The Incredible Lightness of Being Green.

Putting The Blue Into Green: The party’s male co-leader, James Shaw, openly touts for the support of “green” capitalists: as if the profits to be extracted from re-branding corporate greed as an “ecologically sustainable business ethos” will somehow render its actual production less dependent on environmental despoliation and unrelenting human exploitation.

IF IT’S PERMISSABLE to talk about “Red-Greens”, then why not about “Blue-Greens”? Surely an abiding concern for the natural environment is something which transcends narrow ideological considerations? And, if that’s true, doesn’t it make perfect sense for an environmental party to position itself squarely in the middle of the political spectrum – from whence it can reach out to both the Left and the Right?

Certainly, that’s what Vernon Tava believes, and the former Green MP, Kennedy Graham, agrees with him. In fact, Graham goes further, arguing that contemporary politics is driven by the followers of three great quests. The quest for freedom; the quest for equality; and the quest for sustainability. Graham strongly implies that the greatest of these three is sustainability. Without a sustainable environment, the quests for freedom and equality cannot succeed. This was the sort of thinking that prompted the late Rod Donald to declare: “The Greens are not of the Left. The Greens are not of the Right. The Greens are out in front.”

A great soundbite – but is it true?

It all depends what you mean by “out in front”. If it is intended to describe the vanguard role played by environmental activists in the 1970s and 80s, then the quip has some merit. Up until then “development” was the dominant – and largely uncontested – paradigm, embraced alike by the Capitalist West and the Communist Bloc. The power of science and technology was being unleashed against an intransigent natural world. “Progress” was the word used by both the Left and the Right to describe humankind’s heroic mission to bend Nature to its will. Felling forests, damming rivers and levelling mountains were all achievements to celebrate. Humankind was winning!

It took the Astronaut’s photograph of “Spaceship Earth” to jolt humanity into the realisation that this bright blue planet is all we have – a dazzling repository of life and beauty in an otherwise barren universe. Not an enemy to be subdued, but our one and only home. If there was a foe to be fought, then surely it was rampant industrialism and the insatiable consumerist societies it was spawning? Whether these societies were ruled by Capitalists, or Communists, hardly seemed to matter. The damage inflicted on the planet’s fragile ecosystems by both ideologies was equally catastrophic.

So, yes. Those who grasped the full social, economic and ecological consequences of the development paradigm were, indeed, “out in front” politically.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is possible to view the Cold War stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union as a conflict driven less by ideology than straightforward geopolitical rivalry. The Russians’ state-capitalist system, at enormous cost, was able to maintain a rough military parity with its corporate-capitalist competitors, but was completely outclassed in virtually all other aspects of production. The Russians never mastered the problems of distribution, and, crucially, suffered from a crippling shortage of domestically generated investment capital. The wonder is not that the Soviet Union fell, but that it remained upright for so long!

With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (a.k.a Capitalism!) the Greens’ boast that they were “out in front” lost its sting. The imperatives of corporate capitalism were now driving economic activity across the entire planet. Industrialisation and consumerism were being supercharged – and so was their impact on global ecosystems. Those who stood for the planet were now obliged to stand against a capitalist system whose corporate masters refused to acknowledge (and were, in fact, operating beyond) the moral and political claims of the traditional nation state.

But, as more and more of Earth’s burgeoning human population were swallowed up in the capitalist machine, the amount of CO2 spewing forth from its smokestacks and exhaust pipes was increasing exponentially – soaring towards an atmospheric concentration incompatible with the long-term survival of industrial civilisation. Capitalism was facing its final and fatal contradiction: a negation which only its own negation could negate.

The colour of this capitalist death-machine is, and always has been, blue. Calling yourself a “Blue-Green” is, therefore, oxymoronic. You can no more be a “Blue-Green” than you can be a non-violent boxer or a chaste debauchee. Nor is it defensible to describe yourself as a “Green-Green” – as if rescuing the biosphere can be accomplished without confronting directly the economic system responsible for its devastation. In this regard, the subjective sincerity or insincerity of Vernon Tava and Kennedy Graham is completely irrelevant. Objectively, they are serving the interests of the planet’s enemies – not its friends.

The capitalists’ oft-repeated accusation that they are facing “Red-Greens” is, however, entirely justified. If by “red” is meant a force dedicated to overturning the prevailing capitalist system and replacing it with one in which the three great goals of freedom, equality and sustainability will each become the indispensable guarantor of the other.

From their first appearance in the 1980s, Green parties around the world have presented themselves as both the exemplars and advocates of four foundational principles: Ecological Wisdom; Social Justice; Participatory Democracy; and Nonviolence. Each of these principles is antithetical to the founding principles of Capitalism: The Subjugation of Nature; Human Exploitation; Plutocracy; and Coercive Violence. The dilemma confronting Green supporters in New Zealand in 2019 is just how far the Green Party has drifted from the global Green Movement’s original values. There is a widespread and growing feeling that the Greens’ parliamentary representatives are no longer Capitalism’s enemies, but its enablers.

The party’s male co-leader, James Shaw, openly touts for the support of “green” capitalists: as if the profits to be extracted from re-branding corporate greed as an “ecologically sustainable business ethos” will somehow render its actual production less dependent on environmental despoliation and unrelenting human exploitation.

Only if Green voters are willing to subscribe to the fiction of “weightless” capitalist enterprises that leave no “carbon footprint”, can Shaw’s pitch be rendered credible. Except that, the cellphone in his pocket, the lap-top in his shoulder-bag, both argue against his proposition. If Shaw could only see the horrors attendant upon the extraction of the minerals that make them work; the super-exploitative megafactories in which they are assembled; then he would understand just how crushing the planetary burden off-loaded by his new-found “green” capitalist friends truly is.

As for the Greens’ female co-leader, Marama Davidson. Perhaps the best that can be said of her performance is that it has been distinguished by neither wisdom, nor justice. Nor even by a conspicuous quantum to democracy – participatory or otherwise. Most notably absent has been the founding Green principle of Nonviolence. On the contrary, Davidson’s “woke” faction of the party, caught up in the ever-tightening coils of identity politics, have unleashed a level of emotional violence upon those it deems ideological heretics that must surely make the party’s founders weep.

How different is today’s Green caucus from the “magnificent seven” Green MPs who entered the House of Representatives so triumphantly in 1999. The New Zealand establishment recognised those Greens for what they were: enemies of the status-quo and certainly not the sort of people this country’s capitalists (not even those in the Labour Party!) felt the least bit comfortable about doing business with. Red-Greens they were called: a label which MPs Sue Bradford and Keith Locke wore with pride. Today, to be branded a Red is simply embarrassing: proof only of outdated thinking.

Even so, the National Party leader, Simon Bridges’, enthusiasm for Vernon Tava’s “Blue-Green” initiative is misplaced. Such an obvious example of right-wing “astroturfing” would produce little of electoral value. Besides, all of the time, effort and resources required to draw off enough votes to tip the Greens out of Parliament would, ultimately, be politically counter-productive. New Zealand Capitalism is much better served by leaving the existing Green Party exactly where it is.

Sitting comfortably in the boardroom: sporting a pale-green silk tie and wearing a dark blue suit.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 February 2019.

Centaurs Need Not Apply.

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.

Rod Donald 1957-2005

A Dignified Protest: Rod Donald draws attention to the plight of the Tibetan people on the steps of Parliament during the visit to New Zealand by Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Thursday, 26 May 2005.

The following obituary was written for, but never published in, the New Zealand Political Review. With the media spotlight focused on the behaviour of the current Green Co-leader, Dr Russel Norman, I have decided to share these thoughts concerning Rod Donald’s political legacy with the readers of Bowalley Road.

DEATH is not always our enemy. In politics, especially, sudden death can bestow a sanctifying aura upon the person who has been so suddenly and so inexplicably stolen away. The fallen leader is caught in freeze frame – often in youth or middle age – with so many things left undone. It is this sense of having the future wrenched from our grasp that makes the loss of significant political figures so poignant and so hard to bear. And yet, we must also acknowledge that while premature Death robs the politician of his potential victories, it also allows him to avoid his inevitable defeats.

Rod Donald died just as the New Zealand Green Party was poised to enter a period of considerable soul-searching. Having been left standing at the coalition altar by Labour for the third time in a row, the Greens had some very hard thinking to do about their future. As by far the most pragmatic, media savvy and politically astute politician in the Green caucus, Donald was readying himself to play a crucial role in determining the party’s future direction. His sudden death has robbed it of a shrewd and experienced pathfinder.

Much of that shrewdness was attributable to Donald’s unique ability to blend the idealism of environmental and left-wing politics with the sort of down-to-earth practicality that actually gets things done. In this respect he was quintessentially Kiwi: largely uneducated when it came to the finer points of theory, but without equal when it came to the hands-on business of turning theory into practice. He was, if the truth be known, that rarest of animals – a left-wing entrepreneur. Someone willing to risk his entire stock of political capital in order to make it grow.

And grow it he did. From his first foray into re-cycling as a fifteen-year-old student at St Andrews College in Christchurch, to his transformation of the Trade-Aid movement from a well-meaning but loss-making charity, to a thriving business network, Donald had a way of working around the objections of the talkers and enlisting the enthusiasm of the doers. His intervention in the campaign to secure a "Yes" vote for MMP in the 1993 referendum demonstrated the full range of Donald’s entrepreneurial flair. Without it, the enemies of MMP would almost certainly have triumphed. For that achievement alone, Donald's place in New Zealand’s political history is assured.

In 1994, having secured the means of making a career in politics possible for representatives of the radical left, Donald lost little time in multiplying his enlarged political capital yet again by joining the Greens. With assistance from Jeanette Fitzsimons and her extensive networks of friends and allies within the environmental movement and the old Values Party, the hero of MMP rapidly rose to become the Greens co-leader.

The pairing of Donald and Fitzsimons was one of the most remarkable in New Zealand political history. Only rarely is a party blessed with such extraordinary complementarity. Where Fitzsimons was cerebral and serene, Donald was enthusiastic and practical. And where Fitzsimons knew exactly how to appeal to the Greens’ constituency, Donald was untiring in his courtship of the news media.

He understood the key role which the media plays in modern democracies, and cultivated political journalists with the same care and attention that other Greens devoted to cultivating organic fruit and vegetables. He also recognised the tremendous importance of image. His trademark white shirt and brightly-coloured braces made him instantly recognisable to the voting public. It is difficult to imagine a less frightening, more infectiously amiable promoter of the Green "brand".

This familiarity with the values of the contemporary New Zealand – and global – marketplace, while a source of suspicion and sometimes friction within the Greens’ own ranks, was also critical to the party’s long-term future. Donald was no Marxist, nor a socialist. In the 19th century they would have called him a Radical (with a capital "R"). One who believes that the rights of property should not be allowed to run roughshod over the rights of human beings. Being a 20th Century environmentalist, Donald would, of course, have extended that definition to include the natural world. He celebrated responsible capitalism – especially in its entrepreneurial, small-business manifestation. His reaching out to the business community in the days after the 2005 election was as genuine as it was courageous. Those who rejected his overtures may yet come to rue his passing.

Because the Greens stand at a political cross-roads – and Donald knew it. They can go on being Labour's loyal supporters (and receive their by now familiar reward) or they can reposition themselves as a force outside and above the classical Left-Right divide. I believe that Donald’s thinking was steadily shifting in favour of the latter option. It would not have been an easy course to steer. The 2005 New Zealand Green Party is among the most left-wing in the world, and re-orienting it after the fashion of the German Greens will not be accomplished without a great deal of bitterness and conflict.

Donald was not the sort of man to relish such a fight. He was a gentle and fun-loving person, as his partner of 20 years, Nicola Shirlaw, and his three daughters Holly, Emma, and Zoe will attest. And yet, I believe that Donald, as he had done so often in his career, would have been willing to give it a go; staking all his political capital on a fundamental reorientation of Green politics in New Zealand.

For better or for worse, Death has spared him the odium and abuse that such exercises inevitably entail. He will be remembered now, and always, as a tireless fighter for environmental sanity and social justice: a decent man struck down in the prime of his life and at the peak of his powers; a true Green politician who never once compromised his principles.

My abiding memory of this remarkable man – my friend – Rod Donald, will be of him standing alone at the foot of the parliamentary steps, his face a mixture of sadness and defiance, holding up the forbidden Tibetan flag. It was a noble protest - and all the more effective for being conducted not by some raggle-taggle band of New Age anarchists, but by a senior Member of Parliament and party leader, dressed proudly and patriotically in his best, New Zealand-made, suit.　

Taking the Red out of the Green

Sue Bradford: She spoke for those conspicuously absent from most Green gatherings: the poor, the brown and the white working-class.

NO WONDER Sue Bradford quit. If a big chunk of your party declared themselves so allergic to your political beliefs that they’d walk away in protest, or form a new one, if you were elected its co-leader, then Hell - you’d quit too.

The Greens have such a cuddly image, it’s hard to believe things could get so nasty. But, pay a visit to the Green Party’s blogsite, "Frogblog", follow the long thread of commentary attached to the posting on Sue’s resignation, and you’ll see just how un-cuddly some Greens can be.

It all looked so much nicer when Rod Donald was the leader. He had such a warm and bouncy personality that the press gallery christened him "Tigger". And that bouncy, optimistic and relentlessly friendly image soon came to encompass the whole Green Party. (Few people outside the Greens ever got to see Rod’s claws and teeth – but, of course, they were there.)

Rod cultivated the Green’s "peace, love and mung-beans" image assiduously because he knew how politically potent their apparently gentle brand of right-on radicalism was when set against the ruthlessness and cruelty of National, Act, Labour and the Alliance.

Behind the scenes, however, the Greens’ political practice reflected exactly what you’d expect from a movement dominated by self-employed small-business people, middle-class professionals and academics. Genteel it might have been. Gentle it was not.

Sue Bradford understood this social milieu extremely well. She had, after all, been born into a distinguished academic family, and was no mean scholar herself. On the other hand, years spent "proletarianising" herself in the Progressive Youth Movement, the Workers Communist League and the Unemployed Workers Movement, also meant that, when she needed to, Sue could play the struttin’, swearin’, rough-as-guts battler from the streets to a nicety.

It was a skill that left most of her political rivals gasping. Someone with the ability to move effortlessly between two worlds; who looks as formidable leading a demonstration against the Asian Development Bank, as she does explaining the finer points of government (not to mention her own) legislation, will generally unnerve most opponents – be they internal or external.

Being on the receiving-end of state-violence on a semi-regular basis also gives the street-level activist another great political advantage: it develops mental, emotional and physical toughness. In a party where non-confrontational manoeuvring behind-the-scenes ("consensus building") is the preferred political style, Sue’s bluntness could be profoundly unsettling.

This was especially true when her bluntness was deployed in the name of social groups conspicuously absent from the standard Green Party muster: the poor, the brown, and the white working-class. Sue never let the Greens off the hook when it came to honouring their formal commitment to social justice (not even when they started calling it "social responsibility").

She also refused to let them get away with the nonsense of "Mother Coke and Father Pepsi" when it came to choosing between Labour and National. Sue’s ideological DNA carried far too many Marxist genes to swallow the "one’s bad as t’other" arguments of a party membership growing increasingly frustrated with, and embarrassed by, its association with the Left.

It was this refusal to let the Greens decline into a genteel and thoroughly non-threatening environmentalism that brought about Sue’s downfall. As more and more New Zealanders shifted restlessly to the Right (a shift given added impetus by her own anti-smacking legislation) the Green rank-and-file decided it was high-time they shifted with them.

Rod’s instinctive grasp of the electoral centrality of the Green’s radical message (of which Sue had become the political icon) would have allowed him to defuse the looming ideological confrontation. But, tragically, Rod was dead. And his successor, Russel Norman, lacked both the instincts and the skills to save his party from itself.

Sue’s rival for the co-leadership, Metiria Turei, with all the reckless insouciance of the genuine anarchist, traded shamelessly on the Greens’ fundamental ignorance of political power’s true nature. To the party rank-and-file she represented the alluring fiction that the planet could be saved from the top down.

Had Sue, in her determination to abolish s59 of the Crimes Act, not suppressed her understanding that enduring political change always comes from the bottom-up, she’d have seen the rank-and-file rebellion that drove her from the Greens coming.

She probably couldn’t have altered their decision, but it wouldn’t have come as such a painful surprise.

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, 2 October 2009.

Figuring Out the Greens

Managing the message: The late Rod Donald's greatest political achievement was in keeping the various currents of Green Party thought - environmentalism, eco-socialism and eco-evangelism - flowing in the same direction. His premature death in 2006 allowed these competing currents to diverge, and the resulting intra-party power-plays have triggered the departure of their most articulate parliamentary representatives.

The exchange of comments between myself and Green Party member "Go Figure" over my 25 September posting "Sue Bradford Resigns" has raised a sufficiently large number of Green Party-related issues to warrant a separate posting of their own.

THE MOST ALARMING ASPECT of the Greens’ political style is the sheer number of heroic assumptions it makes about the world it is trying to save. Foremost among these is the assumption that by exposing the ecological dangers and social pathologies threatening human civilisation, Green Parties can, and will, secure the political changes required to eliminate them.

The social-change model at work here is straightforwardly educative. Since the self-destructive and ultimately unsustainable policies of current governments are (according to the Greens) based on an insufficient understanding of their ecological and social effects, all that is required to remedy the situation is for the evidence amassed by the world’s natural and social scientists to be placed before the world’s politicians, and the problems will be solved.

That’s what my statement: "At the heart of the Green ideology is a conviction that natural science is devoid of political content" means. It describes a world in which scientific evidence arrives without political baggage. And it explains why the Greens have been so spectacularly unsuccessful in translating the reality of global warming into a commanding electoral position.

They have proved singularly incapable of constructing an effective strategic (or even tactical) response to the brute political fact that, in spite of all the evidence amassed by the world’s leading climatologists’, their own country’s – and the world’s – political leaders refuse to act decisively. Their policy-making model: amass the evidence-present the evidence-effect the change; doesn’t work – and they simply don’t know what to do about it.

Another example is the Greens handling of the Genetic Engineering issue. They promoted and (thanks to the Alliance) eventually secured a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the controversy. Their assumption was that, once the Commissioners were presented with all the evidence of the dangers of GE , they’d adopt the precautionary principle and recommend that the Labour-led Government’s moratorium on GE activity outside the laboratory remain in place.

When this didn’t happen they had no real answer – other than to temporarily sever their relationship with the Labour Party. Not even when Nicky Hager’s book Seeds of Distrust revealed to them how effortlessly the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry had prevailed over the Prime Minister’s and her advisors’ initial determination to expose and rectify the accidental release of genetically modified corn, the Greens were unable to mount an effective political attack.

The dangers inherent in the Greens’ educative model are demonstrated in their policy on the Treaty of Waitangi. Though the signing of the Treaty, like all historical events, is the subject of multiple, and often sharply contradictory, interpretations, the Greens have adopted an unequivocal and quite inflexible interpretation of the Treaty’s meaning. So much so that when some of their own members, unconvinced by the official party line, openly questioned it’s accuracy, they were deemed ineligible to stand as Green candidates by the Party leadership.

That the dissidents’ views on the Treaty of Waitangi were actually more in tune with those of the majority of Pakeha New Zealanders was an "inconvenient truth" to be overcome by – yes, you guessed it – a taxpayer-funded traveling road-show which would take the "true" meaning of the Treaty directly to the ignorant Pakeha masses and educate them into full conformity with the Greens’ historical interpretation.

This authoritarian aspect of the Greens’ political style is nowhere more apparent than in their so-called "consensus-based decision-making" constitution. Described as a means of "seeking positions that the maximum number of people can support, rather than a simple majority", what these rules actually make possible is the ability of a tiny minority to over-rule and/or subvert the will of the majority.

In practical terms, it allows the leadership of the party, either directly or through their surrogates, to prevent the membership from directly challenging the Green Party caucus’s political strategy and tactics. Rather than promoting the open contest of conflicting political options, it fosters the cobbling together of compromises. Also, by imposing enormous emotional pressure on dissenters, it drives opposition below the surface of party affairs – a situation which, once again, privileges those in senior positions, and makes rank-and-file challenges to official party policy extremely difficult.

Offsetting these massive political liabilities, however, was the presence in the 1999-2008 Green Party caucus of eco-socialist politicians Sue Bradford and Keith Locke, and the eco-religious activist, Nandor Tanczos. The formers’ Marxist backgrounds provided them with a very different social-change model, one based upon the understanding that ideas – even scientific ideas – arise out of the political, economic and cultural context of social classes in unrelenting conflict, and that the only truly effective means of defending Planet Earth is by organising the victims of socio-economic and/or ecological violence against the economic and social forces responsible for inflicting it. In other words: without assembling the mass movements required to make those responsible for assaulting the planet and its peoples cease and desist, simply presenting governments with evidence of their ecological and social crimes is never going to be enough.

Eco-religious activism can be of enormous help in this regard. By adding a metaphysical gloss to the political exigencies of what remains, fundamentally, a class-based conflict, the existential aspects of the issues at stake can be brought into sharper focus. When all is said and done, the struggle is about nothing less than the long-term survival of our own, and countless other living species. It is a battle for the very possibility of a just and abundant human future.

More than any other Green Party leader, Rod Donald understood the critical importance of keeping all of these aspects of the Greens in play. A natural and highly effective political campaigner, he knew how important it was to have clout on the streets as well as in the House. He knew, too, the value of Nandor’s gentle eco-evangelism in a society increasingly bereft of religious and spiritual nourishment. In Sue and Keith, he recognised two potent links to New Zealand’s radical socialist traditions. And, in the environmental work of Jeanette Fitzsimons, he appreciated the value of a well-argued case, based upon solid empirical research. It was Rod’s great skill to keep all of these ideological currents flowing in the same direction. Tragically, his premature death allowed them to diverge, and the resulting intra-party power-shifts have led to the departure of their most articulate representatives.

Sue is merely the latest of these critical individuals to go.

Others will follow.

They will not be replaced.

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.