The Greens need to commit more crimes

The polling evidence is becoming more clear by the day. Steve Abel must rob a store.

For months, the Greens watched their vote share slip away like so much conservation land under the auction hammer. After peaking in the mid-teens following the 2023 election, the party’s polling average dropped to just under 10% this year, with the nadir arriving in the form of a 7% 1News-Verian result just before Christmas. But then, last week, hope. It arrived in the countenance of Talbot-Mills, specialists in corporate, social, and political research. “Lo,” said Talbot-Mills. “You are not actually that unpopular.” Its June poll had the Greens sitting at 13%, while another leaked survey told the same story, also putting the party up 3% to 13% support.

Non-Talbot-Millses are just as encouraging. Monday’s 1News-Verian poll had the Greens at, you will never believe this, 13%. The latest Ipsos issues monitor shows public confidence in the party has risen on every issue, from housing to the cost of living crisis. June’s Curia-Taxpayers Union poll has the party up 2%, while statistical wild child Roy-Morgan’s latest puts it up 1.5%.

What could be behind the turnaround? Is our everlasting economic malaise pushing people toward parties offering to change a miserable status quo? Could the electorate be clamouring for an income tax-free threshold or indeed a 0.06% levy on the liabilities of the big four banks?

No, a far more obvious correlation exists. Just days before Talbot-Mills started calling people, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson was snapped going 121km/h on the Waikato Expressway, where the speed limit is 110km/h. According to a rigorous Spinoff data analysis, that’s 11km over what’s allowed, putting Davidson in breach of the Land Transport Act 1998.

Crime immediately paid, slapping sweet political capital straight into the palm of the Greens. It’s not the first time either. Almost every time a Green MP has engaged in some light alleged criminality or become embroiled in scandal over the last few years, the party has polled strongly.

Elizabeth Kerekere resigned in 2023 after an investigation into her behaviour that began after she possibly sent some mean stuff about Chlöe Swarbrick to the party’s group chat. It went on to achieve its best ever result at the general election a few months later. Golriz Gharaman’s shoplifting scandal kicked off in January 2024. The Greens recorded 15.5% in Roy-Morgan later that month. Allegations of migrant exploitation at Darleen Tana’s husband’s bike shop broke two months later, in March 2024. Following weeks of blanket coverage of the scandal, the Greens crept up in the 1News-Verian’s poll, from 12% in February to 14% in April. Even less serious incidents have paid off. Julie Anne Genter got into a confrontation with a bike lane-hating florist in May 2024. The party kept trucking along nicely in the flowergate aftermath, hitting 14.5% in Roy-Morgan and 13% in 1News-Verian in June.

For the sake of balance, it’s worth noting there’s another way of looking at the data. Some might see this as a semi-ridiculous confusion of correlation and causation. Taking that view, we could see the link between Green crime and scandal and Green polling surges as a lesson in the futility of much of our political punditry, which regularly tries to interpret the moving numbers put out by our pollsters as a decisive verdict from the electorate on policy moves or current events.

We could end up concluding that trying to divine the minds of voters from poll results has all the reliability of lighting sage and conducting a seance on the grave of Keith Holyoake. We may begin to look askew at people who proclaim things to be “good” or “bad” politics or even popular or unpopular policy without any reference to actual data. We may start to infer that voters are weird and essentially inexplicable beasts, as likely to party vote NZ First and electorate vote Legalise Cannabis as they are to carry out any kind of coherent analysis of the current political landscape and the efficacy of the various policy propositions being put forward within. We might even begin to suspect that the world is chaotic, bizarre and mostly unintelligible and that all other people, no matter how precious they are to us, are ultimately on some level unknowable.

Thankfully that’s not the case. The way to interpret these poll results is that the Greens need to engage in more breaches of the Crimes Act 1961. Get out your wire cutters, Steve Abel, it’s time to rob a store. Set up a sophisticated scam, Lan Pham. Learn how to rob a bank or at least Larnach Castle, Fransisco Hernandez. There may be a short stopoff at Rimutaka on the way. But do this and the polls are clear about the end destination. You’re heading to Floor 9, The Beehive, corner of Molesworth Street and Lambton Quay, Wellington.