CHLOE SWARBRICK : "WE CAN DO THIS ECONOMY THING A LOT BETTER"

The corporate media might have relentlessly pursued Golriz Ghahraman, but it paid scant attention to an address that Green MP Chloe Swarbrick made to Parliament in December. It has since been picked up by a British journalist and caught the attention of a major US progressive website.

WHILE GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN has been the focus of the media's attention for the past several days, another Green MP received next to no attention from the corporate media for a speech that has recently been picked up by the overseas media. Of course, there was exactly zero political capital to make from Chloe's Swarbrick's speech to Parliament in December. She posted an extract from it to her Instagram account. It has since had over 95,000 views. This is what she had to say:

'We don't live in a game of Monopoly which, by the way, as invented in the early 1900's to actually teach children of the pitfalls of an economy that is premised on land speculation and luck. Yet, hey presto, what do we have to this day? I'd just like to quote from Paul Hawken who says we have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present and call it GDP.

'GDP, of course was invented by a guy called Simon Kuznets who took it to the US Congress in the 1930s and was like, hey guy's, here's a really good way to measure economic transactions on a micro level within our economy - but, god forbid, do not use it as a measure of what he called welfare and we now call well-being. That's because the baseline measure of just those transactions does not give us any meaningful insight into the value of those transactions, whether we actually want them in the first place, whether they actually benefit people and the planet or the distribution of these of transactions. That is, who benefits from these transactions because, Mr Speaker, the squiggly line of GDP can go up but we also know too full well so too can homelessness, so too can the destruction of the environmental fundamentals that are necessary for life as know it. So Mr Speaker, the kind of premise from the Green Party here is that we can do this economy thing a lot better'.

Swarbrick's Instagram post was picked up by British journalist David Vetter who posted it to X (formerly Twitter) with the comments: 'Watch Aotearoa New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick deliver the most formidably cogent summary of the 20th-century economic order—and how it ruined everything. I genuinely don't think I've seen—or read—a more concise and effective summary than this. Even today, 'Greens' are portrayed by our media as pie-in-the-sky dreamers, while the besuited worshipers of an ideology wholly divorced from the observable universe are regarded as pragmatic geniuses. It's what you might call total reality inversion.'

Chloe Swarbrick's observations on GDP have since been picked up by the progressive US website Common Dreams. Journalist Jessica Corbett writes of Swarbrick:

'In addition to the climate emergency, her legislative priorities have included cannabis decriminalization, election access, mental health services, and a wealth tax. Swarbrick said in June that "wealth in Aotearoa is concentrated in the back pockets of a wealthy few. It's time we get on and fix this.'

But Swarbrick's views on the economy continue to sit uncomfortably within a Green Party whose present leadership continues to pledge the Green Party's loyalty to the free market model, as it did throughout the six years of the Labour Government.

While Chloe Swarbrick has gone as far to identify capitalism as the source of our economic injustices, she has yet to spell out what her economic alternative is. While she says that the Green Party thinks it can 'do this economy thing a lot better', we are no wiser as to what she thinks this means in practical terms. Is she suggesting that the Green Party adopt the cause of ecosocialism - as other Green Parties have done around the world - or is she simply prepared to concede to the present Green Party leadership that tinkering with the present economic model is enough? And how would that square with her comments in 2022 where she appears to advocate system change:

'Do we want to keep tinkering, or do we want a brand new deal? Are we willing to reset the rules?... It's not going to happen overnight and it's not going to be easily handed over, but history tells us we can, and the demands of the future require we must.'

While we, of course, can 'do this economy better thing better', Swarbrick needs to tell us how. Given that the Green Party are now in opposition, this is the time for her to stop fudging the issue.