The Greens want to lead the next Govt. What does that mean?

Newsroom

4 days ago

Analysis: When Chlöe Swarbrick announced her run for co-leader last year, it was with a lofty goal: achieving 'our nation's first Green-led government'.
More than a year on, the Greens are polling about where they sat at the last election – 11 percent. It's more than respectable, given the party's 2023 election result was its best, and given Labour has jumped 7 points in the polls over the same period without eating into the Green Party's constituency.
But it's nowhere near where a party which is aiming to lead the next government needs to be. Labour, at 34 percent in recent polls, has more than triple the Greens' support.
And yet, Swarbrick and co-leader Marama Davidson both reiterated the goal of a Green-led government at the party's AGM over the weekend and began sketching out a high-level path to get there.
To start with, the co-leaders claimed the Greens are already leading the Opposition – not in number of MPs, but in setting the agenda and laying out a vision for an alternative government.
'We're not one of the two biggest parties, but if you take the Green MPs who were directly leading the interruption to this Government's Budget night legislative agenda, we stopped them from being able to get it through,' Davidson told Newsroom in an interview ahead of the AGM.
'We were the party who exposed the fiscal, massive, giant hole in the Government's Budget this year. Our Green MPs at the select committees have been the MPs responsible for the scrutiny, the surgical precision blowing apart what the ministers were reporting on.'
And, as Swarbrick told reporters on Sunday: 'This very Government, on its own Budget day, spent the majority of its time talking about the Green budget.'
Labour's slow policy processes and reluctance to commit to anything beyond a handful of planned moves for its next moment in power has left a vacuum the Greens have been more than willing to fill. While Chris Hipkins won't even say, for example, whether Labour would reinstate the oil and gas ban, the Greens have a fully fledged alternative emissions reduction plan and industrial policy to help workers transition to cleaner jobs.
But a strong role in Opposition – even a leading one – does not necessarily transmit to a leading role in Government.
If Swarbrick genuinely wants to lead the largest party in the next government, there's a long way to go for her and the Greens. It's something she readily acknowledges, telling reporters that 'this change is not going to happen overnight'.
And yet, with little over a year until the next election, it can't wait much longer if the Greens think there's a genuine chance of changing the government in 2026.
Building a base which can out-muscle Labour's is a daunting task, particularly for a party which has at times been accused of navel-gazing and insularity.
Acknowledging this, too, is a sign of a changing focus for the party. In her speech on Sunday, Swarbrick urged members at the AGM to be open to uncomfortable conversations with people who are not the party's 'natural constituencies'.
'Where do you want to invest your valuable energy and focus? On winning debates or changing our world? On being right, or building relationships? On being comfortable, or growing?' she asked, rhetorically.
'How do we get a mass of exhausted regular people, fed up with politics, to engage and organise with a bunch of earnest nerds – that's us, guys – to win power against some of the most well-funded and unscrupulous industries and political actors?'
While the party has at times in past elections focused more on boosting turnout from its core constituency, Swarbrick said she believes there is potential for the Greens to vastly expand their base by reaching beyond those traditional Green voters to people whose interests and values are aligned.
As examples, she points to coal miners on the West Coast, who she met last year, the Kinleith Mill workers who the Greens worked with on their industrial policy and perhaps the party's least likely source of new voters: farmers.
'Sure, the conversation to begin with may be a little bit frosty…. But as soon as you get through all of those presumptions that we may make about each other and we come to the core, common good that we share, the common values, you find that those coal miners just want a decent income,' Swarbrick told reporters.
'They want to be able to stay in their community and to feel a sense of pride. Those are things that we can work together on…. That is the broadest possible coalition that we could possibly find across New Zealanders.'
Of course, there's another way a future government could be labelled 'Green-led'. Davidson alluded to this on Sunday, without saying directly that it's what the Greens actually means when they talk about a Green government.
'Setting the agenda isn't just about numbers. We've got a Government right now whose tail is being wagged by two smaller parties,' she said.
The Greens won't come out and say it, for fear of handing over effective ammunition to the Government, but a more realistic vision of a Green-led government is more closely modelled on the current coalition, with Chris Hipkins swapped in for Christopher Luxon and Swarbrick and Davidson (and potentially Te Pāti Māori's co-leaders) playing the roles of David Seymour and Winston Peters: A Green tail wagging the Labour dog.