CAN WE TAKE THE GREEN'S SERIOUSLY?

The Green Party has seemingly rediscovered the working class. Its proposals for a wealth tax and rent controls are designed to frame the Green's as a party that is championing the interests of ordinary New Zealanders. But can we take seriously a party that has slavishly supported Labour for the past six years, even as the levels of poverty and inequality have worsened?

FOR SIX YEARS the Green Party has been the loyal servant of the Labour Party. Such has been its subservience that in 2018 it decided it no longer wanted to ask any searching questions of the Government and handed its allocation of parliamentary questions over to the National Party. It reserved the right to ask questions only on issues that were outside the remit of the Confidence and Supply agreement it had signed with Labour. 

The Green's docility was highlighted more dramatically in May 2018 when the newly-elected Green co-leader Marama Davidson joined Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni to reject the recommendations of Labour's own Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG). One of the recommendations was for a substantial and immediate increase in benefit levels. RNZ's Tim Watkins was clearly stunned by Davidson's response and wrote: 

'Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni agrees the welfare system is not working. Marama Davidson agrees the welfare system is not working. And then they commit to ignore the report's big recommendations.

They say no to up to 47 percent benefit increases, preferring "a staged implementation". The call for "urgent change" is rejected. Remarkably, Ms Davidson has put her quotes into the same press release, tying the Greens to this approach, when they could have been dissenting from the rafters.'

Former Green MP Sue Bradford took a swipe at Marama Davidson and the Green Party when she observed: 'Good on the WEAG for your mahi but I strongly suspect it'll take a way more progressive govt than this lot to enact serious welfare reform."

After the Labour's election victory in 2020 it rewarded the Green Party for its loyalty by appointing its two co-leaders as ministers outside of cabinet. James Shaw was appointed Climate Change Minister while Marama Davidson was appointed Minister for Family and Sexual Violence (a new position) as well as Assistant Minister of Housing with special responsibility for homelessness. 

Shaw and Davidson chose to ignore the warnings of people like former Green MP Keith Locke who wrote that by accepting ministerial positions, the ability of the Green Party to oppose the policies of the Labour Government would be 'inevitably constrained'. He wrote:

'We saw this happening in the last term when the Greens gave away the opportunity to ask critical questions of Labour Ministers during Parliamentary Question Time.  Worse still, the Greens handed over their allocated Oral Questions to National.  This was shocking to me, and contrary to the Green practice, during the Clark government (1999-2008), of using Question Time to hold Labour Ministers to account.' 

Locke concluded: 'I’m worried that pushing for Ministerial positions, when the Greens haven’t got any leverage with Labour, makes the Greens look like an “ad-on” party, and a bit desperate.'

Keith Locke has proved to be right. By accepting ministerial positions within the Labour Government, Shaw and Davidson effectively kneecapped the Green Party's ability to be a visible alternative to Labour. Even as New Zealand's level of inequality and poverty has deepened under Labour, the Green Party has remained conspicuously silent.

Both Shaw and Davidson have acted largely as de-facto Labour ministers. As Climate Change Minister, it has been the task of Shaw to defend the Labour's Government's inadequate climate change policies. The under-fire Shaw has, in recent times, taken to agreeing that the Government is not treating climate change with the urgency it demands. But this has been little more than an attempt by Shaw to claim that, even though he is Climate Change Minister, he cannot be held responsible for the Government's failures.

Marama Davidson has also had her limited abilities and conservative politics well and truly exposed in her role as Assistant Housing Minister.  

Standing as a Green Party candidate in 2014 Davidson berated the National Government for its failure to adequately address the issues of inequality and poverty. 

Some ten years later and despite being the minister directly responsibility for homelessness, the number of homeless has continued to increase and thousands of New Zealanders are confined to a network of boarding houses and motels euphemistically described as 'emergency housing'. Once defended as a temporary solution to the lack of available affordable housing, they are now well on the way to becoming permanent feature of New Zealand society - like food banks.

It was recently reported that while Labour allocated $75 million to tackle homelessness in its 2022 budget, Davidson has spent barely any of it. Far too often she has gone missing in action, only popping up to promote a te reo-branded block of chocolate and allege that 'cis white men' are responsible for most of the domestic violence - a spectacularly false claim from the Minister for Family and Sexual Violence.

It is the Green's failure to be little more than Labour's obedient servant, combined with its fixation with 'social justice' issues surrounding race and gender, that have not only led to the emergence of divisions within the Green Party but a slump in the opinion polls.

As commentator Bryce Edwards has noted:

'2023 should therefore be The Year of the Greens. Yet it’s not. Instead, the Greens are struggling in the polls – averaging only about nine percent, well below where they’ve polled in the past. And instead of ploughing ahead, making great strides in government with their ministerial portfolios of climate change and homelessness, they are infighting – mostly over culture war and personality issues.'

But low polling in an election year has stirred a reaction out of a political party that has, previously, displayed little interest in the concerns of ordinary New Zealanders. Its latest policy announcements are an obvious attempt to portray the Green Party as a party focused on the economic issues that are impacting negatively on working class New Zealanders. 

Its policy of a guaranteed minimum income to be funded by a wealth tax is meant to appeal to New Zealanders struggling with the rising costs of living. Similarly, the proposed cap on rent rises is also designed to attract the support of those struggling with steeply rising rents. 

They are not only policies designed to differentiate the Green's from Labour but are also meant to be seen as innovative and progressive. They are not.

The Green's claim that a wealth tax will 'end poverty' is simply wrong. Karl Marx predicted some one hundred and fifty years ago that capitalism would lead to ever greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. That is exactly what has occurred throughout the world, including New Zealand. Poverty for billions around the world remains the norm with little sign of improvement, while the rich continue to get richer.

What this means is that a policy designed to reduce inequality by taxation, such as a wealth tax, will change little while there is such a high concentration of wealth in just a few hands. Yes, taxing the rich might help to ameliorate the problem of deepening economic inequality but it will not solve it. To solve this crisis, we need a fundamentally different way of distributing wealth. That cannot be done under our present economic arrangements. And the Green Party, loyal to market economics, is not about to campaign for the overturning of the economic status quo.

Similarly calling for a rent cap ignores the real reason for the housing crisis. Successive governments, including this present Labour Government and supported by the Green's, have allowed the housing sector to be used as a gigantic casino for maximizing short-term profits.

Rent controls, like the Green's advocate, is not the solution. We need to go much further than this and much further than the Green Party will support. We need an alternative focused on meeting the needs of people rather than the interests of property developers and private landlords - we need a massive public works program to build high-quality public housing. 

Such a public housing program could be part of a Green New Deal, as it is in countries like the United States and Britain. But the Green Party leadership have actively opposed the promotion of the GND within the Green Party because it cuts across the Green's continued support for 'the market'. And, contradicting its claim that the Green Party would be more 'combative' with a third term Labour Government, it also does not want to put any obstacles in the way of the Green's forging a post-election relationship with Labour. No doubt both James Shaw and Marama Davidson will expect to retain their ministerial positions and the fat six-figure ministerial salaries that accompany those positions.

Of course, the Green's new-found commitment to the working class will be rendered irrelevant if National wins the Treasury benches in October. And, even if Labour manages to secure a third term, its unlikely to take on board the Green's proposals for a wealth tax and rent controls. And given that the Green Party has regularly demonstrated that its prepared to 'compromise' its policies away, its likely to do so again with another Labour Government. Significantly James Shaw has declined to describe its wealth tax and rent control proposals as 'bottom line' policies.

Note: The Green Party's policy of a guaranteed income proposes that nobody's income would fall under $385 a week. This, however, does not go anywhere near meeting people's basic needs. It is ironic that someone like Marama Davidson, on an annual salary of over $240,000 (plus expenses), is expecting people to live on less than the minimum wage. It would certainly not 'end poverty' as the Green Party argue. Far from this policy representing a progressive challenge to neoliberalism, it represents a capitulation to it.