THIS WEEK the NZ Herald published a commentary by Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick that condemns the National-led coalition government as a government promoting and defending the interests of the few at the expense of the many. Given that a recent survey suggested that over half of all New Zealanders think the system is rigged in favour of the rich and the powerful, many people would agree with Swarbrick's assessment. She writes:
'The Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance also continue to tell us that they’re making ‘hard choices’, but it’s more accurate to call them cruel choices. Like choosing a $2.9b hand-out for landlords which the Reserve Bank tells us will push up house prices, while chopping half-price public transport, free prescriptions, property manager regulations, and handily shredding Inland Revenue’s reporting requirements on the fairness of our tax system.
'The Government is saying there’ll be more misery before things get ‘back on track’. What they’re not saying is that they’ve decided to inflict this suffering, because they don’t want to fix the fundamentals of our economy which generate inequality and squanders productivity by privileging wealth over work.'
But New Zealand's distressing high levels of poverty and inequality did not start the day the new government was installed. Despite Labour campaigning in 2017 on a platform of addressing the economic malaise caused by over forty years of neoliberalism, little had changed by the time that Jacinda Ardern left office and Chris Hipkins took over.
The Labour Government, despite Ardern's supposed commitment to economic 'transformation', became little more than a steadfast defender of the economic status quo. Yet it was this determinedly centrist Labour Government that the Green Party remained loyal to. And any possibility that the Green Party would oppose Labour's neoliberal policies was finally snuffed out when, in 2020, its two co-leaders, James Shaw and Marama Davidson, accepted ministerial positrons within the Labour Government.
Former Green MP Sue Bradford said that it was 'a sad day for the Green Party. If you can’t speak out strongly on climate change and homelessness and have no real power on either, what’s the point of being in parliament?'
Another former Green MP, Keith Locke, wrote: '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.'
While James Shaw has now retired from parliamentary politics, Marama Davidson remains one of the party's two co-leaders. It appears that she plans to continue as co-leader at least as far as the next election. This is in despite of the fact that her leadership is blighted by her role in the previous Labour Government, a government that betrayed the interests of a working class it claimed to represent.
Indeed, how can Davidson now credibly speak on issues such as the housing crisis and homelessness when, under her watch as an Associate Minister of Housing with a special responsibility for addressing homelessness, the number of homeless people actually increased? How can she speak credibly about poverty when, in 2018, she 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.
In July last year it was reported that even though Labour had allocated $75 million to tackle homelessness in its 2022 Budget, Davidson had managed to spend barely any of it. The present Minister of Housing, Chris Bishop, has already referred to Davidson's failure in Parliament and no doubt it will get referred to again. In opposition, Bishop described Davidson as 'a zero-time homelessness minister. She seems to spend very little time doing any work.'
In fact, Davidson was more concerned with protecting the Labour Government than helping the homeless, especially in an election year. Her failure to act prompted Monte Cecilia housing trust boss Bernie Smith to say that Davidson had been 'very silent' about the growing problems with emergency housing.
While Shaw and Davidson drove the Green Party closer to Labour and behaved largely as de-facto Labour Government ministers, Chloe Swarbrick seemed far less enthusiastic about the Green's cosy relationship with Labour. In 2021 she tweeted a comment from the former Green co-leader, the late Jeanette Fitzsimons: 'If socialism is to survive as a relevant political movement in the 21st century, it must develop a response to the ecological crisis and a socialist strategy to build a sustainable future.' This was not exactly a ringing endorsement of the market environmentalism that James Shaw was pursuing and which Marama Davidson supported.
And, in 2022, Swarbrick rejected the incrementalist politics of both Shaw and Davidson and advocated system change instead. This was a clear endorsement of the ecosocialist call for 'system change, not climate change'. She wrote in the NZ Herald:
'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.'
And on the Green Party website, Swarbrick's criticisms of the neoliberal status quo and the 'tinkering' of incrementalism continues today:
"Mechanisms of conventional, incremental political change have failed to rise to the challenges that the deeply entrenched and inextricable crises of climate change and social and economic inequality present. Citizens are smart enough to recognise the need for an alternative. It’s in this alternative where we can continually redraw the boundaries of the possible, because possibility in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power.”
Where does Chloe Swarbrick's left-wing views leave the more conservative Marama Davidson? Swarbrick has referred to both Labour and National as 'legacy parties' who promote a politics that 'limits the oxygen and the options that people need to imagine and, in turn, limiting real world results.' But Marama Davidson has largely remained silent, seemingly content to allow Swarbrick to take the senior leadership role. It also means she has, so far, avoided having her own politics scrutinised in the way that Swarbrick's have been.
It's fair to say that the Green Party could do with another co-leader who isn't compromised by their previous close relationship with the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern. Davidson is also a market-led environmentalist in a Green Party that, under Chloe Swarbrick, is no longer prepared to accommodate itself to neoliberalism.
Of course, the rub is that under Green Party rules, adopted under James Shaw and Marama Davidson, one co-leader must be Maori and Davidson is under no threat of being challenged.
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