Grave Issues For The Greens

Greens co-leader (male) contenders: Russel Norman and Nandor Tanczos

ROD DONALD’S grave, on Bank’s Peninsula, overlooks a little valley of extraordinary beauty. Directed to the tiny cemetery a couple of years back by a friend, I sat there for a long time, looking down on the valley and recalling the man whose resting-place this was.

I thought about his funeral service in Christchurch Cathedral, and the way the chords of Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond echoed among the stone and stained glass. I remembered, too, the stricken features of Helen Clark as she followed his plain pine coffin down the cathedral aisle and out into the blazing Canterbury sunshine.

People still insist that Rod died of a broken heart. If so, it was Clark who broke it.

And Labour has paid a high price for betraying the Greens and their ebullient co-leader. Had Clark remained staunch and honoured the relationship which Donald, more than any of his companions, had worked so hard to build with her party, many of the mistakes which ultimately brought her government to grief might have been avoided.

Winston Peters would never have brought a Labour-Green Government down – not if it meant installing a Don Brash-led National Government. A much less bumpy ride than the one she was ultimately required to endure awaited Clark, if only she’d been brave enough to keep NZ First’s parliamentary contingent safely ensconced on the cross benches, and their leader mercifully unencumbered by ministerial baubles, big-donor bangles and industry lobbyists’ beads.

But let’s not pursue that counterfactual history too far. Suffice to say that Labour’s treachery and Donald’s death opened up a deep chasm of mistrust between the Greens and their erstwhile Labour allies. Somehow, the party’s surviving co-leader, the redoubtable Jeanette Fitzsimons, managed to string a rickety bridge across the gap (meeting Clark more than half-way on climate change) but, with both sides unwilling to trust too much weight to this fragile structure, inter-party relations remained strained. By 2008, the best the Greens could say about Labour was that it was marginally more environment-friendly than National.

The party’s new co-leader, Russel Norman, who’d cut his rhetorical teeth by calling Labour and National "Mother Coke and Father Pepsi", found even this minimal concession to Labour’s virtues onerous. Small wonder, then, that in the aftermath of National’s stunning election victory, and with Fitzsimons announcing her retirement as co-leader, Norman seized his chance to re-position the Greens as a party that could swing both ways.

Norman’s decision to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Party-led Government helped to close the widening gap between the left faction of the Greens (in which he, along with Sue Bradford, Keith Locke and Catherine Delahunty, have long been included) and the more "organic" grouping represented by his principal rival for the co-leadership position, Nandor Tanczos.

On 12 January, Tanczos had used his new Waikato Times column to set out the case for change:

"It is the Green Party's job to influence governments on the issues that count [but] why would National listen to them? The Greens made it very clear in the election campaign that they were not interested in talking to National.

"I thought at the time that it was an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, to fasten your lifeboat to a sinking ship. Greens do best when there is an outgoing Labour Government, but this election the results were disappointing. The Green Party might well have won their biggest caucus yet, if they had been prepared to stop licking Labour's hand."

The obvious danger in such a strategy is that once they are seen licking National’s hand, the Greens risk losing their caucus altogether. That risk is heightened if the Right, cornered by vast exogenous crises, like a global recession or an influenza pandemic, reverts to type and starts slashing and burning its way through political territory dear to Green hearts.

Up ‘til now, the Greens’ "brand" has remained unsullied - global events and trends bearing-out their boast that they are neither left nor right – but in front. Their enemies have sneered at their "always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride" political history, but to their supporters this unwillingness to compromise on core principles goes to the heart of what it means to be green.

As the political journalist (and former Greens media-man) Gordon Campbell recently noted on the Scoop website:

"The Greens will have only themselves to blame if they do muddy their brand. What can look like smart, hard-nosed politics for other parties can cause lasting damage to a party that has based its identity on a reputation for virtue. Virtue-based parties just can’t afford to fool around. One has only to look across the Tasman at the terrible fate of the Australian Democrats who - in a spirit of realpolitik collaboration with the Howard government – supported a GST tax that the party rank and file opposed, to see what havoc a dose of political horse trading can do to a party that markets itself as being above such things."

In this respect, the speed with which John Key has turned his hand from trading currencies to trading horseflesh must be worrying politicians across the spectrum. Accused of trading horses with Social Credit over the Clyde Dam enabling legislation back in 1982, Rob Muldoon famously replied: "Horse trading? Heh! I’ve still got all my horses." But Key’s performances to date outshine even the old master’s. It takes a rare talent to go into negotiations with no horses, and come out leading a whole string. Bamboozling the Maori Party was one thing. But repeating the same trick with the Greens? Scary!

Whether they recognise it or not, by signing the Memorandum of Understanding with National, the Greens have set themselves upon the same downward path as the Progressives, NZ First and United Future. If someone doesn’t rescue them – and soon – they, too, will degenerate into a demographically marginal, politically opportunistic "niche" party, with no higher aspiration than to become an adjunct (or ornament) to someone else’s government.

That’s exactly where the German and Irish Greens now find themselves. But it’s certainly not where Tanczos, temporarily parked (like his new house-bus) in the political wop-wops, wants New Zealand’s Greens to end up. For the moment, however, the wilderness has its attractions. Sometimes, to win something back, you first have to give it away.

Rod Donald, meanwhile, must be tossing and turning in his picturesque grave.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday 7 May 2009.