Greens lay conditions on the table

By BERNARD ORSMAN

The Greens have outlined their conditions for going into coalition with Labour: the party must hold the balance of power, be able to negotiate a good coalition agreement and have enough MPs to make it work.

That means Labour will have to modify its stand on the commercial release of genetically modified organisms, co-leader Rod Donald said at a lively campaign launch in central Auckland yesterday.

Mr Donald said the party membership would need to be satisfied with the agreement and voters would need to support the Greens in droves.

Mr Donald told the Herald that the present team of seven MPs was too few to contemplate a coalition with Labour and a realistic target was 10 per cent of the party vote, or about 13 MPs.

That would give the Greens a handful of ministerial posts - but not the deputy prime ministership, which the Greens do not want - and a wider representation on parliamentary select committees.

A rolling average of Herald-DigiPoll, TV One-Colmar Brunton, UMR-Insight and TV3-NFO polls puts the Greens on 8.5 per cent. The latest Herald-DigiPoll recorded 9.6 per cent for the Greens. The Greens polled 5.16 per cent at the 1999 election.

Fifteen of the Greens' top 16 list candidates spoke at the campaign launch to give about 400 supporters a flavour of the parliamentary team if the Greens polled 12 per cent. After the seven MPs - at the top of the list - came faces representing the young, Maori and gays.

They included the co-president of the Maori Lawyers' Society, Metiria Turei, 22-year-old Hamilton student Cathy Olsen, and a Cambridge University graduate, Jon Carapiet, who is the spokesman for the lobby group GE-Free NZ. He is gay.

The launch coincided with the start of a hard-hitting advertising campaign by the Greens based on GM and safe food. A ransom note features in the first of the advertisements run yesterday.

It states that the country is being held to ransom over the release of GM and points the finger at Labour leader Helen Clark and big business for kidnapping the political process and dictating New Zealand's future. The advert asks: "Who is holding who to ransom over GE?"

In her campaign speech, co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons compared the GM debate with the acceptance of civil rights for blacks in South Africa and the United States, the inclusion of Maori in rugby teams and the understanding that New Zealand had better options for electricity than nuclear power.

"Every great truth is first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as self-evident," she said to rapturous applause.

Ms Fitzsimons said she was particularly pleased that one of the "mainstream" New Zealanders associated with the Sustainability Council - set up last week to call for greater caution on GM - was Professor Garth Cooper, a leading biochemist and prominent in the development of GM insulin.

She said Professor Cooper had debunked the science-versus-emotion claim by stating that the economic survival of the country should be a fairly emotional topic.

Ms Fitzsimons said the GM issue had got past being ridiculed and violently opposed and the last people to accept the truth as self-evident were Labour and National.

They had staked so much of their reputation on the release of GM that it was hard for them to reconsider.

"That's what the election is about - making them reconsider. If voters give Labour an outright majority then the issue will be out of the hands of Parliament and the people's elected representatives and into the hands of an appointed bureaucracy with a record of saying 'yes' to everything," Ms Fitzsimons said.

Mr Donald said New Zealanders faced a simple choice at the election: "Either they give Labour absolute power to rule without any checks or balances or they give the Greens enough support to keep the Clark Government under control and heading in the right direction".

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