How did we do?

Published: October 5, 2005

by frog

All political parties will be conducting post-election reviews in the next wee while. I’d be interested in your views on what you felt the Greens did right, and what we did wrong. To get the ball rolling, here’s what Chris Trotter had to say about our campaign in today’s Independent:

Labour’s successful wooing of the student vote throws into sharp relief the general failure of the Greens’ election campaign.

As a long-time observer of Left politics, I estimate that 150,000 left-wing voters (5%-7% in terms of the party vote) remained politically inert as a result of the sheer ineptitude of the Greens as an electoral organisation.

Leaving aside its appalling billboards and its inexplicable failure to exploit the full political potential of the peak oil issue, the Green Party’s most egregious fault was its apparent indifference to the virtual collapse of its Auckland organisation.

In both the 1999 and 2002 elections Auckland had a vibrant Green scene – reflected in a level of voter support well ahead of the national average. By 2005, however, Green activity had declined precipitately and its level of support in Auckland had slipped below that of the other main centres.

Part of the problem lay in the general exodus of Auckland-based Green MPs and activists. Sue Bradford decamped to the far north, Metiria Turei to the deep south, Nandor Tanczos to Hamilton and key activist Catherine Delahunty to Gisborne. By the start of the campaign only Keith Locke remained in the Queen City to carry the Green banner.

There was nothing in the run-up to the 2005 election to match the anti-GE mobilisations of 2001/03. Peak oil offered so much scope for creative consciousness-raising but remained a purely academic exercise, with next to no resonance among Auckland’s hapless commuters.

Ironically, as the election campaign reached its climax, the price of petrol broke through the $1.50-a-litre barrier. Inexplicably, what any other party would have regarded as a gift from the gods, the Greens’ propagandists all but ignored.

Instead of painting themselves as far-seeing prophets with real-world answers for the harried motorist, the Greens allowed themselves to be demonised as car-haters and motorway postponers…

The Greens will need to move swiftly if they are to recover their radical mojo.

I disagree with much of what Trotter says here, but it’s a useful starting point. For example, what he says about Green support dropping in Auckland and among students is not accurate. It’s absolutely not true that the Green vote in Auckland used to be higher than our national vote but has collapsed since 1999. In that year, we got 4.7% of the Auckland vote, compared to 5.2% nationwide. This year, we got 4.8% of the Auckland vote, compared to 5.3% nationwide. So, barely any change. That’s not to deny that we need to better in Auckland. Of course we do. If the Greens are going to be the third largest party in New Zealand, then we need to do a lot better than slightly below 5% in the City of Sails.

Actually, looking at the difference between the Green vote in 1999 and 2005 (which is instructive for looking at regional changes, because of a similar base vote – 5.16% in 1999 and 5.30% this year), you see that the Green vote has become more urban: it’s rural and provincial Kiwis who have moved away, not city-dwellers. Compared with 1999, we did around 2 percentage points better in Dunedin, Wellington and Christchurch this time. Our votes in Auckland and Hamilton were pretty much exactly the same, and our votes in rural and provincial electorates dropped.

And, as for the student vote, our best electorates (in terms of the percentage leap in support from 1999 to 2005) are a roll call of electorates with big student populations: Wellington Central, Rongotai, Mt Albert, Dunedin North, Banks Peninsula, Christchurch Central, Mana, Palmerston North, and Dunedin South.

I’d also strongly contest the claim that the Greens didn’t try to make peak oil an election issue. Jeanette campaigned tirelessly on this issue and on transport but, far more often than not, the media ignored what we were doing. This happened to all third parties (bar Winston, who had more colourful ways of keeping in the headlines) in a campaign dominated by the two main parties.

In any case, having said all of that, I’m sure there’s lots the Greens can learn from Campaign 2005. As always, your ideas are welcome :)

UPDATE: Those regional breakdown figures I mentioned were based on the provisional results, not the finals. However, having done the full calculations now, the finals don’t tell all that different a story. We did much better this time compared to 1999 in Wellington (8.67% vs 6.12%), Christchurch (7.44% vs 5.74%) and Dunedin (8.00% vs 5.61%). we can probably thank students and urban liberals for that. We did pretty much the same in Auckland (4.80% vs 4.85%) and Hamilton (4.73% vs 4.75%) as we did in 1999. Our big losses, however, were in the provinces (4.45% vs 4.95%), rural electorates (4.78% vs 5.18%), and the Maori seats (3.32% vs 4.96%).

frog says

Published in Campaign by frog on Wed, October 5th, 2005   

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