The dead rat has been swallowed with unanimous support to use the party-hopping rule, explains Stewart Sowman-Lund in this extract from The Bulletin.

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Tana’s time in parliament to end

Green Party delegates have voted to invoke the party-hopping rule against one of its former MPs with the intention of booting them out of parliament. Darleen Tana was elected as a Green list MP at last year’s election, though has spent about as much time out of parliament as she has in it. In March this year, a Stuff investigation by Steve Kilgallon revealed allegations of migrant exploitation against a business owned by Tana’s husband. Tana was stood down by her party and a lengthy independent investigation ultimately concluded that Tana herself was likely to have had knowledge of the claims levelled against her partner’s business. She has continued to deny this, and told Stuff’s Glenn McConnell she was devastated at the possibility of having to leave parliament. “I have done nothing wrong,” she said yesterday.

After choosing to quit the Greens after the investigation was made public, Tana has remained in parliament as an independent despite repeated urges from Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick to leave. That decision has now been made for her.

Swallowing the dead rat

The Greens met for a couple of hours last night over Zoom where the motion to try and oust Tana was backed unanimously. Those on the call included former co-leader Metiria Turei. “It’s massive,” Newstalk ZB’s political editor Jason Walls told Ryan Bridge earlier this morning. “[Turei] has been basically absent from the political landscape… Even Chlöe Swarbrick said she had no idea she would be making this contribution to the call.”

Speaking at parliament last night, Swarbrick told reporters she felt “comfortable” with how the party had gone about deciding to oust Tana. “We have done our best to act in a principled manner and to weigh everything up and come to the conclusion that we have,” she said, reported Stuff. She urged Tana, one last time, resign.

Were Tana to resign of her own accord, that would save the Greens from having to swallow a so-called “dead rat” given the party’s vocal opposition to the party-hopping rule in the past, as The Post’s Thomas Manch looked at in July. Deputy prime minister Winston Peters was quick to jump to that conclusion, posting on Twitter moments after last night’s Green meeting concluded that the party was “virtue signalling”.

On Newstalk ZB moments ago, Swarbrick told Mike Hosking she acknowledged the party’s historic opposition to the party-hopping law, but said she was “the first to admit” that people can change their minds when new evidence or complex situations are encountered.

What happens next?

In a substantive explainer of the whole Tana-Greens shemozzle published yesterday, my colleague Alice Neville explained that when exactly the independent MP has to leave parliament is at the discretion of house speaker, Gerry Brownlee. Once she has gone, the Greens will get a new MP – Benjamin Doyle, who is next on the list and has been waiting in limbo throughout this whole process. Swarbrick said she was confident that the threshold to use the party-hopping rule had been met and that Tana’s presence in parliament but not in the Green Party had “affected the proportionality of the House”.

One potential spanner is that Tana has opted to fight to the bitter end, relaunching a legal bid in the Court of Appeal earlier this week. Otago University’s Andrew Geddis told The Bulletin that even in the very unlikely scenario that Tana’s appeal was successful, it wouldn’t mean she could stay in parliament. “The two things are on different tracks. Tana’s appeal does not affect the Greens ability to use the party hopping law against her because she hasn’t asked for an injunction to stop them doing so while it is being heard,” Geddis explained.

“Once the Greens trigger the party hopping provisions (as they lawfully can do) and the speaker declares her seat vacant, then she is no longer an MP and the next on the Greens list comes into parliament. That is then the end of that, in terms of her seat.” Should the appeals court side with Tana, that could – at most – result in a finding that the Greens had acted unlawfully in how they treated her prior to her resignation from the party. “Such a finding obviously would be deeply embarrassing for the Greens. But it wouldn’t affect the issue of who gets to be an MP,” said Geddis.

Drawing a line under a rocky year

It’s welcome news for the Greens to have the Tana saga in the rearview mirror. It’s been rocky year for the Greens, though largely for reasons out of their control. Along with the claims levelled against Tana, former MP Golriz Ghahraman resigned from parliament over claims of shoplifting she later admitted to. Ghahraman is appealing that conviction at the moment. The party also lost co-leader James Shaw, who opted to leave parliament rather than spend a term in opposition, while Marama Davidson was diagnosed with breast cancer and has been on leave.

In his piece assessing the “losers” from this week’s TVNZ Verian poll, The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire noted that while the Greens have largely avoided a calamitous drop in support, they could be doing better. “The government is unabashedly cutting taxes and public sector jobs, embracing roads, oil and gas, targeting blind frogs called Freddy and flirting with culture wars. It’s hard to imagine a more fertile territory for the Greens, especially when you chuck a pedestrian Labour Party into the mix.”

On The Spinoff’s politics podcast Gone by Lunchtime, co-host Annabelle Lee-Mather believed part of that was down to Labour’s poor performance in opposition. “It’s remarkable to see the Greens have gone up despite the absolute shit show of a year that they’ve had – and I think that’s a testament to Chlöe’s leadership,” she said.