Tu Ingrate Vireta!* Stabbing The Green Caesar.

Struck Down: As James Shaw saved the pure Greens from themselves in 2017, they resented him. As he secured the Climate Change portfolio for his party, they suspected him. As he achieved cross-party support for crucial climate change legislation, they condemned him. And, as he was white, and male, and straight, and admired by a clear majority of Green Party members – as well, unforgivably, as the Prime Minister herself – they slew him with 29 daggers.

WHAT ARE THE GREENS telling us when they allow 29 people to overrule the wishes of 71 people? In essence, they are telling us that, in their political party, minorities count for more than majorities. Or, to put it more bluntly, the Greens are telling us they do not believe in democracy.

For those who look back fondly on the co-leadership of Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons, the Greens’ antipathy to democracy will be hard to accept. The Green Party they remember seemed very much a party of human rights and freedom, and its consensus-based decision-making process struck many as the epitome of political inclusiveness. Masking the fact that making decisions this way  actually disempowers people, stands among Rod’s and Jeanette’s most important contributions to the Green Party’s electoral viability.

How much harder it would have been for their party to crest the 5 percent threshold if Rod and Jeanette had openly repudiated traditional democratic decision-making processes. “We believe in allowing minorities to overrule majorities” is hardly an election-winning slogan!

The Greens’ anti-democratic instincts constitute one of the more important reasons why they have never allowed themselves to become a mass party with tens-of-thousands of members. And it’s odd, isn’t it, that they haven’t? When you think of the huge numbers of young people eager to do all they can to rescue the planet from disaster; or the scientists desperate to make themselves heard; or the workers keen to stop contributing to the despoilation of the natural environment; it’s astonishing that the Greens are not, far-and-away, New Zealand’s largest political party.

What is it, then, that leads the Greens to believe – like Lenin’s Bolsheviks – that “fewer, but better” is the way to go? The answer is brutally simple: a mass party, in which everyone has an equal say, and policy reflects the will of the majority; is a party whose ideological purity will very soon be compromised, and its political priorities side-tracked, by people with “unacceptable” ideas. Bluntly, Ecologism and Populism do not mix.

Those who join the Greens do not enter an open party, with simple, practical structures, but a strangely opaque organisation whose rules and rulers are hard to find and difficult to understand. It is a party of initiates who assess, rather than welcome, newcomers. How likely are these newbies to measure-up to the ideological and procedural strictures of the Greens? Will they be disruptive? Will they challenge the party’s precepts? Are they racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and/or Islamophobes? Do they know what it means to be te Tiriti centric? Are they familiar with the jargon and buzz-words of the contemporary Left? What are their pronouns?

How many meetings will an ordinary person, keen to fight climate change, attend before people of indeterminate gender, with purple hair, talking menacingly of heteronormative white privilege, convince them that it might be wiser, and more enjoyable, to be a Green Party member who “works from home”. One? Two? Assuming, of course, they don’t decide they’d be better off getting involved in some other – any other – political party?

Fewer, but better?

Even the saintly Jeanette Fitzsimons had her Leninist side. I well recall an old time ecologist, one of those who fought to “Save Manapouri”, approaching me with a bitter tale of intolerance and exclusion. Unconvinced by Catherine Delahunty’s interpretation of the te Tiriti o Waitangi and its meaning, this Green Party member had argued for a more nuanced Treaty policy. Fatal mistake. When he put his name forward for the Party List he was informed bluntly by Jeanette that his views on the Treaty made him unfit to carry the Green banner into an election. His name was not even allowed to go forward to be ranked by the members – lest a lifetime of contributions to environmental politics prompted too many of them to overlook his “racism”.

To be accepted into the body of the Green Church, one must be willing and able to recite its catechism word perfect – and without demur.

This is the critical political weakness of the Greens – their unwillingness to repose the ultimate determinative power of their movement in the collective judgement of their party’s members. In the inner sanctum of the Green temple burn four torches: Ecological Wisdom, Social Responsibility, Appropriate Decision-Making, and Non-Violence. Their sacred flames are tended by priests and priestesses whose manner of induction remains mysterious, but whose powers extend even to striking down a co-leader, should his dedication to the party’s guiding lights be deemed insufficient.

As James Shaw saved these pure Greens from themselves in 2017, they resented him. As he secured the Climate Change portfolio for his party, they suspected him. As he achieved cross-party support for crucial climate change legislation, they condemned him. And, as he was white, and male, and straight, and admired by a clear majority of Green Party members – as well, unforgivably, as the Prime Minister herself – they slew him with 29 daggers.

And the 71 daggers, whose owners supported this Green Caesar, were powerless to defend him.

Because, whatever else the Greens may be – they are not democrats.

* You ungrateful Greens!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 28 July 2022.

Jeanette Fitzsimons 1945-2020: An Assessment.

A Force For Good: Jeanette Fitzsimons stands firmly in the tradition of such high-minded intellectual reformers as Beatrice Webb in the United Kingdom, and Jane Addams in the United States: women who put their faith in the discoveries of science (the social-sciences in particular) and in the unimpeachable power of official statistics, rather than in the surging passions of the masses – down in the street.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS’ DEATH brings to a close the political narrative which began with the Tony Brunt Values Party in 1972. In its essence, it’s been a story about principled expertise, cultural radicalism, and what later came to be known as “ecological wisdom”. Expressed in this truncated way, the most remarkable thing about the period traversed by Fitzsimons’ political career is that the interwoven strands of New Zealand’s green movement did not fray and snap.

Fitzsimons’ serene personality played a critical role in the Greens’ political coherence over her three decades of active involvement. Political leaders are not always calm and unflappable human-beings. Indeed, the preferred leadership style in New Zealand is the one that offers the voters hardness and decisiveness in equal measure. The Greens’ consensus-based decision-making is often dismissed as woolly-woofterish weakness. In reality, it is anything but. Few outside the Green Party appreciate the power of a patiently assembled super-majority – especially when wielded with a serene smile.

An political leader requires more than serenity, however, if she is to succeed. Knowledge and expertise also count for a great deal – especially in avant-garde minority movements like Values and the Greens. In this regard, Fitzsimons was a formidable protagonist. Her scientific training equipped her admirably for the unavoidable and often trenchant debates which her radical environmental and political agendas provoked. Against the defenders of the status-quo, and especially against the protectors of entrenched corporate interests, expertly marshalled facts and figures were the only rhetorical weapons capable of drawing blood. Fitzsimons always excelled in this kind of political warfare.

Her other great advantage owed nothing to these personal strengths. Simply by being born in 1945, she experienced all of the many benefits of growing up in post-war New Zealand. What’s more, she was perfectly positioned not only to imbibe all the heady cultural brews of the late-1960s, but to make sense of them. Twenty-seven, and already an academic high-flyer, when Tony Brunt launched the Values Party in 1972, Fitzsimons was the sort of asset any fledgling political movement was bound to welcome with open arms.

That intellectual heft is an important part of Fitzsimons’ and the Greens’ political genealogy. In terms of Twentieth Century progressivism, her role in Values and the Greens is analogous to that of historical figures from earlier in the century when progressivism – and a certain type of socialism – first gained its political momentum. She stands firmly in the tradition of such high-minded intellectual reformers as Beatrice Webb in the United Kingdom, and Jane Addams in the United States: women who put their faith in the discoveries of science (the social-sciences in particular) and in the unimpeachable power of official statistics, rather than in the surging passions of the masses – down in the street.

Not that there was any lack of passion in Fitzsimons’ love affair with the natural world. Indeed, it was from the natural harmonies and intricate balances of Nature that Fitzsimons’ drew her political inspiration. This always separated her, radically, from those on the traditional Left, who characterised their mission of uplifting the poor and oppressed as a struggle to overthrow and overpower not only the ruling-class, but Nature herself.

What little socialism there was in Fitzsimons (and, honestly, there wasn’t much) was the socialism of gentle folk like the British polymath, William Morris, who drew his inspiration from the organic communities of the Middle Ages. Not from the feudal aristocrats and their brutal retinues of knights and tax-collectors, you understand, but from the ministering monasteries and abbeys, and, most especially, from the guilds of medieval craftsmen. Less Karl Marx’s post-industrial utopia – more J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire!

Much of the Traditional Left’s animosity towards the Greens was born of what they saw as the latter’s politically dubious love-affair with what the Germans call the volksgemeinschaft – the “people’s community”. In the eyes of these old-fashioned socialists and social-democrats, the Greens organicism smacked of a deeply conservative preference for human subordination to the “natural order”. Certainly, there remains a strong political tendency within the Green ideology to elevate pre-industrial indigenous cultures over the extractive and oppressive industrial societies of the colonialist-capitalist West. The Traditional Left didn’t just pour scorn on the Greens’ Morris-dancing because it looked silly – they took it as evidence of the Greens’ dangerous liaisons with all manner of reactionary ideas.

No one who ever visited Fitzsimons’ organic farm in the Kauaeranga River Valley was left in any doubt about her commitment to treading gently on the earth. Not even her staunchest critics – left or right – could accuse her of not walking her talk. If there was a reactionary element to her politics, then it was born of her scientific and moral rejection of Capitalism’s addiction to growth: an entirely justifiable reaction to the havoc which that addiction is unleashing upon the planet’s fragile ecosystems. It’s a reaction that goes all the way back to the Values Party: to the conviction that so long as Science remains under the control of unaccountable corporations, then its insights and discoveries will inevitably be turned towards violent, perverted, and, ultimately, life-diminishing ends.

As they used to say back around the time the Values Party was formed: “If this planet’s a corporation, it’s a corpse.”

What then, we are left to wonder, did Fitzsimons make of the Green Party in 2020? Did she see it as a source of pride, or as a cause for concern? Are those who have come of age, politically, in the years of Capitalism’s undisputed triumph more, or less, able to perceive the danger it poses to the future of all living things? Do they manifest the same acute ecological wisdom that enabled Jeanette to hold the party together for more than quarter-of-a-century? Do they walk lightly upon the earth, as she did? Or, do they just talk about it?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 March 2020.

Ten Years Ago This Week: Fattening Tigger

The face/s of the Green Party 1999-2005: Rod Donald & Jeanette Fitzsimons.

WHAT SHALL WE DO about poor little Tigger? If he never eats nothing he’ll never get bigger. So sings Winnie the Pooh as he attempts to rustle-up some breakfast for his new playmate. The Left is asking the same question about those Tiggers of New Zealand politics – the Greens. For if Jeanette Fitzsimons is not given a clear run at the Coromandel seat in the forthcoming election, the Greens chances of ever growing big enough to climb over the five percent MMP threshold look very slim indeed.

The key to unlocking Coromandel for the Greens is in Labour’s hands. At the last election Ms Fitzsimons received 9,561 votes, just 2,450 less than National’s Murray McLean. If the 4,255 people who voted for Labour in 1996 could be persuaded to come in behind the Greens in 1999, then there is every chance of Ms Fitzsimons winning the seat. A Green victory is even more likely when one considers the likely voting behaviour of the 7,932 people who, in 1996, supported NZ First.

According to the rules of MMP, a party which wins an electorate seat is automatically entitled to the number of seats represented by its overall share of the valid Party Vote – even if that share amounts to less than five percent. In the Taranaki-King Country by-election the Greens won approximately 2.5 percent of the vote, and most commentators believe they will achieve at least that level of support simply by having their name on the ballot paper. With 2-3 percent of the Party Vote - plus Coromandel – the Greens could expect to see at least two - and possibly as many as four - MPs in the House of Representatives. And seats in the House are what Tiggers like best!

The question for Labour to answer, as the election draws near, is this: "What reasons can they sensibly offer for NOT throwing their support behind the Greens in Coromandel?" As the undisputed leader of the Left – at least in electoral terms – shouldn’t Labour be committed to seating the broadest and most accurate representation of progressive New Zealand which is possible? And, if it is acceptable for the Labour Party to align itself formally with the Socialist Left, in the form of the Alliance, why not Ecological Left with the Greens?

Broadening the base of a future Left Coalition also makes excellent electoral sense. Historically, the Green Party has drawn its support not only from red-green radicals, but also from blue-green conservatives. A brief glance at the electorates in which the Greens won strong support in 1990 (the last time they stood in their own right) shows that a Green Party with momentum is as likely to take votes from National as Labour. In other words, by backing the Greens Labour can actually grow the total Centre Left vote. That has to be a better prospect than simply redistributing the same amount of support between themselves and the Alliance.

To achieve that momentum, however, Labour needs to signal its support for Ms Fitzsimons sooner rather than later. If the voters can be persuaded that, come what may, the Greens are certain to be represented in Parliament, then they can tick their box on the ballot paper with a clear conscience. Without Labour’s (and then almost certainly the Alliance’s) agreement to stand aside in Coromandel, people considering casting a Party Vote for the Greens may reluctantly come to the conclusion that they would be throwing it away.

And that would be a pity. The Greens, like A.A. Milne’s Tigger, may be bouncy and prone to mischief (especially with genetically engineered potato crops!), but they also represent our last, best hope for a sustainable future.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of 11 June 1999.