The Green Party, in an election year, remain largely invisible. Still bogged down in culture wars and identity politics, writes Bryce Edwards, the Green's have lost touch with the concerns of ordinary working people. Perhaps the solution for the Green's is to embrace 'eco-populism'.
This follows a pattern. In my first column in this series on the Greens in 2026 (Have the Greens lost their mojo?), I laid out the symptoms of a party in trouble: polling in decline, scandals piling up, staff jumping ship, and leaders clinging to excuses about algorithms and government conspiracies. In my second column (The Green Party’s culture war quagmire), I diagnosed the deeper malaise: a party bogged down in culture wars and identity politics, having deprioritised its environmental focus and lost touch with ordinary working people who don’t inhabit inner-city bubbles.
Today, I want to offer something more prescriptive. There is a path forward for the Greens. It’s called “eco-populism”, or “left populism”, and it’s working spectacularly overseas. The strategy is straightforward: fuse climate action with the cost-of-living crisis, name the corporate villains making life harder for ordinary people, and stop apologising for demanding that the powerful pay their share. But much of the New Zealand Greens seem allergic to this approach. They view populism as something for the right, associated with demagoguery and Trump. They don’t get that the likes of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the surging UK Greens are showing another way.
The Greens are missing the historic populist moment, failing to recognise that New Zealand is gripped by what I’ve termed the “Broken New Zealand” zeitgeist. Public anger at corporate greed and dysfunctional government bureaucracy is at fever pitch. Majorities in survey after survey believe the economy is “set up to advantage the rich” at the expense of everyone else, and governments are too focused on placating vested interests.
This is not a fringe sentiment, but the dominant mood of our politics. Voters are hungry for politicians who side with ordinary people over corporations. But they also don’t want politicians who are just part of a “Wellington bubble” of bureaucracy and business as usual.
THE ECO-POPULIST BLUEPRINT
Consider what’s happening in Britain. Since Zack Polanski won the UK Green Party leadership in September 2025, membership has more than doubled from roughly 65,000 to over 150,000. They’re now polling at 15-16%, nearly double what the New Zealand Greens are managing. What’s his secret?
Polanski’s pitch is explicitly eco-populist. He frames climate action as inseparable from bills, rents, wages, and corporate price-gouging. He names villains: billionaires, privatised utilities, lobbyists and “the economic and political elite.” He makes decarbonisation about lower energy bills, not about sacrifice. He argues openly that ordinary people are right to resent paying for the green transition while corporations and the super-rich escape, and says he agrees with voters who think they shouldn’t carry the costs.
The same formula powered Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York. He campaigned on fare-free buses, universal free public childcare, city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze, and a thirty-dollar minimum wage by 2030. Simple policies, clearly communicated, hammered relentlessly. He didn’t get lost in abstract policy frameworks or academic jargon about intersectionality. He told voters who was rigging the system and what he’d do about it. This was a fight against corporate power, based on more of a socialist or class politics than the Greens’ culture war inclinations would seem to allow.
This is the Sanders approach writ large: “the many versus the few” speechmaking around climate, putting corporate power at the centre of the story. The message is that powerful interests privatise the gains and socialise the losses. When cyclones hit and floods rise, it’s not the polluters who pay but ordinary families whose insurance premiums spike and whose communities get abandoned.
The core insight is that climate politics dies when it becomes a lifestyle brand for the affluent, Wellington public servants, and university students. Eco-populism makes it what it really is: a fight over who owns the economy and who pays when it breaks.
THE SWARBRICK PARADOX
Chlöe Swarbrick should be New Zealand’s answer to AOC or Mamdani. She’s young, articulate, and capable of explaining complex policy in accessible, passionate language. She even sometimes cites Mamdani and Polanski as inspirations. She’s toured Europe recently, rubbing shoulders with economists like Yanis Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty. She’s said something deeply insightful: “Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism.”
That quote almost deserves to be the Greens’ campaign slogan. But there’s a yawning gap between what Swarbrick says and what she and her party actually campaign on. Instead, we get rainbow politics and a general middle class liberal ethos. We get plenty of moral fervour about various identity-based grievances, but precious little fire directed at the people actually making Kiwis poorer: the bank executives, the supermarket barons, the electricity oligopoly.
 |
| Chloe Swarbrick with economist Thomas Piketty. |
The Green Party’s policy documents do actually contain some relatively radical ideas: a wealth tax on millionaires, windfall profits levies on banks and power companies, breaking up corporate monopolies, massive state investment in housing. But the Greens bury these on their website, mentioned in passing, not made central. Swarbrick can wax lyrical about Mamdani’s success, telling an interviewer that “putting policies on the table which meaningfully address the material, real world needs of people, well, they’re going to resonate.” And she’s right. But she and her party don’t follow through.
One leftwing political commentator, Steven Cowan, has suggested that Swarbrick is being held back by her caucus. She might be more willing to ride the leftwing populist zeitgeist, he argues, but her colleagues are stuck in their ways. Other Green MPs like co-leader Marama Davidson remain focused on the old fights of years ago. Whether it’s true or not that Swarbrick is held back by such people, the result is the same: the Greens dabble in anti-corporate rhetoric without owning it. They have the policies but not the discipline to make them the entire point.
MORE OF THE SAME
Is there any sign the Greens are pivoting? Nothing in their January agenda suggests a shift.
Look at what they’ve prioritised as 2026 begins. Last week, Green MP Kahurangi Carter talked up her two private members’ bills currently before Parliament: one on copyright reform to protect memes and satire, the other a Good Samaritan law offering legal protections during drug overdoses. Both worthy causes. Neither exactly a rallying cry against corporate greed.
Then last week the Greens also announced they’re putting forward a member’s bill to entrench the Maori seats into law. Again, a defensible position on its merits. But it’s hardly the economic populism that would connect with struggling families in South Auckland or provincial New Zealand.
When Marama Davidson was asked last month what the focus of the election campaign would be, her answer was telling: “always, there’s going to be upholding the wellbeing of people, tangata, the wellbeing of environment, taiao, and that that is only possible through upholding Te Tiriti.” No mention of naming corporate villains. No mention of making polluters pay. No simple, repeatable message about power bills and grocery prices.
What we see is a collection of odds and ends, mostly around identity and culture rather than climate and the economy. It all looks a bit incoherent. As political commentator Grant Duncan observed recently, Labour is “leading on 15 of the top 20 issues” in surveys, while the Greens lead on none. That’s a devastating indictment for a party that claims to be driving the opposition agenda. Duncan’s blunt assessment captures it: “A lack of concentration on critical issues gets them poor results.”
Meanwhile, the party’s current campaign team structure was revealed last week in an article by Thomas Coughlan, and this indicated where the Greens’ focus likely lies. The campaign committee will be “structured to achieve a Te Tiriti partnership model,” with emphasis on Maori representation and engagement. That is not inherently problematic, but it signals that identity and indigenous rights remain central to the campaign framing, rather than a relentless focus on economic justice and environmental defence.
Unsurprisingly, their polling keeps dropping. My first column in this series on the party pointed to poll results going downwards, including the latest 1News poll putting them on just 7%. One Green Party staffer emailed me to suggest that these poor polls are just a blip. But since then, the latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia survey had the Greens at 7.7%, down over three points, and the RNZ-Reid Research poll put them at 9.6%, down 1.3 percentage points.
Meanwhile, in comparable countries green parties are blooming: the Australian Greens are polling around 13%, the German Greens are around 11-12%, the Dutch Greens recently won 12.8%, and the UK Green Party is about 16% (just behind the Labour Party).
WHAT A POPULIST PIVOT WOULD REQUIRE
So what would it actually take for the Greens to capture the “Broken New Zealand” zeitgeist? The recipe isn’t complicated, but it requires a discipline the party hasn’t shown for many years.
First, single-issue focus. Make economic justice the overwhelming priority. Every press release, every question time, every social media post should hammer corporate profiteering, rent gouging, bank profits. The Greens’ problem has always been trying to be everything to everyone. Mamdani didn’t win by releasing forty-page policy documents on fifteen different topics. He picked his fights and stuck to them.
Second, name villains. Follow Winston Peters’ playbook, ironically enough. Call out Foodstuffs and Woolworths by name when grocery prices spike. Call out the Big Four banks when they report record profits while families struggle with mortgages. Call out Contact and Genesis when power bills soar. Voters don’t mobilise around “policy settings”, they mobilise around who is doing this to us. The Greens should highlight the lobbyists, political donations, and oligarchy that now underpin the political process.
Third, simplify policies. Don’t release fifty-page fiscal strategies. Release three-point plans: “Tax the wealthy. Break up monopolies. Free GP visits.” Repeat them endlessly until everyone knows them by heart. “Make Polluters Pay” should be a concrete demand, not a slogan on a policy document nobody reads. Under James Shaw’s leadership, the Greens used to have an ongoing list for staff of the three big issues that the public should know the party is focused on. That disappeared with Shaw.
Fourth, make it performative. Swarbrick talks about “face-to-face conversations” as the alternative to social media. Fine. Then campaign at supermarkets about prices. Protest outside power company offices about bills. Show up at bank headquarters when they announce dividends. Make economic populism visible, not just rhetorical.
Fifth, stop taking Winston’s bait. When Peters taunts them about pronouns and culture wars, don’t engage. Stay relentlessly on-message about the cost of living. Every minute spent fulminating over his provocations is a minute not spent connecting with voters who just want to know how they’ll pay the rent.
Sixth, embrace anti-establishment energy. For years, the Greens have positioned themselves as the responsible, competent partner of Labour, being keen to join government, and eager to demonstrate they can manage the machinery of state. But in an era of declining trust in institutions, that positioning is a liability. The Greens should instead run as the party against the political establishment, including the Labour Party.
They should say it plainly: “Labour has had its chance. They knew about supermarket oligopolies, bank profiteering, power company excess, the housing crisis, the climate emergency. They managed these problems incrementally and failed. We will fight the system that causes them.” Of course, the Greens spent years positioning themselves as Labour’s responsible coalition partner (2017–2023), and that instinct dies hard. There is a lingering temptation to moderate messaging, to avoid “scaring the horses,” to maintain the appearance of reasonableness and competence. But this strategy is self-defeating.
Above all, the tone needs to shift. Replace “we have a policy” vibes with “we’re done letting powerful interests rig the system” vibes. Less technocratic, more combative. Make the Greens sound like the party of confrontation with vested interests, not just compassion for victims.
Will the Greens do any of this? The honest answer is probably not. It would require ruthlessness in message management that the party no longer has. It would mean talking less about some cherished issues to hammer home a core economic theme. For a party that sees every issue as interconnected, that kind of focus feels like betrayal. But politics is about choices, and the Greens keep refusing to make them.
What’s more, as I suggested in my last column on the party, the caucus and the activist base have become more middle class, and most of them have no instinctual feel for the class politics or leftwing populism required to follow the lessons of Mamdani or Polanski. It simply might not be in the DNA of the Greens to become truly anti-Establishment.
THE STAKES
Climate policy is in retreat in New Zealand, while the planet burns. The Emissions Trading Scheme has effectively collapsed. More than ever, New Zealand needs leadership on climate change and what to do about. On this issue, here’s what Danyl McLauchlan writes about in the latest Listener:
“The Ministry for the Environment estimates we’ll miss our 2030 Paris commitment by about 84 million tonnes – roughly a year’s emissions. We can offset this by buying carbon credits, and the estimates for this fall between $3 billion and $30b, depending on the vagaries of a very uncertain market. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has indicated she does not have billions to spare on planting forests in Peru or Ghana… but it is hard to imagine a Labour-Green government finding that kind of money. Especially because it would involve a gigantic subsidy of the agribusiness sector, our largest source of emissions by far. The Ardern government bent over backwards to keep farming out of the emissions trading scheme during its time in office, while National would rather see the entire country vanish beneath the waves than make the sector pay for its own pollution. So what is New Zealand’s climate strategy? At the moment it is to pretend to fulfil our obligations while doing nothing to deliver on them.”
The Greens seem to be missing in action on this crucial debate. Likewise, the Government’s fast-track legislation has overridden environmental protections with minimal scrutiny. Someone should be channelling public anger at this state of affairs into a compelling political movement. Instead, the Greens offer a scatter of causes while their signature issue goes undefended.
Unless the Greens reconnect with everyday struggles and reclaim their environmental mission through an economic lens, they will remain a minor chorus in New Zealand politics, not the transformative force they aspire to be. The country needs them to be better than this.
New Zealand needs a strong voice against corporate excess and climate negligence. The “Broken New Zealand” mood is real: anti-elitist, anti-corporate, impatient for change. If the Greens don’t capture it, others will, and possibly from the right. Nature abhors a political vacuum.
The Greens risk missing the moment to position themselves as the real anti-establishment voice of Broken New Zealand. Whether they recognise that before November remains to be seen.
Dr Bryce Edwards is Director of the Democracy Project. This article was first published by the Democracy Project.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated.