What Will It Take For The Greens To "Make A Difference"?

Not This Time - But Never Say Never: James Shaw and his fellow Greens cannot put off forever the hard decision of whether or not to reverse out of the Left-of-Labour cul-de-sac in which they have stranded themselves. As Nandor Tanczos so succinctly put it in a recent blogpost: “players only respect other players”. To negotiate the treacherous rapids of political power successfully, the Green waka’s load must be lightened – by offloading the excessive weight of its conscience.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of the “opportunity” the Green Party now has to “make a difference”. Unsurprisingly, most of this much-making has come from the right of the political spectrum. The prospect of being robbed of his “kingmaker” role by a last-minute display of National Party + Greens political jiu-jitsu, is clearly intended to keep Winston Peters on his tactical toes.

Not all of this tactical advice, however, is coming from the Nats. The former Green MP, Nandor Tanczos, is also urging the Greens to escape the self-imposed confinement of their Left-of-Labour cul-de-sac. In a recent blogpost, he identifies the Greens’ fundamental problem as having bought into an “inadequate conceptual model” of twenty-first century politics. Specifically, “the idea that political philosophy can be represented in one dimension on a straight line between left and right.”

The New Zealanders that Tanczos holds up as the unfortunate victims of this one-dimensional conceptualisation of New Zealand politics are the “450,000 small businesses in Aotearoa employing five people or less.”

Self-employment, according to the former Green MP, “speaks to core Green ideals of supporting local economies, building self-reliance and personal autonomy, helping people lift themselves out of poverty and fostering stronger linkages between businesses and the social ecological communities in which they are located.” Tanczos claims to know “a great many small business owners who support the ideals of the Greens but who don’t connect with us a party because we are not speaking to them.”

This is smart thinking on Tanczos’s part. Right from the start, the Greens most obvious electoral deficiency has been a solid socio-economic base from which to strike out in pursuit of political power. Unlike the National Party, with its businessmen and farmers; and the Labour Party, with its wage-workers and Maori; the core of the Green Party vote has never consisted of a social class whose interests it protects, but always of a social movement whose ideals it expresses. Since movements tend to be as varied as they are volatile, it is no wonder that the level of Green Party support can fluctuate wildly between one election and the next.

Historically-speaking, the transition from a movement-based, to a social-class-based, political party is neither easy nor painless. To get some idea of just how difficult and painful these ideological and sociological shifts can be, one has only to study the evolution of the German Green Party – Die Grünen.

Within all Green parties, the most obvious division is invariably between those who come to the party from what might best be called the conscientised, publicly-funded salariat (academics, scientists, teachers, bureaucrats) and those who have made themselves into exemplars of alternative ways of living in a world dominated by consumption-driven capitalism (students, artists, hippies, anti-capitalist artisan-activists).

In Germany, the former group was dubbed the “Realos” (realists) and the latter group the “Fundis” (fundamentalists). The tension between the two factions became a constant feature of Die Grünen’s internal politics. The event which tipped this tension into open and bitter intra-party conflict was – of course – the German Greens’ acquisition of real political power.

In alliance with Germany’s Social Democratic Party (the equivalent of New Zealand’s Labour Party) the Greens soon found themselves confronted with a decision that went to the very heart of their political philosophy.

It was 1999, and NATO was bombing Serbia. The Greens’ leader, and Germany’s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer (a Realo) argued that, for the first time since the Second World War, German fighter aircraft should be sent to attack a nation which had not violated Germany’s borders. The Fundis – many of them veterans of the huge German peace and anti-nuclear movements of the 1980s – were horrified. Fischer was proposing to violate the core Green principle of Non-Violence. A Special Conference of Die Grünen was convened in the city of Bielefeld, in north-west Germany, to decide the matter.

Getting An Earful: Joschka Fischer's "realo" foreign policy prevailed over its "fundi" opposition within Die Grünen, but only at the cost of bitter internal strife.

New Zealanders who lived through the 1981 Springbok Tour would have recognised all the signs of strife. The conference hall was ringed with barbed-wire and guarded by hundreds of armed police officers. Delegates were jostled, and as Fischer entered the hall he was struck by a bag of blood-red paint. The anger of the Fundi protesters outside the hall was equalled only by the fury of the Fundi delegates inside. All to no avail. By a margin of 415/335 the German Green Party’s idealistic fundamentalists were required to make way for its power-wielding realists.

Eighteen years later, Die Grünen, alongside the Free Democrats (the German equivalent of New Zealand’s Act Party) are engaged in coalition negotiations with the conservative Christian Democratic Government of Angela Merkel.

As Nandor Tanczos so succinctly puts it: “players only respect other players”. To negotiate the treacherous rapids of political power successfully, the Green waka’s load must be lightened – by offloading the excessive weight of its conscience.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 October 2017.

The Selling (Out?) of the Greens

"You're not on Waiheke Island now, Dr Norman."

THEY say one picture is worth a thousand words. Well, cast your eyes over the above billboard and ask yourself: What are the Greens trying to say about Russel Norman and their party?

Both the image and the slogan are intended to convey strength and reliability.

This young man, the billboard says, can be relied upon to get things done. What’s more, just by looking at him, you can tell he’s not a weirdo or a revolutionary. His hair is nicely styled (no dreadlocks!) and he wears an expensive suit (no tie, though, because Russel is a relaxed, informal kind of guy– not a stuffed shirt).

Even more interesting is what the Greens are telling us about themselves.

Look at us, says their advertising, see how we’ve changed. No longer are we the sort of people you might suspect of carrying a joint in their pockets, or having strange dietary habits. This is a very different party from the one that used to tear up GE crops and campaign for the decriminalisation of marijuana. Nowadays we’re just like you. We’re out to save the planet – but in a way that doesn’t pose a direct challenge to the system. Relax, it says, the Greens are no threat to your way of life.

I remember having a cup of coffee with Nandor Tanczos in the weeks after Rod Donald’s death, and him asking me how I thought he should approach his return to Parliament (he was, you’ll recall, next on the List).

I said to him: "If I were Mephistopheles, I’d advise you to pay a visit (accompanied, of course, by photographers from The Woman’s Weekly) to one of New Zealand’s foremost hair-stylists, where your dreadlocks would be removed and your remaining hair styled. Then I’d pay a visit to Politiks, the trendy menswear store (accompanied this time by photographers from FHM Magazine) and kit myself out in the latest executive fashions. And, when I returned to Parliament, I’d give a speech about the importance of Green businesses to New Zealand’s economic future."

If I remember rightly, Nandor quoted scripture: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul."

What indeed?

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.