The polls are out and the internal revolt last month to remove James Shaw as Greens co leader hasn’t made a ripple.
Apparently being so close to Labour in Parliament would enable the Green Party to better hold Labour to account. But this year the Greens have asked just one Parliamentary question of the government. Ricardo Mendez March asked the Transport Minister what steps he was taking to ensure people have access to free, frequent, and accessible public transport. Every other party in parliament has asked more questions of Labour than the Greens. So no, not really.
Nor do they hold themselves to account.
This week, Tony Kunowski the former leader of the Values Party, said in The Listener that it is most unlikely that there are any performance indicators to show how either Shaw or Davidson are performing in their roles as ministers. “Without these, debates about their efficacy are reduced to merely trading opinions and are thus highly subjective. What mechanisms, if any, exist to hold individual members accountable for their inaction or counterproductive actions?”
Despite gaining the numbers to roll him, no one in the Greens stood to challenge him for the leadership.
One current Green Party MP came out to support him this year – Eugenie Sage: “James has ensured that there is a stable framework for action on climate change that will outlast this Government.”
So not only do they not hold Shaw to account, other than Sage they can’t bring themselves to support him either.
Shaw got more support from Labour’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and the leader of the National Party Christopher Luxon, than his own colleagues.
Obviously the attack on Shaw came from within the Greens.
Delegate Trav Mischewski said of the ousting of Shaw that “This is a membership-driven decision. This is not a handful of people who’ve gone rogue.”
His faction has been around for a while seeking to get him, and Eugenie Sage, and Chloe Swarbrick.
In May this year Gareth Hughes the ex Green MP from Dunedin, said by email to Newsroom:
It’s debatable that the trajectory has shifted and we’ll only know if that’s true looking in the rear-view mirror but it’s clear right now New Zealand isn’t doing enough to reduce emissions.”
While writing the biography of Jeanette Fitzsimmons, Gareth Hughes also wrote in The Spinoff in July 2022 about the instability of leadership within the Greens and that it was likely to remain unstable:
In its 50-year existence the party has gone from one leader to no leaders, to three co-leaders to four spokespeople before settling on the co-leader model”, with those leaders further subject to annual delegate re-appraisal.
In terms of the cold evaluation of the political performance of this term’s Green Party, previous leader Russel Norman listed the top three achievements of this government as an oil and gas exploration ban, greater investment in KiwiRail, and a cap on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.
Norman put responsibility for those moves down to, in order: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Energy Minister Megan Woods; New Zealand First; and Environment Minister David Parker. None, by his telling, because of the Greens.
RNZ discovered that former Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons wrote to James Shaw in 2018 to “explain the overwhelming anger and disappointment felt widely in the party about the decision to support the party hopping bill.”
Other previous Green Members of Parliament to come out strongly against Shaw in the last month included Sue Bradford and Catherine Delahunty.
This week, previous Greens leader Russell Norman has come out and slammed James Shaw again, accusing him of greenwashing for Labour.
People assume that the Climate Minister, especially a Green Party Climate Minister, will not perpetuate greenwashing, and will call it out, but it has not always been the case with James Shaw, and that makes it all the more insidious.”
Also this week, the party that came out hard against the government for massive growth in coal use wasn’t the Greens, but ACT with Seymour noting:
Jacinda Ardern’s “nuclear free moment” has become even more of a joke today as New Zealand has become a net importer of coal for the first time ever.”
Green Party electoral support hasn’t been altered by the leadership challenge. Nor are the Greens holding the government to account. Nor are they holding each other to account. No new processes have been formed for accountability. Green criticism of the government remains as weak as ever.
Those who simply want to destabilise the Green Party from within have done so – and have the mechanisms to do so each year.
As Tony Kunowski says it, the Green Party members who thwarted the immediate re-election of James Shaw have achieved only the most Pyrrhic of victories.
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