The Greens - making the intellectual running on the left

Friday, 20 June 2025

ANALYSIS: In Early May, the Green Party released an industrial strategy - a blueprint, it said, for getting industry going around the country. Then in mid-May, it released the “Green Budget”, a document which laid out a high tax, government-first vision for the provision of public services. Then on Tuesday it released its fiscal strategy, which took am at the Public Finance Act for taking a narrow, in in its view, outdated and “neo-liberal” view of government finances.

These papers were variously decried as “madness” and “clown show economics” (Christopher Luxon), “an absolute circus of an idea” (Nicola Willis), a manifesto of “Chlöe Marx and Marama Engels” (Winston Peters) and “left-wing Trumpism” (David Seymour).

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said that while some ideas may be appealing on the surface, taken as a whole, it was “unrealistic.”

The one that made the biggest splash was the Green Budget which proposed $80 billion in new taxes - including the headline-grabbing private plane tax. The party’s industrial strategy proposed a Ministry of Green Works and jobs creation scheme via a new government-backed forestry products industry in the central North Island.

In the space of a month and a half, the Green Party of Aotearoa has barrelled head-first into detailed economic, fiscal and industrial policy.

Its three policy papers have revealed an economic iconoclasm that it hopes will win more voters, and perhaps more importantly, introduce some ideas into the political water that may, over time, seep into the public consciousness.

“We've released three quite weighty, not only discussion documents, but quite substantive policy proposals,” Green party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick told The Post.

“We've put a number of solutions on the table, and part of the rationale behind that is, firstly, look, obviously, we are a really proud evidence-based party when it comes to kind of showcasing that the ideas that we have actually have serious weight behind them and are practical and implementable in the real world.”

Every party claims the mantle of being evidence-based when it suits, but the general vibe of it more seems to align with something John Maynard Keynes wrote 91 years ago.

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

The quote is often used to point out that ideas have their germination somewhere, and not everyone knows where they have come from. In addition to staking out immediate political territory, the Greens also want their ideas to germinate over time.

Consider the capital gains tax issue. In the political realm, former Green Party co-leader Russel Norman was pushing it well before it became Labour policy in 2011 - and it’s been in and out of favour, kicking around as an idea on the political left ever since.

While the Green Party’s voter universe may not be large, and it remains a party that about 90% of the country does not vote for, it is currently making the intellectual running on the political left. As Labour values unity and considers its timing around policy release, content with ad hoc criticism of the Luxon Government, the Greens have filled the ideas vacuum.

And the left wing environmental party is moving into territory once considered more populated by the left of the Labour Party: debt spending, industrial policy, various taxes, empowered unions. All overlaid with an environmental tinge.

Swarbrick, who will turn 31 next week and took over as co-leader in March 2024 when James Shaw retired from politics -and spent seven months by herself as co-leader when Marama Davidson underwent cancer treatment - hinted at her approach in her first speech as co-leader at a party annual general meeting in July last year.

“Let me be clear here. None of this means capitulating to the mystical and frankly made up ‘centre’ of politics. Reaching out and growing our movement doesn’t mean watering down our values. Quite the opposite,” she said.

But it is the strategic move into areas which seem well beyond the Green Party’s traditionally environmental roots and away from the environment and climate change that is interesting, drawing both admiration and praise. It’s about the temper of the time, Swarbrick says.

“At the moment, it is really, really challenging when people are struggling to put food on the table. How are you supposed to get people to care about the end of the world if they can't, you know, get the means together to put food on the table for the end of the week. So it's about having people understand that these issues are deeply interconnected.”

She also pushes back at the notion that it isn’t somehow Green.

“We experience a bit of a moral panic every few months let alone, every few years, about how the Greens are apparently - based on somebody else's prescription - quote, unquote, not green anymore.”

More broadly, climate change is not so much a policy area as a first principle through which all other policies should be viewed - undergirded by the Greens’ commitment in its charter to the principle of “ecological wisdom” (the other principles are social responsbility, appropriate decision-making and non-violence).

Swarbrick also says she is determined to try to rescue economics from its jargon to make it digestible for ordinary people.

In most of its documents the party has succeeded. The fiscal strategy less so, as it appears mostly designed for the econocrat class. It’s pretty difficult having a technical discussion about the Public Finance Act without using the terms involved.

In any case, the effect is the same - while in a policy sense the Greens have got away for an early morning run, the Labour Party has barely got its pants on. More worryingly for Labour is not that it hasn’t developed a bunch of costed policies, but that it hasn’t decided yet what its next iteration in government really looks like - and what it believes.

But there are some important caveats to the Green push as it relates to Labour. It is politically much easier for the Greens to get in and make detailed policy than for the Labour Party. Whereas the Government would devote time and resources into really tearing down any plan Labour made long in advance of the election, the Greens just get generally denigrated. The second is that Labour, like National, still aspires to be a broad-based political party - and can only win office when it is.

So its policies need to balance far different constituencies more than the Greens, ACT or Te Pāti Māori which can hone in and try to maximise their voter base within a smaller corner of the voting public. This is true both within its caucus and out of it.

Nevertheless, the Green Party’s ideas are out there and are currently the only well-developed and concrete plans on the left. When asked if she would like Labour - who the Greens need to perform well to have a chance at reaching government to adopt some more of these sorts of policies, she said she couldn’t speak for Labour.

“I’ll tell you what I said when I was asked about how we were the only party on the left who was willing to engage in the debate meaningfully on the cannabis referendum in 2020,” she says.

“I can’t speak for any other political party, but I can tell you that the reason that I’m in the Greens is because I’m proud that we have the courage of our convictions. So we are unapologetic of setting the debate. We know that comes with, you know, relentless attacks from those who are profiteering from the status quo, but we’re more than happy to have that fight because New Zealanders need somebody to have it.”

Swarbrick says that it is a part of a strategy to set the agenda and prosecute Green ideas, even if does mean being attacked.

“At the Green Party AGM last year, you know, I gave a pretty straight up speech to party faithful about the fact that I spent the better part of a decade trying to get people to care about issues,” Swarbrick says.

“The evidence is really important for informing the public debate, but ultimately, what it's going to take is not only convincing those experts, but building the trust of regular New Zealanders.”

She also wants to use the coming months to hit back at what she calls the “mysticism” that surrounds economic policy. And the Greens will clearly continue to make policy with the underlying assumption that the system is crook and has been rigged to favour corporate interests.

“It's about resources and it's about power, and it's about who gets to make decisions that saturate and shape our daily lives. So if we help people understand how economics actually works, the power that it reflects, and the kinds of choices that we can make collectively, they think that we have a far more democratic country that we're operating within.”

This week’s The Post/Freshwater Strategy Poll shows that Green polling remains pretty steady, while Labour’s continues to inch up off the back of voter grumpiness around the cost-of-living.

At some point, Labour will have to make some decisions and put some stakes in the ground. Until then, expect more of the same from the Greens.