Challenge to James Shaw's Green Party co-leadership fizzles at AGM

James Shaw was re-elected Green Party co-leader at the party's AGM this weekend. Photo / Mark Mitchell

A co-leadership challenge to the Greens' James Shaw has fizzled, as Shaw was re-elected by a margin of 116 delegate votes to four.

The vote took place at the party's AGM this weekend, where co-leader Marama Davidson repeated her description of the National Party's recent rhetoric - from the He Puapua report to a call for a referendum on the name Aotearoa - as "dangerous" and "racist".

Shaw was being challenged by Dunedin activist James Cockle, who campaigned on "not just giving away polices that are akin to being Labour's little helper".

Cockle was hoping to get some support from the 15 per cent of party delegates who voted against the Greens-Labour cooperation agreement, whereby the party has two ministers outside Cabinet.

Party members are understood to have challenged Cockle in Saturday's meeting of the party AGM by asking him why he was the person to lead the party to rise from Labour's shadow.

The landslide result at the party's AGM this weekend prompted Shaw to declare it a symbol of the party's unity for its policy platform and the strategy of working with Labour.

Shaw used his speech today to reiterate the gains the party has won while supporting Labour, including the feebate scheme and climate change legislation.

He accepted they were "not perfection, we know that - but meaningful, lasting change".

To party members who thought the party had not gone far enough, he said: "No one should ever think that the hard work is not worth it because we don't get everything we want."

The party's AGM, which hosted about 150 party members in Upper Hutt, was mostly closed to media except for the co-leaders' speeches.

In her co-leader speech yesterday, Davidson hit out at the National Party's "dangerous, racist and classist political narratives".

"The ghost of Don Brash is haunting the National Party. It is lazy and dangerous politics we are seeing from the Opposition.

"They do not have answers or solutions to the big issues in Aotearoa, and so they are seeking to divide our communities."

She noted National's opposition to a new bill banning conversion therapy.

"That is the latest step in desperate attempts from the National Party that will make things worse in our communities, not better. It is abhorrent. We will not let it stand.

"We are here to push back against that type rubbish that threatens our communities who have been smeared for generations by people who hold power selfishly.

"And I have faith that what the Opposition is trying to do will not work. People do not want what the Opposition is selling."

Before the AGM, Shaw told the Herald the party was doing well despite not gaining much of a dropping Labour vote in recent polls.

The Greens won 7.9 per cent of the vote in last year's election, and in the latest Newshub Reid Research poll this week they were on 8.5 per cent.

Criticisms that the Greens haven't been loud enough or influential enough, if there was any truth to them, haven't seem to have translated to any loss in support.

Shaw said he believed the Greens could still pick up disaffected Labour supporters who didn't think the Government was doing enough in the housing, income inequality, climate change and biodiversity spaces.