THERE ARE MORE SERIOUS MATTERS TO BE OUTRAGED ABOUT THAN JULIE ANN GENTER

Julie Ann Genter's only 'crime' has been to upset parliamentary sensibilities. But with a recent poll revealing that more than half of all New Zealanders think the system is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, there are more things to be outraged about than the Green MP's brief 'skirmish' with a National MP.


I CAN'T agree with the commonly held view that this week's Parliamentary fracas was serious and concerning. I've watched the video several times, but all I see is Green MP Julie Ann Genter waving a booklet about and getting in the face of bemused National MP Matt Doocey. Big deal. Genter might have briefly upset Parliament's 'decorum', but it would have been more useful if the media had devoted some of its energies exploring what Genter was upset about. Instead, it went for the easy clickbait headlines.

It was unfortunate too that the media amplified the Government's portrayal of Genter as someone with anger management issues. It did so without providing any real evidence to back this allegation. The best it could come up with was a Wellington florist alleging she had a 'heated exchange' with Genter over cycleways and that Genter had been 'intimidating'.  And Jordan Carter of the right-wing Taxpayer Union alleged on X that, in 2017, Genter had approached him in a Wellington café and shouted at him for a column he had written. Carter is so upset about it that's it has only taken him six years to go public about it.

These charges are entirely anecdotal and unsubstantiated.  However, they serve a purpose; to frame the politically vulnerable Genter as both 'troublesome' and emotionally unstable. She can now join a long line of women, both past and present, who have found themselves being labelled as 'bolshie'. Off the top of my head, I can think of US civil rights activist Rosa Parks and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. And one of my heroes, revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, was often described by her political opponents as a 'meddlesome agitator' and worse. They murdered her in the end. Today another socialist, US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is regularly attacked for her 'bolshie' behaviour, even by conservative Democratic representatives. A Republican representative in 2020 described her as 'a f**king bitch'.

While Green Party co-leaders Chloe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson might have thought they had to condemn Genter's outburst in order to protect the standing of the Green Party, they have now also bought into the depiction of one of their MPs as someone not in control of her emotions and maybe a bit of a 'loose cannon'. Of course, one isolated incident doesn't suggest this at all and, although I have major disagreements with Genter's middle class liberal politics, she has always struck me as an intelligent woman who knows what she's about.

In an age of the machine politician where political diversity is frowned upon and routinely obstructed and where passion and fervor have been drained out of a politics that is blindly loyal to 'the market', It's refreshing to see a parliamentary politician do something other than routinely go through the motions.

I'm not outraged by Julie Ann Genter's behaviour. I am though outraged by a Parliament that under various governments and various political configurations has, for more than four decades, been little more than a defender of the neoliberal status quo. And the Green Party must take its share of the blame. During Labour's six years in office, it barely raised a voice in anger. Indeed, during Labour's first term in office co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson decided that the Green Party would not be asking critical questions of Labour Ministers during Parliamentary Question Time. That was a dereliction of the Green Party's democratic duty, and that was more of an outrage than Julie Ann Genter upsetting parliamentary sensibilities this week.