Chloe Swarbrick, who is standing in Auckland Central for the Green Party, has risen to third on their list. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Chloe Swarbrick, who is standing in Auckland Central for the Green Party, has risen to third on their list. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Chloe Swarbrick's had a huge promotion in the Green Party and now outranks two ministers and an under-secretary.
She's now third on the party's list, released today, behind co-leaders Marama Davidson who's first and James Shaw, who's second.
After her 2016 Auckland mayoral campaign, Swarbrick was recruited by the Greens and scraped into Parliament at ninth on the list.
She's since made a name for herself addressing mental illness and on legalising cannabis and will go head-to-head against new National Party deputy leader Nikki Kaye for the Auckland Central seat.
Shaw said Swarbrick's substantial rise was a sign of the profile she'd made during her first term in Parliament.
Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter holds on to her fourth position, Justice under-secretary Jan Logie moves up one spot to fifth, Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage slides two spots to sixth and MP Golriz Ghahraman moves up one spot to seventh.
Current MP Gareth Hughes will stand down at the election and Swarbrick will take over his role as caucus strategist and party whip - or musterer as the Greens call it.
Rounding out the top 10 is former mayoral candidate and climate campaigner Teanau Tuiono, LGBTQ+ scholar Elizabeth Kerekere and poverty anti-poverty campaigner Ricardo Menéndez March.
Dr Elizabeth Kerekere is ninth on the Green Party list. Photo / NZH
Shaw said it was the most diverse list they'd had for a long time.
"It's a really strong and diverse group of people and I think it looks like modern twenty-first century New Zealand. I'm really pleased."
"I'm quite pleased about that because the Greens haven't always had the most diverse list."
The list ranking is voted on by members in two different stages - first by delegates and then by all Green Party members. Voting was completed before last week's 1 News Colmar Brunton poll where the Greens slid to 4.7 per cent which would see them out of Parliament.
Shaw said he was "pretty confident" they'd do even better than the challenging 2017 election where they won eight seats with 6.3 per cent of the vote.
"You have to remember right now with the Covid crisis, the Prime Minister's profile is stratospheric and so I'm actually very pleased we're holding up our core vote in the face of the operating environment when the attention just is not on us.
"I think we're doing pretty well to hold that together."
Teanau Tuiono, lawyer who worked for the United Nations, is standing for the Greens in Palmerston North and is eighth on the list. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
Having a track record in Government for the first time which they could point to on the campaign also worked in their favour, said Shaw.
But they would now have a tough competitor in the new National Party leader Todd Muller.
"[His leadership] is a good thing for the National Party and I think the Government's got more of a contest on its hands than it did a week ago.
"I think that he's a person with integrity and dignity and decency and I think he'll be a tough opponent in the campaign to come."
The Green Party conference will be held online on July 25, after being organised in the face of possible lockdown restrictions.
That would come at the expense of the usual media interest of a traditional AGM conference and Shaw said they'd have to make up for that "in other ways".
The Green Party previously ruled out working with National under Simon Bridges and Shaw said it would be up to the party membership as to whether that would be reviewed with Muller in charge.
Though Shaw said he saw it as an "unlikely scenario" for the party to be offered a better deal on climate change, protecting nature and reducing inequality than with Labour.
