WHO'S AFRAID OF CHLOE SWARBRICK?

Chloe Swarbrick with economist Thomas Piketty.

According to the National Party, it would be a 'disaster' if Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick got anywhere near the finance portfolio in a Labour-led Government. And, apparently, Labour leader Chris Hopkins agrees. The irony is that most of the positions that Swarbrick is advancing today would have been regarded as mainstream before Labour drank the neoliberal Kool-Aid.


 

IN A POLITICAL culture still shaped by the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that the economy should serve society rather than society serve the economy, is apparently so dangerous that even Labour leader Chris Hipkins has been quick to rule out Green co--leader Chloe Swarbrick as finance minister in a Labour-led government. But Hipkins needs to be reminded that his party has the support of less than a third of the electorate, and he's in no position to dictate terms.

The irony is that many decades ago, before Labour drunk the neoliberal Kool-Aid, many of the positions that Chloe Swarbrick and the Green Party are advancing today would have been regarded as mainstream. They certainly would have been embraced by a social democratic Labour Party.  

Public investment, stronger regulation, progressive taxation and active government involvement in shaping economic outcomes were once accepted features of New Zealand politics. Today, after decades in which market solutions have been elevated above almost everything else, even modest departures from the neoliberal consensus can provoke outrage. According to National's Nicola Willis, such a departure would be 'disastrous' for New Zealand. This is the same Nicola Willis who has imposed an austerity agenda on the country that has placed the economic burden on the shoulders of folk least able to bear it.

What Swarbrick's critics don't say is that the majority of people actually agree with her that the country is on the wrong track, All the polls say that. If the existing economic and political model is working so brilliantly, why do so many New Zealanders feel pessimistic about the country's future? Why do younger generations increasingly believe homeownership is beyond their reach? Why are food prices, rents, and household costs consuming such a large share of incomes? And why do communities feel abandoned while wealth continues to accumulate at the top?

What makes Swarbrick significant is that she is one of the few major political figures, at least in parliamentary circles, willing to connect these problems to the larger economic structures that produce them.  But her critics respond as though she has committed a cardinal breach of good taste by even raising questions that are supposed to remain unasked.

There is also a generational element to the backlash. Swarbrick represents a generation that has not experience neoliberal reform as liberation. They have experienced it as inheritance. They have inherited the housing crisis. They have inherited declining social services.They have inherited the rising cost of living. They have inherited environmental degradation. They have inherited an economy that benefits the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

For younger New Zealanders, neoliberalism is not a success story. It is simply the system that produced the conditions they now live under. Most of them will regard the attacks on Swarbrick as ridiculous.

Chloe Swarbrick has become the subject of fearmongering because she represents something larger than herself. She represents the idea that the neoliberal economy has failed ordinary people and that governments can do more than simply manage decline. Her greatest offence is not that she has broken the rules. It is that she has continues to question who wrote them in the first place. And in a country where a majority of people increasingly believe New Zealand is heading in the wrong direction, that conversation is not only legitimate. It is long overdue.