Election 2026: Chlöe Swarbrick says Greens ‘rolling with punches’, ‘transparent’, as it issues another correction

Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick says her party is “rolling with the punches” and doing its “best to be honest, transparent people” in the aftermath of several economic bungles.

It comes as the Greens’ opponents, including New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, criticise the party’s economic credibility. Swarbrick, however, says the party’s tax plan is getting a warm reception from one unexpected place.

The Green Party has made a handful of errors this month, ranging from its entire tax plan being uploaded online hours prior to its official launch, to mistakenly claiming in a press release the Budget had a “$500 billion” hole.

There was also a mistake in the tax plan, counting $100 million of expenditure each year as revenue, which threw its costings out by $800m.

Now, the party has also had to correct a press release issued on June 4 that claimed the Government had increased funding for the KickStart Breakfasts programme, an initiative to give children a healthy breakfast, by “just $23,000”.

“That tells you everything about where this Government’s priorities sit,” the Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said at the time.

But Social Development Minister Louise Upston’s office says that’s incorrect and the programme has received a $234,000 boost per year.

“The Government’s contribution to the KickStart Breakfasts programme was previously $1.266m per annum, and was time-limited funding due to expire at the end of 2025/26,” a statement said.

“Budget 2026 increases funding to $1.5m per annum (an increase of $0.234m [$234,000] per year, NOT $23,000 as in the Green PR) and baselines this funding to support continuity of the programme."

The Herald contacted the Greens about the error on Tuesday and a spokesman promptly responded, acknowledging there was a “missing 4”.

“This release initially said $23,000 was allocated in Budget 2026 to the Kick-Start Food in Schools programme,” a correction now reads on the party’s website.

“This should have read $234,000. All other figures and text are otherwise unchanged.”

The error was found within a Greens press release saying the Government had “nearly halved funding” for foodbanks from $15m in the current year to $8m in the following years.

This year’s Budget established ongoing baseline funding for the Food Secure Communities programme, Upston said. It had previously been “time-limited [funding], creating annual uncertainty”.

It will start this year at $15m, which is a combination of new baselined funding to “maintain existing community food distribution infrastructure at the current level ($8 million per year)”, plus an additional $7m. It will then shift to $8m.

The Ministry of Social Development will monitor demand over the coming year.

Swarbrick told the Herald on Tuesday that politicians faced two options when a mistake is made.

“You’re either upfront and transparent about that and fixing it, or you try and hide it,” she said.

“We always opt for being transparent and upfront, sometimes to the extent that I think we make a rod for our own back in making ourselves fully available to all of you to answer absolutely every single question under the sun, and that’s just the way that we do things.

“Every single political party in this place has made mistakes in the past, so have journalists. This is rolling with the punches and doing our best to be honest, transparent people.”

Peters earlier said the Greens “cannot even add up properly”.

“$800 million out. The last time they made an announcement, they made a mistake between $500 million and $500 billion.”

Peters’ initial reference there is to the costings of the Greens’ total tax plan being wrong by about $800m.

The party originally counted its plan to give Inland Revenue about $100m a year to go after multinationals as a revenue measure, when it is actually a cost.

In the first year the total package would be in place, the party predicted all of its policies would bring in $5.35b net. But once you swap that $100m from revenue to expenditure, it is actually $5.15b. Over four years, that added up to an approximately $800m error.

Peters’ second point relates to a press release the party issued on June 8. The Greens were making an allegation about a hole in the Budget, which the title of the press release quantified at “$500 billion”.

This received some attention on social media, with the party later issuing a correction substantially reducing the hole to “$500 million”.

On Sunday, the Herald revealed the Green Party had accidentally uploaded its entire tax plan online early. The party said this was due to human error and brought its official launch forward in response.

Asked about the tax plan’s reception, Swarbrick told the Herald she had heard from an “Act Party voter” who had “loved the policy”.

“The experience that people are having of politics getting even more toxic and our society becoming ever more divided is absolutely caused by deeply extreme inequality,” she said.

“If we want to meaningfully arrest those issues as a country, then we need to tackle wealth inequality, and the only way to do that is through fairly taxing wealth and investing in our economy, our jobs, our creativity, our innovation. That is how you build a country.”

Jamie Ensor is the NZ Herald’s Chief Political Reporter, based in the press gallery at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. He was a finalist in 2025 for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.