Stroking The Cat

Dressed for Success: NewGen Green co-leaders Metiria Turei and Russel Norman are keen to present a "credible" (i.e. non-threatening) face to the "mainstream" New Zealand electorate. But, is it possible to appease the prejudices of one group of voters without offending the principles of another?

RUSSEL NORMAN’S right about one thing – the way you dress is important.

I remember very clearly my first encounter with the Dunedin Labour Party back in the early-80s. Young people were conspicuous at local party gatherings: not only by virtue of their rarity, but also because of their sartorial indifference.

Jeans, T-shirts and long-hair might have been de riguer on the university campus, but to the middle-aged and elderly working-class members of the Labour Party they constituted a cultural affront. Politics for these folk was a serious business – with a dress-code to match.

It wasn’t quite a case of wearing your Sunday-best – but it was close. Youngsters who stood up to speak looking like they’d just spent six months on a hippie commune were not kindly received.

So, my wardrobe changed. My long hair was clipped. The jeans and T-shirts were replaced with pressed pants, clean shirts and a sports jacket.

The response was dramatic. The older members knew that my change of attire was both an acknowledgement of and a concession to the rules they lived by. I had demonstrated my respect – and they reciprocated by giving me a more than fair hearing.

But that was the Labour Party in the early-1980s.

At the time of the Springbok Tour it was still the case that an influx of young people to just about any New Zealand institution – but especially the institutions of the Left – meant radicalisation.

Young people challenged the verities of New Zealand’s buttoned-down society: raising difficult and often painful questions about the role and rights of women, the treatment of Maori, and the criminalisation of homosexuality. They demanded a radical shift in New Zealand’s foreign and aid policies; they were inspired by the defiant solidarity of the militant trade unions; and they were deeply worried about the degradation of the natural environment.

Their elders, many of them deeply religious, were shocked. And even those who were sympathetic to the youngsters’ idealism could draw on a wealth of personal/political experience that argued strongly against mistaking Labour Youth’s most radical and militant ideas for the best policy options.

So, what about the Greens of 2010?

Is it still the case that "young person" equals "radical"? Do the headlines from last weekend’s Green Party Conference, such as "Red is dead as guard changes", signal the arrival of a generation with more – or less – revolutionary ambition than their parents and grandparents?

And to whom, exactly, is Russel’s suit and tie intended to show respect? The radically dishevelled "alternative" culture out of which the Values and Green parties sprang? The culture of Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons and Sue Bradford? Or is Russel’s wearing of a suit and tie both a cynical gesture of acknowledgement – or even a potentially fatal concession – to the planet-destroying corporate culture that Green parties everywhere were established to challenge and destroy?

Listening to Russel on Radio New Zealand, and reading the Green MPs’ speeches to the Conference, it struck me that this younger generation who’ve taken over the Green Party haven’t made it more radical – they’ve made it more conservative.

The inspired amateurism and anarchic flair that made the entry of the Greens into the NZ Parliament resemble (to use the author of the seminal Making of A Counter-Culture, Theodore Rosack’s, wonderful phrase) "an invasion of centaurs" has gone.

Russel and his co-leader, Metiria Turei, along with their coterie of Gen-X and Gen-Y advisors, are no longer dreadlocked outsiders prophesying in the name of Gaia and demanding a fundamental shift in the suicidal economic paradigm of limitless consumption. Rather than cut out the neoliberal cancer that is eating the planet, the objective of this new, well-groomed generation of Greens is to zap it into remission with the "sustainable", "environmentally-friendly" capitalism of the "Green New Deal".

Their goal is to win at least 10 percent of the Party Vote in 2011 – and, who knows, they may well succeed. A snappy suit, a slick advertising agency and a swag of non-threatening policies might be all that’s needed to secure the support of a generation whose formative political influences were Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson.

It’s a generation which has learned – on pain of penury – that it is wisest in this life to stroke the cat from its head to its tail.

The truly radical question, of course, is: Which cat?

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 11 June 2010.