Green Party flexes its muscle for “partnership”
February 23rd, 2012
The Green Party is sounding confident, not to say cocky, in the wake of the publicity coup it scored at the expense of Speaker Lockwood Smith over financial support for profoundly deaf MP Mojo Mathers. It carried this spirit into its conference at the weekend where co-leader Meteira Turei stressed her party’s success in last year’s election meant its relationship with Labour has to be one of “equals.” She is firmly staking out the ground for “partnership” rather than the support role the Greens had to play through the long years of the Clark Govt.
But the assumption the Greens are a growing force, rather than just a fringe player, may prove illusory if onetime Labour voters who switched to the Greens last November shake off their disillusionment with the Goff-led party and are drawn back to Labour under David Shearer’s banner. Many of the causes championed by the Greens in the past have proven to be politically evanescent (think genetic modification).
The problem which the Greens will have to resolve is how their core belief NZ can have a free lunch at the expense of the rest of the world is to be reconciled with the hard reality the country is an international trader which has to earn its living in the face of stiff competition.
Turei says the Greens do not agree with Labour’s “continued pursuit of economic growth in the face of declining natural resources and climate change,” and “their pursuit of free trade agreements that undermine NZ land, assets and jobs.” So with the Greens and Labour pulling in opposite directions, how would a partnership between them work?
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Duncan Cotterill