THE GREEN PARTY CAN EXPECT THE ATTACKS TO CONTINUE

The attack on Green MP Benjamin Doyle is only the beginning of further attacks on a Green Party that seeks fundamental change. It's little wonder that co-leader Chloe Swarbrick has said that we can't let the political establishment determine our future.

 

WHILE IT was Winston Peters intervention that propelled the allegations against Green MP Benjamin Doyle into the mainstream media this week, it was a cabal of keyboard warriors in the social media that laid the foundation for Peters scurrilous attack.

It comes as no surprise that the campaign against Doyle was mounted by the usual right-wing suspects, whose political loyalties lie not a million miles from the National Party and the Act Party. It also includes a number of Donald Trump supporters, like Zionists Juliet Moses and Ani O'Brien.

Even Rachel Stewart, who used to write some good commentary on climate change for the NZ Herald, has joined in the attacks on the Green Party. Apparently, for Stewart, the environmental crisis is not quite so pressing now that the National Party are in power.

The reactionary keyboard warriors have launched campaigns against Green MPs before. They were, for example, intimately involved in the pursuit of former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman. Also, last year Juliet Moses and Ani O'Brien were active in a campaign to smear Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick as 'anti-Semitic' because she has protested Israel's genocidal rampage in Gaza. This week Moses has claimed, without providing any evidence, that Swarbrick has 'trolled the Jewish community for the past seventeen months'. Unfortunately for the increasingly discredited Moses, a group like Alternative Jewish Voices has consistently come out in support of Swarbrick.

The Green Party could play a crucial role in the result of next year's general election, so the attempts to undermine it are likely to continue and perhaps even escalate as the general election draws ever closer. Writing in the NZ Herald, Chelsea Daniels has suggested that the attacks on Benjamin Doyle 'could be a glimpse into a dirty campaign at next year’s general election.'

But more 'conventional' attempts to discredit the Green Party have already started from within a corporate media hostile to political change.

According to National Party supporter Mike Hosking,  although the Labour Party might need the electoral support of the Green Party, it and the Maori Party are 'increasingly ropey'.

Declared the wealthy Newstalk ZB breakfast host: 'Both are increasingly belligerent, both are increasingly fringe and both are an electoral nightmare for a so-called mainstream, left-wing party.'

It takes a unique mind to characterise the determinedly centrist Labour Party as 'left wing'. But this is little more than an attempt by Hosking to paint the Green Party's left-wing politics and policies as 'extreme' and 'fringe' rather than the necessary response to an economy in decline and a planet in crisis.

Activists and scientists have been saying for a long time that we’re in a dire situation that demands profound change. Right now, the only parliamentary party in New Zealand that seeks such fundamental change is the Green Party. It's inevitable that the defenders of status quo are seeking to discredit the Green's economic policies.  Meanwhile, the Act Party, busy undermining workers' rights, seeking further privatisation, and obstructing efforts to fight climate change, goes largely uncriticised and often stoutly defended.

But the attacks on the Green Party continue.

Right wing journalist Andrea Vance has caricatured the Green Party's economic policies as part of a 'TikTok manifesto'. According to her, the Green Party's policies 'ignore the most basic of economic principles'. What Vance doesn't say is that the so-called 'economic principles' she is referring to are the same 'economic principles' that have led to deepening poverty and inequality and a housing sector and welfare system in crisis.

Neoliberalism is a god that has failed yet the zombie doctrine staggers on, defended by its supporters like Mike Hosking and Andrea Vance. The Green Party is by no means perfect but, at least, it is attempting to provide a political and economic alternative, a conscious attempt to develop a new system.

But the Green Party finds itself with few friends within the political establishment. Perhaps Chloe Swarbrick saw what was coming when she said in March last year: 'What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power. As Co-leader, I want to show everyone in this country the power running through their veins to choose our future. We cannot leave politics to the politicians.'