THE TROUBLE WITH CHLOE

Commentators like Andrea Vance and Barry Soper want to know why Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick can't be James Shaw.

 

CHLOE SWARBRICK'S problem is that she's not James Shaw. That, at least, is the unspoken opinion of a Commentariat that long abandoned any pretence to be anything other than a cheerleader for the status quo.

It has joined the Government to snigger and point the finger of derision at Swarbrick for even daring to suggest that neoliberalism might just have failed, totally, and that there are other, and better ways, to organise the economy.

Inside Parliament, Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters have accused Swarbrick of 'Marxism' and of referencing Das Kapital. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Housing Minister Chris Bishop have chimed in with similar views. It's almost as if they have all been referring to the same prepared talking points.

Outside Parliament, Swarbrick has also been under fire for her 'outlandish' left wing views that dare to contradict establishment opinion.

Writing in The Post, Andrea Vance has tried to ringfence Chloe Swarbrick and the Green Party as 'fringe' and 'extreme'. According to Vance, for example, the Green Party's legitimate and worked-out plans to renationalise the rail industry and renationalise the partially-privatised energy companies are the insanities of what Vance has described as a 'TikTok manifesto'.

The plans to renationalise the energy industry aim to provide all New Zealanders with affordable power but, according to Vance, this 'ignores basic economic principles'. That principle appears to be that energy companies should be allowed to make enormous profits while folk shiver in cold houses in the depths of winter. They are too scared to switch on the heating because of the financial cost.

Meantime, Newstalk ZB's Barry Soper has taken to task Swarbrick's entirely legitimate and valid criticism of Government maneuvers to usher in further privatisation into areas such as health. According to Soper, Swarbrick's attack on 'profit' was enough to make 'the usually loquacious Christopher Luxon literally lost for words.'  Soper has also been 'lost for words' in his inability to discuss the implications of further privatisation. But given that Soper writes in soundbites, perhaps such a detailed commentary is beyond him.

But, in the end, it doesn't matter what Chloe Swarbrick says or does because the Commentariat will remain offended because she isn't James Shaw. Or, as Andrea Vance puts it: 'In the Chloe Swarbrick era, the Greens have been reduced to a caucus of anarkiddies posting out a flood of social-justice clickbait.'

Vance, Soper and others like them hanker for the days of a James Shaw-led Green Party that accommodated itself to the neoliberal status quo and didn't rock the boat.  

These were the days when Shaw, while unpopular with much of the Green Party membership, was warmly embraced by the business sector. In the 2022 NZ Herald Mood of the Boardroom survey, Climate Change Minister Shaw was rated the Government's best performing minister. This was the same Labour-led government that Greta Thunberg accused of doing nothing about climate change, and which subsequently led to Shaw dropping any further references to the young Swedish activist in his speeches and comments.
 

While James Shaw believed that a 'green capitalism' was possible via some suitable monetary incentives and a little light regulation, Chloe Swarbrick's Green Party says that the State's role isn't merely to hold the hand of business. Indeed, the Green Party says that the State should be the central actor.

Such a view, of course, cuts across the neoliberal narrative that Shaw was happy to follow, and which Andrea Vance refers to as 'basic economic principles'. That Swarbrick remains implacably opposed to a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many means that she will remain a threat to those seeking the further continuance of that status quo.

This is the same status quo which saw the planet buckle under its hottest year on record in 2024 and which UN chief António Guterres described as a 'climate breakdown'.