The Greens: how will they get through their present discontents?

List MP Darleen Tana is absent from the Green Party website. Julie Anne Genter faces a Privileges Committee hearing.

What’s up with the Green Party, then?

Green MPs were busy last week – no, not just with internal inquiries, but with a few public statements.

Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick got stuck in to finance minister Nicola Willis’s pre-Budget speech, accusing the government of being “intent on growing inequality”. For example, they’re ignoring advice in favour of implementing a capital-gains tax.

Ricardo Menéndez March attacked the policy to introduce obligatory work seminars for job-seeking beneficiaries. He said there’s no evidence that they make any difference. “Poverty is a political choice”, the Greens argue, and the present government is choosing the wealthy over the poor.

There was also a constructive note, however. The Greens are getting behind a motion to continue cross-party work on climate adaptation in the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

Their week’s agenda weighed more on the socialist than the environmentalist scale, but the Greens are doing the mahi despite the party’s rocky start to the year: the devastating loss of Efeso Collins, and three of their MPs involved in high-viz scandals.

List MP Darleen Tana was suspended in mid-March. She doesn’t feature on the party’s “Meet the Green MPs” webpage, but the Parliament website shows she has six party spokesperson roles. Julie Anne Genter has been referred to the Privileges Committee. Former MP Golriz Ghahraman pleaded guilty to charges of theft.

And there’s been a change in co-leadership following James Shaw’s departure, succeeded by Chloe Swarbrick, thus securing the party’s left-wing credentials.

What are the prospects now for the Green Party?

The 2023 election gave the Greens their best results ever: 11.6 percent party vote and winning three electorate seats, bringing 15 members into the House. (Only 14 players were on the field at the time of writing. One was sin-binned.)

For comparison, their next-best party-vote results were 11.06 percent in 2011 and 10.7 percent in 2014. Those two elections saw Labour at its lowest, so it’s not rocket science to conclude that the Greens do relatively well when Labour does poorly.

Furthermore, Green electoral performance wasn’t harmed by supporting Labour in office since 2017, despite the compromises they made. The Greens’ party vote rose in the two subsequent elections. This is contrary to the normal pattern where minor parties suffer electorally after supporting larger ones in government, as NZ First can attest.

Can you even remember the United First Party? They supported both Labour and National at different times, and then they gradually disappeared.

The Green Party’s success since the 1999 election can be put down to a distinctive values-driven policy agenda and a loyal core of supporters who have nowhere else to place their votes if they feel disgruntled. It looks unlikely now that the Greens could fall below the five-percent threshold.

But the party has been rocked by scandals: MPs have been accused of misconduct including bullying and the exploitation of migrant labour. This has eroded the party’s self-declared reputation for high ethical standards.

The damage is reflected in recent opinion-poll results. The Greens had been doing well early in the year, often above their 2023 election result, and as high as 14 percent. Two recent polls suggest a decline, with the Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll (5–7 May) putting them on 10.2 percent. But this may not represent a longer-term trend.

Green supporters needn’t panic. There’s still further to go on Darleen Tana’s previous business activities and a Privileges Committee hearing on Julie Anne Genter’s misconduct in the debating chamber. But that should all be forgotten by the time of the next election – if the party learns some lessons.

Here the conservatives have something to show them. Conservatives in the tradition of the British MP Edmund Burke (1729–97) accept that there’s a dark side to state power and social hierarchy, and that humans are inherently imperfect creatures. It’s all part of Nature, so they don’t ask too many questions. Those with Rousseauian ideals for making the world better are going to get themselves and others into a mess – as indeed many of them did. Burke would understand why the idealistic Green Party finds itself fighting fires over the hypocritical misconduct of its own members.

On the other hand, religious conservative politicians are prone to sex scandals, and there’s been worse behaviour on display recently in the UK’s House of Commons than Ms Genter’s outburst – just to put things into perspective.

Incidentally, Burke was one of the earliest to recognise the importance of preserving what we have for future generations. Green MPs won’t have much time for him, even so. But they need to improve candidate background-checks and avoid confirmation bias. And, if Ms Swarbrick’s stated aspiration for the Greens to become the leading party of the left is to be taken seriously, policy proposals would need to go neither too far nor too fast for a middle-of-the-road constituency.

In this imperfect world, politics is the art of compromise. The Greens made a few frustrating compromises while Labour were in power. It’s unlikely that their membership would let them go so far as to support a National-led government, however, especially as the ideological gap between the two is getting even wider. That could mean a longer spell for the Greens on the opposition benches, being the critic and conscience of parliament, while not achieving much. But they’ll keep well above the five percent threshold.