 'rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society' the Green Party remains locked into supporting  the neoliberal economy  and slow incremental reform.

This is not just some theoretical abstraction which we can debate at our leisure. We are in a fight for our lives. Yet none of the urgency required is exhibited in the agreement the Green's signed with Labour. Once again, its largely business as usual.