When she was recruited by the Greens in 2016, Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick probably never imagined that when she was finally promoted to co-leader it would mean a very public baptism in disaster management. Now having achieved her longstanding ambition to climb to the pinnacle of Green politics, her most immediate challenge has been to stamp out the smouldering fires among the ruins of the party and to somehow restore its battered reputation as its annus horribilis grinds on.
This year, the party’s ranks have been seriously depleted or damaged through death, defection and disgraceful behaviour.
In February, Efeso Collins, regarded as a future leader, died. In March, James Shaw — widely seen as the most reasonable of the Green MPs and certainly the most acceptable to the wider electorate — stepped down as co-leader, enabling Swarbrick’s ascension. In May, Julie Ann Genter crossed the floor of Parliament to shout in frustration at National’s Associate transport minister Matt Doocey, for which she has been referred to the Privileges Committee. In June, former justice spokesperson and party darling Golriz Ghahraman was sentenced in the Auckland District Court for stealing very expensive clothing from boutique stores.
And, of course, the weeping wound that is the Darleen Tana saga continues to suppurate as she took up residence this week at the back of Parliament as an independent MP after resigning from the Greens, despite clear instructions by Swarbrick to leave the premises.
A headline in May for TVNZ’s Q&A hosted by Jack Tame summed up the problems facing the new co-leader — presumably in order of public interest: “Chlöe Swarbrick on Julie Anne Genter, Darleen Tana, and methane targets.”
Nevertheless, for the intensely ambitious Swarbrick, there are silver linings. With her co-leader Marama Davidson absent while she is treated for breast cancer, Swarbrick has been given the opportunity to deal single-handedly with the Tana saga, which revolves around allegations of migrant worker exploitation at her family’s e-bike business. That has gifted Swarbrick valuable media exposure, in which she has exhibited barely concealed fury mixed with the usual pieties about caring for “the planet and people”. She has also expressed her personal disappointment in someone she says she “loved” while assuring voters that none of the options for removing Tana will be ruled out. In short, repeated displays of an iron fist in a thin velveteen glove.
And Swarbrick’s firm hand on the party’s tiller during her co-leader’s absence from Parliament will leave little doubt about who will be seen as first amongst equals when Davidson returns, although her pre-eminence has been evident for some time.
Long before she became co-leader, she featured in preferred prime minister polls. And in the 1 News Verian poll released in late June she was at six per cent — ahead of Winston Peters and David Seymour, both on four per cent.
However, by any assessment, the party Swarbrick has come to rule is in spectacular disarray. Although it is still riding relatively high in the polls — and regularly higher than its election result of 11.6 per cent — a chunk of that support will undoubtedly peel away once Labour rolls Chris Hipkins and replaces him with someone less tainted by a deep connection to the Ardern years.
The more pertinent question perhaps is how durable the Greens’ electoral appeal will be in the years ahead. The unfortunate truth for Swarbrick is that she has assumed the mantle of co-leader when some of the party’s most cherished ideological stances — and ones she enthusiastically promotes — are looking decidedly ropey.
Even popular political parties can wear out their welcome as the public’s preoccupations change. Social Credit, which was dedicated to monetary reform, has long slipped into political obscurity. Yet it was New Zealand’s third party from the 1950s to the 1980s; at 1981’s general election, it reaped 20.55 per cent of the vote.
The issue Swarbrick has elected to pursue most energetically is what she refers to variously as the “climate crisis” and the “climate emergency” — upgraded over recent years from the more anodyne “climate change”. Now in some quarters it is being described as “global boiling”, which is a significant advance on the earlier “global warming”.
The ramping-up of emotive rhetoric has been in inverse proportion to the electorate’s diminishing appetite for more climate doomsterism. Whatever the merits of the science behind the apocalyptic predictions, the Greens face a similar problem to any religion or cult proclaiming an imminent Armageddon. What to do when prophecy fails?
By being part of the global climate change lobby that has been preaching doom from the early 1970s, the Greens are widely seen as crying wolf far too often. Repeatedly rescheduling global disaster and warning of “tipping points” wears every bit as thin as endless promises of Christ’s Second Coming and the apocalypse.
Although the mainstream media prefers to hide the fact, scepticism about anthropogenic climate change is widespread. Social media shows that there are plenty of people who remain unconvinced that every devastating storm or flood is a result of global warming or that replacing their always-raring-to-go fossil-fuelled car with a slow-to-charge EV will make a jot of difference to the climate.
After the devastation wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle and floods early last year, the public mood has swung sharply away from the importance of reducing emissions and towards mitigating the effects of severe weather. Swarbrick’s repeated accusations that emissions are rising under Luxon’s coalition government are beginning to sound simply quaint — and as plaintive as the heading for a recent column by the NZ Herald’s Simon Wilson: “From buildings to bicycles to oil and gas, why do we ignore the climate crisis?”
The Greens have also undoubtedly exhausted the public’s patience with their quixotic campaign to lace New Zealand’s cities with expensive cycle lanes on which cyclists are so often noticeably absent that the dedicated strips have become a byword for the triumph of eco-romaticism over human nature. Even the increased availability of e-bikes — touted as having the ability to flatten hills — has failed to convince many drivers they should expose themselves to the country’s undulating terrain or the vagaries of the weather. Traffic congestion is obviously a price most are willing to pay for convenience, even as they grumble about it.
Transgender ideology — an issue dear to the Greens’ hearts — is swiftly waning in public acceptability too. The tide has turned sharply after the release of the Cass Review in April that heavily criticised the use of puberty blockers, along with the leaked WPATH Files a month earlier, which exposed a shocking lack of ethics and medical integrity among proponents of gender transitioning.
The idea that men can become women by merely wishing to “transition” between the two sexes will increasingly be seen as a form of mental derangement and prescribing puberty blockers a form of child abuse. It is fast becoming an issue that will severely harm any party that continues to champion one of the West’s most pernicious medical experiments.
Senior Green MPs, of course, enthusiastically supported the mobbing of middle-aged women last year in Auckland’s Albert Park before female rights activist Posie Parker and others even had a chance to speak — and Swarbrick played a leading role in reinterpreting the event as one of “love and affirmation”, despite images of the violence meted out by trans activists going viral.
In fact, the Greens’ policies resemble an incoherent grab-bag of contemporary “social justice” issues, including “honouring te Tiriti” and implicitly calling for the destruction of Israel, even while the party condemns “hate speech”.
The Greens’ contradictions were no more apparent than when Ghahraman appeared in court in late June for sentencing for theft. With her shoulders draped in a keffiyeh in support of the Palestinians, she was in a perverse way carrying water for the Iranian regime that arms, trains and funds Hamas — a regime she claims to despise and from which her family fled to New Zealand when she was a child.
Her thefts involved expensive items of clothing, some worth thousands of dollars each. For a party that casts itself as champions of the poor and fierce critics of inequality, its representatives seem to have awfully expensive tastes. And after an earlier court hearing, she was ushered into an enormous, three-litre, diesel-powered, double-cab ute, and not the modest, environmentally sound EV you might have expected to see as a Greens getaway vehicle.
That is what poses the biggest existential threat to the Greens: the growing perception they are — despite their lofty rhetoric about principles and morals — first-class hypocrites.
It doesn’t go unnoticed that they are intent on thwarting mining in New Zealand while driving vehicles that require vast mines to build. And that they tap out their communiques to the faithful on computers and other electronic devices that require metals such as gold, antimony and lithium to function.
It is clear they are happy for New Zealand to outsource oil and gas production to other nations with lower environmental and labour standards than us, even if it means importing vast quantities of Indonesian coal to help charge the EVs they want everyone to adopt.
Perhaps it is their overwhelming self-righteousness that makes them so often blind to their hypocrisy. In June, Green MPs Julie Anne Genter and Tamatha Paul faced a storm of criticism after their staff asked to use off-street parking belonging to nearby retailers for a party-related event held at their new Wellington electorate office. Green-led cycleway initiatives had removed on-street parking on the street.
An OIA request showed that Paul had raised the issue of a lack of short-term parking near the electorate office with a city councillor at the Greens’ office opening party in April. Yet, in 2021, as a city councillor herself, Paul had enthusiastically promoted a $226 million Wellington cycling network.
And now a new list MP who is no longer a member of the party seems to feel no more obligation to leave Parliament than list MP Elizabeth Kerekere did last year when she resigned after being accused of bullying colleagues and staff.
Swarbrick has, of course, left open the possibility of using the “waka-jumping” legislation to evict Darleen Tana from Parliament, despite the Greens being deeply opposed to it in principle.
It doesn’t really matter, however, whether the Greens decide to use the law’s provisions or not. The fact Swarbrick is even willing to contemplate that course of action as a way to rid herself of the rogue MP shows her principles to be entirely flexible — aptly summed up by Groucho Marx’s immortal line: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.”
Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore. This article was first published at The Platform