On one level, Chris Hipkins taking the scalpel to Green priorities and the Greens crying foul can grow the left-leaning bloc. Whether it can last the distance is another matter.
If John Key was the smiling assassin, Chris Hipkins is the affable executioner. It’s not that he was gleeful, exactly, in laying out round two of policy slaughter, but can you imagine a more, well, congenial and phlegmatic administration of the guillotine?
So agreeable, perhaps, was Hipkins’ countenance that the Green co-leaders were dazzled through the news that he was doing away with so many of the initiatives and programmes they had proffered and championed.
Cash for clunkers, the car lease scheme, alcohol reform, the voting age, the container refund scheme, most road speed restrictions. “We had a really positive conversation,” said Hipkins on Monday of the meeting in which he discussed – or maybe provided notice of, is a better way to put it – the latest slicing of the cost of living loaf.
The Green leadership agreed with that “positive” characterisation, at least at first. As the hours wore on, as MPs expressed their anger, the mood changed, and by yesterday lunchtime, on the way into the house, James Shaw was upbraiding the prime minister for “breaching longstanding practice” by failing to consult properly on changes to climate-related policy.
It’s tempting to read the whole episode as a charade – an MMP manoeuvre in which Labour throws all its energy at the median vote, eschewing, abandoning even, climate priorities in the full knowledge that the Greens will soak up any disenchanted voters. After all, if Labour nibbles vote share out of National and the Greens nibble vote share out of Labour, doesn’t the Labour-Green overall slice of the pie, upon which a third Labour-led term depends, grow?
On that front, this week’s Kantar/1News appears to say: carry on. Our proportional system, the aberration of the last election notwithstanding, is designed to oblige parties to reach accommodations. And on the bloc front, the red-green trajectory is striking.
The average across the most recently publicly released polls, meanwhile, has Labour edging ahead of National. Much of that may be a result of the change in PM, the crisis response and the resulting oxygen deprivation for the opposition. It is also, unmistakably, a reflection of Hipkins meeting the mood.
It was almost as if, on Monday afternoon, that genial guillotine operator, a pragmatically radical minimalist called Chippy, was stage-whispering at the Greens, urging them to stop being so dutiful and get mad as hell. “We recognise we’re coming into an election. There will be areas, and increasing numbers of areas, where we will agree to disagree,” he said. Of their meeting: “They can share their own reactions to the announcement that I’ve made today, and I’m sure that they will.”
No doubt there is an element of unstated complicity in that calculus. But however much Hipkins’ focus is an election, there are yet many months to go. There is an emissions budget to recalibrate and a budget proper to deliver, and if recent years are a guide, Labour won’t give many seconds’ thought to the wellbeing of the Green Party.
Many Green MPs are furious about the Monday announcements – especially coming on top of the extension of the cut in fuel tax. The most compelling of the objections comes in response to what seemed almost a footnote in the purge: the deferral of the container refund scheme. Eugenie Sage, who is leaving parliament at the next election, was quietly furious in a social media post, condemning a “rubbish” decision and bemoaning the wasted time of officials. The programme – essentially about getting a refund on drink bottles – was hardly something that needed scrapping in the bread and butter mission to save dollars and, you know, “bandwidth”.
The Green co-leaders were swarmed by a thicker than usual scrum of reporters on the tiles at parliament yesterday. Asked whether he’d consider sending “a strong message” by walking away from the cooperation agreement with Labour, James Shaw said: “Well, it might send a strong message but it doesn’t actually achieve anything. You don’t get to influence anything by walking away.”
There are members of the Greens, including in the caucus, who feel differently – who would like to hear it shouted out loud that cooperation is not guaranteed. In the internal Green "theory of change" debate, some are chomping at the bit to tear strips off the Labour government. Across the aisle, meanwhile, National MPs would welcome warring among Labour and the Greens. Add Te Pāti Māori, increasingly emerging as a potential kingmager, to the mix, and it wouldn't take much to see a return of the devil-beast rhetoric.
Hipkins, meanwhile, is unshakably, uncomplicatedly – though cordially, of course – focused on October 14, staring past everything into the middle-New-Zealand distance.
In the final parliamentary debate before the last election, the then senior minister paid tribute to the Greens, who had performed the difficult task of being “partly in and partly out of the government”, and played the role “to some extent, of the conscience of the Labour Party”. Yesterday, it emerged that the Monday catch-up with Marama Davidson and James Shaw was the first since Hipkins became prime minister. But it has been a busy time, and if we’re honest, the conscience doesn’t get too much of a look-in when the body is in survival mode.
In that same 2020 speech, meanwhile, Hipkins lambasted the National opposition for focusing on what was wrong, advising, “you’ve got to give New Zealanders a reason to vote for you and for your party.” Hipkins has not forgotten about that, and the affable executioner is set upon offering something new, bold even, when budget time rolls around in May.