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Marama Davidson and Julie Ann Genter listen to Green Party co-leader James Shaw speak in 2017 (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Marama Davidson and Julie Ann Genter listen to Green Party co-leader James Shaw speak in 2017 (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

OPINIONPoliticsMay 25, 2020

Green Party list ranking revealed: can this group lift them over the threshold?

Marama Davidson and Julie Ann Genter listen to Green Party co-leader James Shaw speak in 2017 (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Marama Davidson and Julie Ann Genter listen to Green Party co-leader James Shaw speak in 2017 (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

Will the door be open to a new National leadership, and does the party need to flex its muscle to get noticed in the coming months?

Suddenly it’s election year again. The National Party has jettisoned Simon Bridges in favour of Todd Muller, a sensible man with a firm handshake. Over the weekend Jacinda Ardern emailed supporters, pivoting from the public service announcements to asking for campaign donations. And this morning the Greens are the first out of the gate with a party list.

The final ranking – arrived at after the initial list, picked by party delegates, was tweaked in voting by the whole membership – has the co-leaders at the top, with Chlöe Swarbrick, the next most visible of the party’s current caucus, coming in third, bumped up four places by members.

It is a very different picture to that memorable North & South front page of just over three years ago. Half of the high ranking candidates on the cover are gone. The magazine itself is gone, too. Perhaps more of a time warp, however, is the cover line: “Is the once ‘loony left’ ready to rule (and should we be afraid)?” For plenty of Greens – voters, members, and even some in caucus – the question is have they been loony, or at least loud, enough?

The full list is as follows (the plus or minus denotes any move from the April preliminary list, as reported by Stuff):

  1. Marama Davidson – Tāmaki Makaurau
  2. James Shaw – Wellington Central
  3. Chlöe Swarbrick – Auckland Central (+4)
  4. Julie Anne Genter – list only (+2)
  5. Jan Logie – Mana (-2)
  6. Eugenie Sage – Banks Peninsula (-2)
  7. Golriz Ghahraman – Mt Roskill (+1)
  8. Teanau Tuiono – Palmerston North (-3)
  9. Elizabeth Kerekere – Ikaroa Rāwhiti
  10. Ricardo Menéndez March – Maungakiekie
  11. Steve Abel – New Lynn
  12. Teall Crossen – Rongotai
  13. Scott Willis – Taieri
  14. Kyle MacDonald – Epsom
  15. Lourdes Vano – Manurewa
  16. John Ranta – Ōhāriu
  17. Lawrence Xu-Nan – Pakuranga
  18. Luke Wijohn – Mt Albert
  19. Kaya Sparke – Rotorua
  20. Jack Brazil – Dunedin
  21. James Crow – Napier
  22. Elliot Blyth
  23. Richard McIntosh – Hutt South
  24. Gerrie Ligtenberg – Rangitata

Seven sitting members take the top seven places (the eighth, Gareth Hughes, is retiring from politics at the ripe age of 38), with Teanau Tuiono dropping by three places. It’s a surprise, given how well regarded Tuiono is, but if nothing else it indicates the membership as a whole is broadly satisfied with the incumbents’ performance.

And if there is a push for an assertion of left-ness, it appears not to be in the form advocated by the Green Left group within the party, which emailed members a month ago encouraging them to boot Shaw, Sage and Swarbrick clean out of the electable places.

The Greens are currently polling around 5%, so could find as few as half a dozen MPs returned – or, worse, none at all. Their poll numbers are better, however, than New Zealand First, the other party faced with the invidious task of campaigning after being in a supporting role for a box-office government. But they know there are voters to win back: in the two elections before the last they won 11% of the vote and 14 seats.

Less than two months before the 2017 election, the party polled as high as 15%. That was following Metiria Turei’s confessional welfare speech. It was quite a time. Labour’s poor polling slumped further. Andrew Little resigned, and Jacinda Ardern’s surged. The focus on Turei’s past and the Ardern halo meant by the time the results rolled in the Greens were just relieved to be there at all.

The party’s signature achievement in parliament, as a confidence and supply partner to the Labour-NZ-First coalition, is the Zero Carbon bill. They can point, too, to the ban on new offshore gas exploration, and some wins on transport. Jan Logie has made strides for women in the justice system. Chlöe Swarbrick has been the outstanding communicator on cannabis law reform.

But they’ve had to watch, too, as the Labour-led government poured billions into an infrastructure dream that looked quite a lot like the last National government’s infrastructure dream – most of it ribboned with roads. On welfare, yes, they won a Welfare Expert Advisory Group. But the report that resulted sits for the most part in a filing cabinet somewhere, gathering dust.

The Greens’ agreement with Labour was not just about exploring and investigating and reviewing. It’s there in black and white: the deal is to “overhaul the welfare system”. It’s hard to imagine another party, by which I mean New Zealand First, being so polite about it all.

With $20 billion still to spend from the Covid-19 recovery fund, it will be interesting to see how much the Greens are willing to throw their weight around in the next couple of months. If they really wanted a dust-up they could at any point vote with National in the house and achieve a majority.

One criticism directed at the Greens is that they got less out of their negotiations with Labour than Winston Peters’ party because they had nowhere else to go. By refusing to entertain any real prospect of making a National government happen, they lose deal-making muscle. Now National has Todd Muller as leader – the man with whom James Shaw worked at great length to get cross-party support for the Zero Carbon Act. And as deputy they have Nikki Kaye, whose climate and environmental are burnished in her open opposition to her own party’s position on mining on Great Barrier Island.

The next few months will see calls, therefore, for the Greens to glance across the aisle, and thereby to win leverage for post-election negotiations. The thought will be anathema to many in the Greens’ base, and the evidence suggests only a tiny minority of Green voters countenance the idea, that but creaking the door open an inch is not beyond the bounds of possibility – after all, the Greens have had a “memorandum of understanding” with National before.

Assuming Labour manages to hold anything like its commanding post-Covid polling position, however, the Greens and New Zealand First will be campaigning as a corrective on the biggest party. New Zealand First: we are the only ones who can stop the country rolling towards socialist hellfire. The Greens: we are the only ones that can achieve a true transformative tilt. The Green Party’s case already was: we, too, want more on social justice; we, too, are frustrated at the lack of change; we can do better with more MPs. The experience of the last election will leave some MPs risk averse, but politeness can be risky, too.

(Illustration: Getty Images)
(Illustration: Getty Images)

OPINIONPoliticsMay 25, 2020

A new geopolitics will emerge from Covid-19, and NZ can be at its forefront

(Illustration: Getty Images)
(Illustration: Getty Images)

From international relations to climate change to world trade, New Zealand has an opportunity to affect the post-pandemic world for the better, writes Robert G Patman in this paper for the SSANSE Commission for a Post-Covid Future at the University of Canterbury

The Covid-19 crisis has confirmed the near breakdown of an international rules-based order that New Zealand had almost taken for granted. With the UN Security Council largely marginalised, it has highlighted the absence of an effective international crisis-management system while revealing that traditional allies like the US and UK – currently led by populist governments – can no longer be relied upon to provide international leadership in a multilateral setting.

A global pandemic is a good time for New Zealand to reset its foreign policy. By clearly rejecting the politics of populism, isolationism and protectionism, Wellington should actively champion, along with like-minded states, an international rules-based order as the most realistic approach to global challenges that do not respect borders.

Most observers agree that a post-Covid-19 world will be different, but beyond that opinion is sharply divided.

On the one hand, there are scholars and diplomats who believe the impact of the lockdown response to Covid-19 in many nations will reinvigorate nationalism at the expense of globalisation, which is seen as a project that has failed, and nation-states will strengthen their status as the world’s important and legitimate players.

According to this perspective, the emerging global order would be characterised by de-globalisation and protectionism and by intensified geopolitical competition involving the great powers like the US and China and also conflicts such as the relatively brief oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Presidents Xi and Trump, in happier times (Photo: Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images)

On the other hand, there are observers who see globalisation as a structural change powered by technologies that have made the world more interconnected.

According to this view, there will be no return to the pre-globalisation era. States confronted by transboundary challenges that they cannot control will sooner or later be obliged, out of self-interest, to seek greater international coordination and support during a period of international transition.

The international transition and the impact of Covid-19

On balance, the latter possibility appears to be more likely for several reasons.

First, disruptive events in the past such as industrialisation, the Russian revolution of 1917, the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War led to the emergence of new perspectives, daily routines, power relations and resource distribution.

Second, the response of states to the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted a clear fault line in global politics, but also some indication of  things to come.

Some of the highest death rates from Covid-19 are found in states with populist governments such as the US, UK and Brazil. These states seemed initially indifferent to the World Health Organisation warning on January 30 that Covid-19 was a “public health emergency of international concern”, appeared impervious to the public concerns of many healthcare experts, continued to emphasise a sense of national exceptionalism, and were painfully slow to react as the threat of the virus grew.

In contrast, the nation-states that have performed well in keeping Covid deaths to relatively low levels include South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and New Zealand.

What these states have in common is they acted early on the advice of an international institution, the World Health Organisation, consulted with a wide range of scientific and healthcare expertise, and were prepared to learn from each other.

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern attend a joint press conference on December 4, 2018 (Photo: Diego Opatowsk/AFP/Getty Images)

Covid-19, New Zealand, and the new geopolitics

Since the end of the Second World War, New Zealand has been a firm supporter of multilateralism and what is known as the liberal international order, which can understood as an open and rules-based system of international relations

For middle range and relatively small states like New Zealand, multilateralism offers the prospect of a voice and influence on international issues that would not otherwise be possible in a self-help state system based largely on power.

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the absence of a functioning global public health infrastructure and the lack of an effective international crisis-management system, with the UN Security Council failing to offer leadership and organisations like the WTO and IMF relegated to virtual bystanders. The pandemic has also showed that some nation-states like the UK, US and Brazil are ruled by leaders who apparently put their national pride and political interests above the safety and lives of their citizens.

New Zealand has a vital stake in defending the rules-based multilateral system against its adversaries. But New Zealand and other supporters of the liberal order must do more than that.

Another global crisis that does not respect borders is climate change. It is unfolding more slowly than Covid-19 but will have even greater consequences. The world had a chance to tackle it in the early 1990s, but blew that opportunity through decades of denial over the mounting scientific evidence underpinning it.

Much future damage caused by climate change cannot now be avoided. But wise policy-making can still limit the impact of this impending disaster – if all nation-states take the challenge seriously. As Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has remarked, “We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.”

That prospect is now emerging. For policy-makers, the key lesson of Covid-19 crisis is that effective leadership must be informed above all by science and the realities of complex interdependence within and across the borders of states.

If this is true, it will become increasingly difficult for political leadership based on nationalist posturing and slogans to continue to deny the crisis of climate change, which constitutes the biggest threat to human life on earth. And such crisis recognition is likely to have radical geopolitical consequences as well.

Two former US Secretaries of State, George Shultz and James Baker, recently observed that the winners “of the emerging clean energy race” will decisively shape world politics in the decades to come.

Moreover, if climate change finally gets the international attention that it deserves, this will be a good time for New Zealand and like-minded states to strengthen global institutions.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old who inspired the global school strikes movement (Photo: Daniel Bockwoldt/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

Renewing the international rules-based order

Two sets of reforms could bolster the international rules-based order.

First, the global security situation is not realistically going to improve until the P-5 group loses the privilege of being able to veto any UN Security Council resolution they do not like.

The brutal nine-year civil war in Syria is a sad reminder that the use of the veto has made the UNSC incapable of delivering either stability or justice to places that are in desperate need of both. The veto power of the P-5 group should be abolished or severely circumscribed.

Second, it is time for a serious international debate on how the liberal economic system can be made to work better for more people. While there may be little consensus about what a reformed liberal economic order would look like, the current situation where 26 billionaires have almost as much wealth as half the world’s population is not morally acceptable or politically sustainable.

Without such reforms, the rules-based international order will remain susceptible to the forces of authoritarianism, populism and demagoguery. To meet this challenge, New Zealand and other small and middle-level states will have to move from top-down multilateralism – where superpowers like America or China always lead – to a more bottom-up, strategic form of multilateralism that is capable of mobilizing international support for long overdue institutional reforms. Above all else, the Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated to New Zealand and many other states that neither the US or China can be relied upon to protect their vital interests.

The SSANSE (Small States and the New Security Environment) Project at the University of Canterbury is launching a Commission for a Post-Covid Future to provide contestable policy advice to the New Zealand government on options for foreign, trade and economic policy for New Zealand’s post-Covid recovery.