You miss the point. Greens, in the sense of environmentalist greens, will dominate from 2020 onward. That is a natural result of the natural result of all the idiocy that has gone on since Hubbard first gave us a peek at the peak. That “major parties” may adopt Green ideas with respect to energy and the environment is another way of saying we win on that front.

Labour got just 40% of the vote and we got 5… IF as I surmise, we could reach 15% without compromising on core issues, simply giving some comfort to people who are nervous about idealists, that 15% would likely come at the expense of all other parties, but mostly from Labour. So maybe we are at 15% and they are at 33% and Nats at 38% etc etc… Just a guess… Now fast forward a few years and see peak oil and warming making themselves more obvious. People WILL look seriously at us and if Greens are not strange and alarming we will wind up majority partners without moving much at all. We can get to 15% without “going soft” and we will naturally go far higher if we simply keep it sane. The world will drift left as it comes to embrace our environmental message.

Is it ambition? No Alistair, No RedGreen, it is a prediction. If we build a semi-serious party we will wind up driving… cause we’re the ones with the vision. If we are a party of rabid idealists we will never get past 7%, will be forever a fringe group and when the big parties adopt core environmental policies Greens will disappear… or hasn’t this near-death experience taught anyone anything?

A complete set of policies becomes relevant when you try to appeal to voters who have concerns OTHER than environment… and the absence of a defence policy will definitely put a fair number of people off. It nearly did me.

If you insist that the Greens must hew to the left of the left of the spectrum you are creating conditions of schism and you will destroy that which YOU seek to promote. Greens did well?
We did NOT do well because people do NOT agree with the extreme left politically. We survived at all because we have a good core environmental message. Without that we’d have zero representatives. Without our more extreme socialist/pacifist pronouncements we’d have 15% and a MUCH better chance to influence the future of the country.

I am perceiving a party that is divided. The policies the other parties will steal will be environmental, they will then attract people like me who want environmental protection and what we perceive as realistic social policies. Labour will grow stronger, and the Green party will go sub-5% and die. That’s something that RedGreen alludes to in his analysis.

The fact that we are the only viable party left of the current Labour party, and we survive ONLY because of environmental issues should give you pause.

Now I believe that most of the policies of the left ARE valid and to a large part desireable, but the holes in our policies put us beyond the pale. Sweden may be just about as far left as we are, but they actually build their own supersonic jet fighters and missiles. The dutch may have legalized a variety of substances but they are getting tough on immigration… Ignoring reality, if it is willful, as seems to be the green habit ( example from the USA – Ralph Nader ), is destructive to the party, its goals and the environment of the planet.

That’s reality. It BITES damnit, and it will chew us up and digest us if we aren’t willing to acknowledge its existence. I actually am somewhat left of Labour in many ways, but I don’t “get” the political ecology argument you are making Alistair. If you understand MMP as it is practiced HERE you will have to admit that the minimum viable political ecological niche permitted is 5%. That or a political leader capable of carrying his/her home electorate by storm. We squeak by and you think that this validates us maintaining our more extreme positions? On what basis?

I don’t know what the “Alliance” was, and given the tone of the posts it seems it may have been home to some fair few idealists. The statement that “Politics is the art of the possible” needs to be examined earnestly by all such, because in this political environment the sort of idealism that eschews defense and embraces the fringe left and pacifists will NOT survive… as the Alliance failed to survive.

That’s just true. You can like it or not. The world doesn’t care if humans survive or not. This political environment doesn’t care if Greens survive or not.

respectfully
BJ

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

I do think we need to occupy the ground once occupied by the Alliance.

At its height, Alliance won – I believe – 13% of the votes. This begs the question: where did all these ex-Alliance voters go? (Alliance polled 0.1% this recent election.) Some would have gone – or perhaps gone back – to Labour, with a few to the Greens. As for the rest, I suspect large proportion of them – due to disillusionment with the Left as they see it and/or the lack of a true leftist Party in Parliament – have, since the demise of the Alliance, either defected to a right-wing party or simply cease to vote at all.

Either way, there is a potentially vast pool of support we can draw from the ‘working class’ so to speak. Many working-class people see Labour as the only pseudo-Left party around and hence give their support to Labour. This will have to change.

I concur with alistair on the point that the Greens aren’t about expanding their support base exponentially. If the bell-shaped curve charting people’s voting preferences in anything to go by, then unless we adopt overtly centrist policies, it would be inconceivable that we will garner the same support that Labour gets. In any case, that is not what we strive for.

As to other parties ’stealing our policies’ however, I am ambivalent as to whether that would be a good thing (I’ll leave out a discussion of consequentialism for now). On the one hand, it will dillute the perception some people have of us being a ‘fringe’ group in society. On the other hand, it could result in the ‘ACT symdrome’. Let me elaborate:

I believe the substantial loss of support for ACT this recent election isn’t because their policies are necessarily unpopular among the general public, but rather because other parties, some of whom are larger than ACT (namely National and NZ First), having begun adopting (or stealing, if you like) policies that were once exclusively theirs, or at least originated from them. Here are some examples:
* Getting tough on crime – United Future, NZ First, National
* Abolishing Maori seats – National, NZ First (appears to be their stand)
* One law for all – National, NZ First, OneNZ
The list could go on further.

The point is that if the general public sees a larger – and somewhat ‘centrist’ (as some people would classify) – party like National adopting policies that ACT has, then they will:
1) Cease to see the need for voting/supporting ACT anymore;
2) Vote/support National now instead since they are more likely to implement these policies, give that they are a larger force in Parliament; and
3) Have a wider range of parties to choose from, given the proliferation of parties with ACT-like policies now – hence the redundancy of ACT.

This is something we need to be wary of if Labour begin to adopts Green – or at least ‘Green-like’ – policies.

By the way, as a corollary of the demise of ACT, I think the alarming prospect we now have to face is this: while in Parliament we have a very small ACT, we now have a very large ACT-like National. Yes, the National Party is now very much a right-wing entity – all elements of centrism they once had or were thought to have have now been purged – thanks to the ‘ACT-isation’ of its policies. We should be shuddering at this thought.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Well said!

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

I disagree with your implied assumption that the Greens have a vocation to become a dominant political party. I don’t even think that’s a desirable objective, let alone a realistic one.

I think we can do better than the 5-10% range we currently piddle around in. I think 10-15% would be great.

Anything over 15% would be proof that we’ve gone soft

More to the point, as we edge upwards, other parties will steal our policies. This is eminently desirable. Our aim should be to be structurally in the avant-garde.

You say we should
A. Have a complete set of [policies] after more than 8 years
B. Have them conform more to the general public’s reality.

A. is not actually very relevant to voter support, in my view — I doubt very much that any voters hesitated to vote Green because of the (alleged) lack of an immigration policy;
B. I am dead set against. To caricature your position a bit : You could very quickly fill the gaps in GP policy by doing a cut-and-paste of Labour policy. That would be, in many cases, a betrayal of Green principles. I allege that you can derive Green policy in any area, not just environment-related areas, from first principles : the principles of political ecology.

There is also the inconvenient historical accident that has made the Green Party the only viable entity left of Labour. I bitterly regret this, but we are obliged to adapt to fill the ecological niche left to us by the extinction of the Alliance.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

You made the following statement:

“The people we have NOT captured however, are the people, and there must be a heck of a lot of them, for whom the environment is an issue but not the only issue that they are concerned with. We need a more of THEM to secure ourselves a place as a permanently viable party.”

You are absolutely correct on this point. That’s why on another thread I made the comment that a young single mother with three kids to feed might be concerned about the albatross and/or clean rivers, but her first and foremost priority – as it rightly should be – would be to ensure that the welfare of her kids is cared for. Here is where our social and economic policies should come to the fore. Telling a poverty-stricken community about the wonders of the albatross isn’t exactly going to strike a chord, let alone give us much credibility…or votes for that matter.

1) Yes we do need a defence and immigration policy. This is something that I’ll also be putting to Karen.
2) Perhaps we can incorporate a Prisons Policy into our Justice Policy? I personally do not see the need for a separate policy on prisions, considering it is intrinsically linked to criminal justice – and indeed justice in a broad sense.
3) Our cannabis policy, I believe, is sound as it stands, but perhaps we can improve on the way we present it to the public/media. I personally use the ‘consistency in law’ argument (being a law student myself) – our very own ‘one law for all’ approach to drug control/regulation – as well as the ‘health not crime’ line of reasoning.

__________

Tane:

The story of the Danes didn’t originate from me. I was busy being locked in a debate with ACT’s list candidate.

__________

Tane and BJ:

I too find keeping within the 200-word limit a bit of a chore, considering that I’m used to writing 5000-word essays and research opinions – so I feel your pain.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Getting over-run on a regular basis taught the Danes the value of keeping a decent sized army. 1940-45 was no picnic for them.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Thanks for the pointer, I’ll contact those individuals and attempt to start some form of discourse within the party. As I said, I’m proud to be in this party. But there are always improvements to be made, and while two of my personal interests (transport and energy) are dealt with very well by the party, the third (defence) is not. I’ll do my best to cram it into 200 words.

Cheers.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Perhaps I wasn’t clear.

Transport and Energy ARE conforming with reality. Never mind the public. Transport and Energy are related and don’t cause big problems for anyone capable of mustering 3 working brain cells… I was specifically not referring to those as causing us trouble.

Causing trouble are:

1. Lack of coherent realistic defense policy.
2. Lack of similarly qualified immigration policy.
3. Prison policy – because there are people who HAVE to be locked up.
4. Cannabis policy – no matter how much I agree with it..

Green social policies are generally good, I don’t have a problem being left of center on most issues and I am happy to be on the side of worker’s rights and social justice.

However, the general public isn’t following us to all the places we go in that respect. Not everyone gets to GO to University, and those who don’t are far more likely to be beneficiaries of our policies even as they support National for “religious/social/righteousness” reasons.

The core environmental vote has been captured. That is, the environmentalists who, like me, put it ahead of everything including their monetary self-interests. The people we have NOT captured however, are the people, and there must be a heck of a lot of them, for whom the environment is an issue but not the only issue that they are concerned with. We need a more of THEM to secure ourselves a place as a permanently viable party. If we make the effort we can be a very effective partner to labour and potentially an equal or dominant partner. The ability to do that hinges on these missing and/or social policies that nobody in the Green power structure seems interested in addressing or moderating. We can do better.

Thanks for letting me know where to write. 200 words is a tough limit. same as the Dom Post editorials, and quite difficult to meet coherently I have to hammer THEM on their Kyoto editorial soonest.

respectfully
BJ

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

I sympathise with your current situation, and as a former
sole-parent-with-full-on-career I am amazed that you find the time to write regularly on this blog!

You obviously have “much bigger plans” for the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand than I suspect it has for itself … and it does look ahead !

In the environment of a Mixed Member Proportional parliamentary system (which is here because of the far-sightedness, skill and hard work of Rod Donald) the Green Party doesn’t have to be “all things to all people.” It does however need to be (and is recognised as) very good at what it does well.

In this election, your first in Aotearoa(?), the two major parties, seemingly overlooked the MMP environment, and ran First Past the Post campaigns … to their detriment. (I doubt they will try that again.) THAT was the “most likely major cause” of the reduced minor parties’ vote …
Voters moved to “shore up” their choice of major party to the detriment of the minors. The fact that Greens survived well is a measure of the regard in which they are held … (The fact that left-of-centre people would have been safe to give their Party Votes to the Greens was missed by many, and I intend to devote time and effort to an education campaign aimed at “average voters” to further flesh out MMP voting strategies over the next three years.)

As far as Defence (note the “c”) Policy is concerned … I enjoy the story of the Danes who, having a history of being overrun because of their geographic location, decided some decades(?) ago that their Defence should be loud speakers in prominent places throughout the country with a taped message in various languages that said “We Surrender!”

I certainly don’t propose this for Aotearoa … (I have to admit that at a younger age I enjoyed the idea of being a partisan in the Southern Alps!) but I wouldn’t class a Green Party defence policy as a top priority at this point.

The idea of MMP is that Parties work in cooperation with their coalliton etc partners … Aotearoa still has various alliances with traditional allies (the biggest of whom could currently be considered a serious liability rather than an asset …)

I won’t take up any more of your valuable time!

Best wishes with your exploration of the Green Party. I don’t think you are meeting many (if any) core Green Party members on this site…

Go well!
eredwen

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Agreed. We have comprehensive and well thought-out policies in many areas, but perhaps there is a certain lacking in certain areas.

Perhaps you (and BJ) could put your concerns to the following people:

* Richard Selinkoff, Section Editor of Te Awa (selinkoff@paradise.net.nz). He will publish ANY comments, criticisms, suggestions, feedback etc. that you may have. There is a 200-word limit however, and the deadline for this is Thursday 13th October.

* Karen Davis, National Co-convenor, via David Parker (cddm@ihug.co.nz). Any concerns, insights etc. will be passed onto both Karen and Catherine Delahunty, who will then pass your comments onto the appropriate people.

Hope that helps.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

I respectfully disagree that our non-environmental policies do not appeal to – or strike a chord with – the general public, or that it fails to do so successfully.

I joined the Greens in 2002 after hearing Sue Bradford speak at a forum on the Greens’ worker-friendly policies and their stance on social justice issues. Many of my friends and associates in the Campus Greens – something like 90% of them – joined (some as recently as a few months ago) the Greens due to their non-environmental policies too. That the Greens have an environmentalist stance is already trite. That is why our new, non-environmental policies are beginning to take root. For instance, our Human Rights Policy has struck a real chord among ethnic communities.

However, I do agree with you regarding “the general population’s receptiveness to our core environmental message”. This seems to me to show that the environmental vote has already more or less been captured and consolidated; the job of the Greens now I guess is to focus our attention more on promoting our non-environmental policies to the public, where there has a lot of ground yet to be gained.

I would take exception though to your inference that we fail to “conform (our energy policy etc.) more to the general public’s reality”. Let’s take our Auckland Transport Policy as an example. The following is a quote from the most recent Green Times:

“Presented with three different transport planning scenarios, 49% of respondents chose a public transport focus, while 29% favoured more of a pedestrian/cycle-friendlt bias, and just 22% wanted a cars-first focus.”

The article then goes on to note that:

“Just over 60% strongly agreed or agreed with spending more on public transport than cars, with 25% strongly disagreeing or disagreeing. 63% agreed or strongly agreed that public transport should have priority over cars and 75% agreed or strongly agreed that traffic congestion affects the environment.”

The Greens’ Auckland Transport Policy, as drafted, is a response – and caters – to these very findings. Accordingly, it would seem that our stance on public transport, and the policy that goes with it, very much conforms to ‘the general public’s reality’.

In fact, this policy has been one of the most effective in striking a chord with Auckland voters.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

I agree with the post you’ve written above, particularly “..No pacifist society on earth has ever survived independently.” For a political party that is very realistic concerning the state of the environment the Greens are almost hopelessly naive about human affairs.

When you consider the political and social effects of Peak Oil, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that humanity is going to get nasty, and it’s going to reach for it’s weapons. The Great Depression and Weimar hyper-inflation were enough to get Hitler in power. How many demagogues are going to crawl out of the woodwork when we have a permanently contracting economy, falling standard of living, declining life expectancy and billions of people starving to death? Yet when I asked Jeanette about this at a meeting in Aro Valley, her reply was that the Greens would work with international institutions to resolve these issues. The same institutions that are powerless now and losing credibility every week. Sorry, but that’s not good enough. I’m a proud member of this party, but we need to sort our shit out when we come to some policy issues, and defence is one of them.

There are a lot of people out there who agree with our environmental message, they can see the writing on the wall. The task we have now is to widen our appeal to them, to gain their trust and maybe one day, their votes. We can do this by developing a full range of good, well thought out policies, and if necessary, by retracting some that are not so popular. The cannabis issue is a classic. I believe we should legalise it, but I don’t think the public is ready for it. If that’s the case, the Greens should not be wasting scarce political capital pushing this policy, and it was good to see that we had the maturity to beat a tactical retreat on this.

I think BJ is right, we could be more prominent than we are. The environment is gaining ground as an issue, and we will gain ground with it. But we can lose it if we are seen as naive, overly idealistic or just plain strange on other issues.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

I arrived 2 years ago and took 1.5 years to decide to join with Greens at all. I am full time and a half employed, have two children and a wife in Hospital… and corresponding here is about as much as I have time to do. Sorry if I seem detached. I have long term obligations to my children which I serve by trying to help the Green cause and short term obligations that limit my participation markedly. I espouse, necessarily, my own perception of what “Green” is and needs to be.

“Our policies are most unlikely to go into law without amendment”, and “Green policies can afford to be idealistic” are not ways of gaining a majority in parliament. We’re a fringe group and we want to stay that way? I do NOT think that’s the way to answer the 95% of the country that DIDN’T vote for us or the near-death experience we just had at the polls.

As for “quickly cobbling together policies”, there appears to be no effort even NOW to assemble a policy on defense. Greens aren’t interested in the subject, and appear to the rest of the country to be complete pacifists. I will observe to you a truth. No pacifist society on earth has ever survived independently. It either exists within the confines of a larger (and more belligerent) host or it is devoured by its neighbours. THAT is a reality. If you are in business competing with other businesses but you have no access to certain supplies because some idealist drew the line at trading with country X, they you go out of business.
THAT is a reality. Reality is what bites your leg off if you ignore it. Greens are realistic about the environment when almost nobody else is… and that’s why I am here. Greens tend to be less realistic about the rest of the world and that’s why they are only a fringe.

I don’t agree that we punch well above our weight. I think we do far LESS well than we ought to do, given the general population’s receptiveness to our core environmental message.

Consider how close we came to dropping out of Parliament completely and IN THE PROCESS throwing the election to National. That should not have been possible, and it was ONLY possible because most of the country perceives us as being unrealistic… or worse. That perception has more to do with our NON-environmental policies and issues than with anything that is really critical, and if we considered those as carefully as we consider our energy policy we might –

A. Have a complete set of them after more than 8 years
B. Have them conform more to the general public’s reality.

I doubt that I have fallen into any traps here Eredwen, but if I have you should consider that if I can’t find a true measure of this party after joining, having read the website thoroughly and debating with you all for the past 6 months, nobody can. That alone would be a clue… I don’t think that’s the case… but I DO think we are failing to accomplish what we could.

Being noticed and vilified well above our weight isn’t the same as getting something done that actually needs doing, or getting elected to office as we almost didn’t. Lessons from a near death experience are usually the most important ones…

I respectfully submit that the latest lesson reflects our lack of realism in some important areas. We can do better.

respectfully
BJ

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

You have a point. When negotiating with a street vendor you don’t pay the asking price, and politics is about negotiation. Perhaps the most important indication of pragmatism in our policies would be a willingness (now apparent) to negotiate them when the political process gets down to the short strokes…

I think that what worries some is the perceived possibility that government will, at the Greens behest, cut off some critical supply of goods or services by objecting to the nations we MUST trade with to obtain them… or do something similarly spectacularly bad with tariffs or tax. That we won’t consider the competitive handicap a policy puts on our business sector. That’s probably the reassurance that is most needed. That we WILL consider these things and negotiate around them.

That said, the principle that everyone must pay the SAME price for their use or abuse of the commons, and that the price must reflect the value of the commons to the community as accurately as possible, lies underneath almost all the strong issues we have. The problem is that Greens in New Zealand influence the actions of New Zealand… only. Businesses in NZ worry about their competitors who don’t face a Green leaning government.

respectfully
BJ

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

As you say, you didn’t get here till 2 years ago, and it appears that you don’t attend meetings ?

Perhaps this is why you are “describing” a Party and System that I certainly don’t recognise as “The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand”.

Green policies can afford to be idealistic … it is a very good place to start. Our policies are most unlikely to go into law without amendment.
We also don’t need to quickly cobble together policies for everything, and thus we take the time needed to do them well … (and not by having “someone writing a “defense” (defence) policy and someone writing an immigration policy”. We use a much longer, and very much more inclusive process.) As for “examining our existing policies for realism.” “Realism” is a very interesting word … Whose “reality” are you thinking of ?

Greens are “pragmatic” enough to realise that we will not be taking over the Government of this country next week … but we can and do have an influence! (A well respected political comentator told me not long ago that “the Greens Punch well above their weight”.)

I agree that “the policies that we do have don’t have to brand us as impractical and immature.” … I don’t believe they do, and they certainly don’t “ignore the imperfect world nor attempt to single handedly change it for the better …”

I believe that the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand has accomplished a great deal in the comparatively few years it has been around. Perhaps you might need to learn more about what has been achieved and how … and by whom (individual members, and the Party as a whole).

You appear to have fallen into the “left/right” trap. Green cannot accurately be measured in those terms … and yes in some ways we appear to be lefter than left (and in other ways righter than right!)

Also if we really “fail to accomplish what we are attempting to accomplish and we fail to accomplish the things we COULD accomplish” why are we noticed, and vilified “well above our weight” ?

“Lack of realism.” I don’t think so!

Whew! That was a mouthful!

Kia ora BJ!
eredwen

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Also had Rod claiming to be a bit extreme…

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Hell yes! Functionally, the TV news serves to format people’s thinking, to help form a shallow concensus. It’s impossible to think anything through and form your own conclusion, because they’ve moved on to something else before you’ve got a chance… The rare occasions I watch the news, I end up shouting at the TV within 5 minutes…

BJ :
I agree that the Greens should have policies on everything, but I disagree that we should have “reasonable” policies on everything :
Our trade policy contains not one jot of pragmatism and our policy on crime and prisons is not likely to win friends and influence people except the ones already IN prison.

… but I’m sure you’ll agree, it would be a good thing if the government’s prison policy and trade policy were inflected in the direction of GP policy. Pragmatically then, which is likely to be more effective in achieving this : negotiating with Labour from positions of principle, or watering down GP policy beforehand to make it Labour-compatible?

My opinion is that the GP needs to preserve a strong brand by keeping a large dose of idealism on display in its policies, while having politicians with good “soft skills” to negotiate the compromises. I am, all things considered, completely in love with the way this is currently handled…. your mileage may vary!

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

The fact that the Greens are prepared to deal with business in a positive sense is a huge step. This meeting was shit-canned by the corporate media. But the next one might do better, the one after that will and the one after that will do better yet.

If anyone should be scared it’s National and ACT. If the Greens can, if not win over, at least allay the fears of the business community, then they lose support from some of their staunchest supporters. Business will never love us, we emphasise other values ahead of economic growth and profit at all costs. But they may no longer loath us, and that is an objective worth working towards.

And every time the price of oil goes up, our case becomes all the much stronger.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)