The Post: The Greens find a new target that isn’t one of their own

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Watching the Green Party’s series of self-inflicted scandals unfold this year, I’ve often been reminded of a shoot-out scene from Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, in which one gangster remarks, “I don’t f...ing believe this! Can everyone stop getting shot?”

But even if it sometimes looked like their MPs were, in fact, determined to get shot as often as possible, the party has closed out the year in respectable fashion. Most notably, it released last Sunday an alternative emissions reduction plan that would triple the pace of our climate change response.

The document, though light on details, is stuffed full of big, interconnected ideas. A clean power payment to cover the upfront costs of rooftop solar panels is matched with a Future Workforce Agency to train a new generation of installers, all funded by a turbocharged emissions trading scheme.

Where National’s relatively feeble plan would take 17 megatons of carbon out of the atmosphere early next decade, the Green version, its modelling suggests, would remove 48 megatons.

Politically, the plan serves multiple purposes. The party has been accused of being “missing” in environmental debates this year, and even though party insiders disagree, they concede it’s useful to have a heavyweight intervention to counter that claim.

The plan signals an intent to get on the front foot, to consign the annus horribilis to history, to be known once more for policies not personalities. It also foreshadows a key strategic focus: the idea that the environment is, as the document states, “a fundamentally economic problem”.

The Greens have always struggled with the tension between honouring radical roots and appearing fit to govern, and the current strategic focus can be read both ways. On the one hand, it signals a desire to put the environment – for too long regarded merely as an extractable resource – at the heart of economics.

On the other hand, it accepts the reality that while climate change is not, alas, a public priority, the economy absolutely is. This positions the Greens well for the run-up to next year’s Budget.

Getting heard, though, will still be hard. There has been heated debate about whether this year’s scandals – most obviously the Darleen Tana catastrophe – have harmed the party’s polling.

One could argue that they haven’t: the Greens’ 2023 election-night tally of 11.6% has, by my calculations, dipped only imperceptibly, sitting around 11% in the last five polls. But the party has, historically, profited from moments of Labour weakness, and given the larger party’s struggles, the Greens should probably be several points higher.

Whereas the party’s base support once appeared perilously close to MMP’s 5% threshold, it is now more like 8-9%, insiders suggest, with a similar number seriously contemplating going Green. It surely helps that the party has proved it can cope with the rigours of government – albeit, critics allege, at the expense of its radicalism.

This year’s polling sensation, though, is Te Pāti Māori, riding a wave of hīkoi energy to hit 6%, twice its 2023 election tally. Labour is also up slightly.

So although the public mood is shifting on issues dear to the Greens’ heart, including te Tiriti justice and tax, the danger – from the party’s viewpoint – is that it may not be the beneficiary.

But while grassroots members may see things differently, there is no immediate prospect of a radical change of direction. The emissions reduction plan may attack capitalism as “an insatiable, unsustainable economic system”, but the solutions it envisages, though supportive of an enlarged state, are hardly anti-capitalist.

Nor does the party plan to microscopically target sections of the electorate, in the way that – for instance – Donald Trump focused on disaffected young men who listen to podcasts.

Green MPs are, admittedly, intensifying their outreach to marginalised non-voters – a more useful task, from the left’s overall viewpoint, than poaching votes from Labour – but such schemes have been tried before with limited success.

At least three big challenges loom for 2025. One is how to accommodate the ongoing absence of co-leader Marama Davidson, still battling cancer, and address the resultant strain on Chlöe Swarbrick.

The second is the party’s sense of being placed constantly on the back foot by the coalition’s blitzkrieg approach to governing, which creates endless policy announcements that can’t be ignored but which nevertheless distract from the task of shaping a proactive Green agenda.

The final challenge is perhaps the biggest: getting cut-through. The Greens have eschewed the David Seymour approach of dominating the news by picking high-profile fights with whoever is deemed the enemy of the day, be it “woke” food providers, Māori activists or Tusiata Avia.

Fair enough, perhaps – but with a diminished media struggling to digest complex policy, this stance raises the risk of being ignored. To adapt an old adage: if the Green Party holds a press conference in a forest, and no-one is around to hear them, do they even make a sound?