Bruce Bisset: Memo to the Greens: Get Active!

By now my many Green friends will doubtless be howling, but I'm not repentant, says Bruce Bisset. Photo/File

Being Green is tough. Because no matter how many positive steps you take to make the world a better place, there's always someone else who doesn't care and willingly continues to muck it up.

The angst at the antics of what often seems an insensate mass of polluting humanity can be enough to make you want to pull your hair out. Luckily, I have plenty, although it's starting to wear thin.

A good part of the reason it's thinning is because the very people you expect to be walking the talk with in-your-face environmentalism, the Green Party, seem to have if not forgotten, then pushed to one side, the valuable grass-roots processes of activism.

See, in case you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of a crescendo of crises.

Water scarcity and degradation, fossil fuel fouling and greenhouse gases, ocean acidification and sea-level rise, biodiversity loss and species extinctions, insidious microplastics, superweeds and antibiotic-resistant diseases, toxic chemicals of all sorts in everything, global warming, climate change, and on and on and on.

So many problems, it's no surprise people seem numbed to this reality. The Greens among them.

Look, I know Green MPs and party stalwarts work harder than anyone in politics trying to bring these realities out and talk the public into supporting efforts to address them.

They're stumping up and down the country constantly, holding meeting after meeting.

The party tactic of endeavouring to make environmental issues a mainstream debate by engaging "middle New Zealand" is slowly, working because it's probably easier to get into an argument about environmental crises than any other topic.

Great. But in the process of that engagement, the party itself has become muddled into measuring "success" not by how well you act but how well you present; the pair of comfortably-raised intellectuals who co-lead it are evidence of that.

As much as I have said for years that Labour needs to be greened, and that a partnership Labour/Green government is the obvious foil to the right-wing's shenanigans, this election's arrangement comes across more as an "accessorised Labour", with the Greens as a trendy handbag, than a linking of arms between two distinct characters heading in the same direction.

This was inadvertently emphasised when male co-leader James Shaw told a news conference the parties were "merging", when he meant to say "not merging". Freudian? Rather.

By now my many Green friends will doubtless be howling, but I'm not repentant.

Just as Labour did in the '80s when it turned from unionism to neoliberalism whole hog, the Greens seem determined to ditch activism in order to make themselves palatable to "centre" voters.

Well, here's the news: it's not working because they're losing more than they gain.

Oh, don't get me wrong. We badly need a Labour/Green government and I sincerely hope we get one.

But now when people think of environmental activism, they think of Greenpeace, not the Greens.

When they discuss political change, they talk about the activism of Mana, the populism of NZ First, or (God help them) the dubious double-dealing of the Maori Party or the rank opportunism of TOP. They don't talk as much about the Greens, not in terms of serious support.

I write this column because I'm a Green, and I see my party sleepwalking its way to 7 or maybe 10 per cent at best come September.

It should be on 20 per cent, or more. There's enough crises happening to drive it there. But that won't occur unless it rediscovers some mongrel and reclaims its spark and its pro-environment leadership.

Get urgent, get loud, get active, greenies. We're out of time.