There has been a lot of conjecture recently on the possibility of no friends National creating a puppet party like ACT so that it has friends. Except this one would try and create warm obligation free fuzzies about the environment. Although as Idiot Savant puts it in his particularly direct way the party would be a farce:
[I]f they do, then its a clear signal that the party isn’t really green. Because National’s policies of supporting the dairy, oil and trucking industries, sucking the rivers dry, and dragging their feet on climate change in the name of “balance” with economic growth are inherently anti-environment, and any environmentally-minded voter can see that.
Which makes their “BlueGreen” astroturf idea laughable – the only people it convinces are people who don’t understand environmental issues at all. But like Colin Craig, Kim Dotcom and Gareth Morgan, they probably think they can simply throw money at the problem and buy the votes they need, with a fallback of hoping to buy enough votes away from the actual Green Party to drive them out of Parliament – a deeply undemocratic goal. But unlike National, I think environmentally-minded voters are smart enough not to fall for it.
This is nothing new. The Blue Greens have been part of National for a while and have failed because National’s environmental credentials are so poor.
Likely leader Vernon Tava says that it is not an astroturf exercise and has not spoken to any National MPs about it. Not even his good friend Erica Stanford. I am sure that if something happened to her career he would not want National to do an ACT Epsom type deal. And of course he has not spoken to her or any other National MP about this. Of course not. Right wing political activists never chat about such things like how to restore National to its divinely mandated role.
In this Radio New Zealand interview he said that when he challenged the Green’s leadership in 2015 he asked the question if the Greens were a left wing party.
Yep he was surprised that the party of Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons and Sue Bradford cared so much about poor people. And would not contemplate supporting National.
Bridges thinks the party is a good idea because it is not fair that the Environmental Party has been hijacked by environmentalists. From Radio New Zealand:
But he said he agreed with Mr Tava that it was not fair any one party should have a monopoly on environmental concerns in New Zealand.
“At the moment you have a Green Party that very much is to the left of Labour, it will only go with Labour, there will be a group of New Zealanders there … who say ‘well actually, they’re not representing me’.”
Mr Bridges said the party would be a potentially valuable addition but it would need to be organic and to drive itself.
Mr Bridges said he has heard from New Zealanders about “the tragedy of a Green Party in name, but is to the left of Labour and is not able to get the wins to the environment that would be there were they to sit in the middle”.
Mr Bridges said it was very early days in regards to such a new environmental party and at this stage nothing was either on or off the table.
National has talked about this for a while. As pointed out by Idiot Savant its major problem is that its record on the environment is so appalling.
What can be the motiovation?
Presuming the party is launched the various possibilities are:
National is really hurting over the fact that it is the “biggest” party and is not in Government thanks to those pesky smaller parties whose votes should not count. I suspect that driving the Greens to under 5% is a big part of National’s thinking.
I suspect this is a story that will develop over the next few months.
Twitter has some of the best analysis:
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