Keeper of the Green Faith: From the moment the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” were announced, I knew that a scorching sermon from Sue Bradford was only a matter of time. She did not disappoint. Barely 72 hours after Grant Robertson’s and James Shaw’s blasphemy had sullied the ears of the faithful, Sue was on RNZ’s Morning Report castigating her erstwhile comrades with considerable passion.
AS A GUARDIAN of left-wing orthodoxy, Sue Bradford is
without peer. At the first hint of heresy she can be relied upon to stride
purposefully to the nearest progressive pulpit and start preaching.
From the moment the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility
Rules” were announced, I knew that a scorching sermon from Sue was only a
matter of time. She did not disappoint. Barely 72 hours after Grant Robertson’s
and James Shaw’s blasphemy had sullied the ears of the faithful, Sue was on
RNZ’s Morning Report castigating her
erstwhile comrades with considerable passion.
“The Greens have completely sold out on where they started
from in my generation of MPs in 1999”, Sue thundered. “So what you see here is
the Green Party deciding to go after votes on the centre and the right of the
New Zealand political spectrum. It wants business in its corner. It wants your
National blue-green voters in its corner.”
What does this mean? Sue is in no doubt. It means
“completely abandoning the huge number of people who are in desperate need in
the areas of housing, welfare, jobs, and education.”
There’s a part of me that inclines towards Sue’s critique.
It’s the part that remembers those original Green MPs, the “magnificent seven”,
as they galloped up the steps of Parliament and onto the floor of the House of
Representatives like “an invasion of centaurs”. (If I may borrow Theodore
Roszak’s evocative image.)
Which was great to see. (And even greater to be, Sue, I’m
sure!) But only if your purpose was (borrowing once again from Roszak’s 1969
best-seller The Making of a
Counter-Culture) to embody “the experience of radical critical disjuncture,
the clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life”. Or, as an old-time Maoist
like Sue might express it: only if the Greens were there to make revolution.
An Invasion of Centaurs: "the clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life".
But even back then, in 1999, the Greens’ revolutionary
faction was in the minority. Alongside Sue, Keith Locke and Nandor Tanczos, sat
Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue Kedgely and Ian Ewen-Street. Radical and
visionary these latter four may have been, but they had come to Parliament to
accomplish things, not to turn New Zealand’s capitalist society upside down.
Twenty years later and the Greens are still waiting to
fulfil even a small fraction of the Magnificent Seven’s agenda. Most members of
the Green Party are not interested in being seen as the harbingers of a
“radical critical disjuncture” but as members of a political party dedicated to
finding practical solutions to global warming; cleaning up New Zealand’s lakes,
rivers and streams; housing the homeless and helping to develop a principled
and purposeful role for New Zealand on the international stage.
For most New Zealand voters, the idea of revolutionary Green
Party centaurs rampaging through Parliament is equally politically
uninteresting.
So perhaps Sue should cast her mind back to the 1999
election and recall just how narrow was the margin that separated the Greens
from parliamentary representation and political oblivion. Rod Donald delighted
in his white shirt and coloured braces for six years, but by 2005 he was very
publicly having himself measured for a stylish Kiwi-made business suit. When
the brute arithmetic of political power kept him out of Helen Clark’s Cabinet
it, quite literally, broke his heart.
“At what price power,” Sue demands “if you sell out
everything that your party was originally set out to achieve? I mean, this
Green Party here is following the same trail as green parties all over the
world – some of who have ended up in coalitions and alliance with really
right-wing governments.”
But in 2014, with just one image, the National Party
destroyed the Green Party’s (and Labour’s) hopes of achieving anything for New Zealand. Their
depiction of a Red/Green government as an uncoordinated and unreliable “Ship of
Fools” was devastating.
That’s the public perception that Andrew Little, Grant
Robertson, James Shaw and Metiria Turei are up against. And it is the
widespread public misgivings about the Left’s economic realism and reliability
that their “Budget Responsibility Rules” are intended to allay.
That’s because powerlessness also comes at a price.
A real revolutionary would understand the importance of
inoculating the two leading parties of the Left against the “Show me the
money!” ambushes of elections past.
The Greens are not trying to make a counter-culture, Sue –
they’re trying to make a government.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 March 2017.
