On the Green rollercoaster

By ANDREW LAXON

Lynne Serpe does numbers for the Greens. She likes to tell a David and Goliath story about how crunching the right numbers won a campaign she ran in the United States.

The 30-year-old American veteran of Green politics, who started campaigning fulltime at 22, had only US$30,000 ($61,475) to spend against her opponent's US$750,000.

But her team worked out that because of apathy and a recent election, only 30,000 of the 250,000 voters would bother to vote.

They used public records to discover the 70,000 people most likely to vote Green and blitzed them with door knocking, phone calls and direct mail. They scraped in by about 14,800 votes to 14,600 - because they identified their voters and went after them.

It's a tactic which works well for small parties, and the Greens have made good use of it in this campaign.

After they refused to support the Government if it lifted the moratorium on the commercial release of genetically modified products, their support soared from 5.3 per cent in March to a peak of 11.3 per cent in last week's Herald-DigiPoll survey.

However, today's snap DigiPoll survey shows support slipping back again to just under 7 per cent. Today's poll was of 500 voters, a smaller sample than in the usualHerald-DigiPoll.

At 7 per cent, the party could get at least eight MPs - one extra - on Saturday. A vote of 11.3 per cent would double its MPs to 14.

With Labour struggling to get an outright majority, the Greens could play a crucial role in the formation of the next Government.

Much will depend on whether co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons can hold Coromandel.

Fitzsimons, who radiates sincerity on television, scored 8 per cent in the preferred Prime Minister stakes before falling back to 4 per cent in today's snap poll.



For number crunchers such as Serpe, the figures get even more interesting when you look at who is voting Green. The party's own polling in March showed that 84 per cent of Green support came from people under 40.

A breakdown of last week's Herald-DigiPoll survey suggests that the party captured 19 per cent of these voters but still has only 6 per cent of those over 40.

Why are so many people, especially younger voters, going Green?

Genetic modification is the obvious answer, but there are other factors.

"They've got a targeted campaign which aims to raise issues which mobilise their core support," says Victoria University political scientist Tim Bale, who specialises in Green parties around the world.

"And that core support is young people, either in tertiary education or just out of it. They can afford to alienate or irritate middle New Zealand with their tactics."

Serpe believes the Greens have won support for their GM stand for two reasons. Voters feel they still don't know enough about the science, but they also back a party that stands up for its principles.

The Greens' campaign manager, Cate Faehrmann, a 31-year-old Australian Senate candidate and longtime activist in South Australia, also points out that the Greens, like NZ First, have gained tremendously from the National Party's collapse.

As Faehrmann puts it, this unusual campaign is not really between Labour and National - it is about who will govern with Labour, which gives minor parties unprecedented exposure.

This in turn leads to more success, as voters like to back a winner. Green research this year showed that many people, especially female Labour voters in their 20s and 30s, were considering voting for the party but wondered if it was too small to make a difference. Polls suggest that some are now convinced enough to come over.

The Greens have targeted their cynical, media-aware young voters with a carefully tailored package: well-designed anti-GM leaflets containing stunning nature photography, snappy but not overtly political slogans ("GE. Keep it in the lab") and a clever television opening that probably went over the heads of many voters.

The strategists say that didn't matter - those people wouldn't vote Green anyway.

The campaign is almost a mirror image of NZ First's advertising, which infuriates many younger voters with its simplistic promises to "fix" crime, immigration and the Treaty of Waitangi, but seems to be mobilising older, conservative voters in a similar way.

Green strategists stress that they are not just targeting niche voters at the expense of general advertising, especially as there is a downside to the GM uproar which has doubled the party's support.

Faehrmann is wary that voters could pick up on Labour's attack on the Greens as a "single issue party". So Green advertising, especially in newspapers, has also played a defensive role, reminding people of the party's wider agenda, from introducing a carbon tax to cutting student loans.

But largely thanks to Serpe, the Greens are finally catching up in this campaign with other parties - especially Labour and Act - in their use of computer databases of voters to deliver audience-specific messages.

The party is mailing 43,000 cards to one of its biggest target markets, all newly enrolled voters under the age of 37. On the front, a smiling Nandor Tanczos tells them: "Big ups for getting on the roll!"

On the back are three reasons to vote Green: no GM field trials, a universal living allowance for all fulltime students, and a ban on battery cages for hens and sow crates for pigs.

A similar card is going to all teachers, setting out the Greens' solutions to the teachers' strike and wider problems in schools.

The party wanted to send a similar message to all students, who make up a large chunk of Green support. It gave up because it was too hard to track down correct addresses, especially during a holiday period.

Candidates are also using the tactic at a more local level. Last Thursday morning, for instance, Waitakere candidate Meriel Watts (number 12 on the party list) doorknocked young mothers in the electorate to talk about GM-free food. Her list came straight from the database.

Getting the concerned-middle-class-mum vote is the second key part of the Greens' strategy.

Research commissioned by the party in March showed its existing support peaking at 25 per cent among 19 and 20-year-olds but its potential supporters were slightly older women who usually voted Labour.

Bale, who has seen the research, says it suggests that a large proportion of Green supporters are either in tertiary education or have been recently.

They do not earn much, but show a good deal of cynicism and media awareness (TV news and talkback radio get the thumbs down). This profile fits many students or ex-students in their first job.

Party researcher Roland Sapsford, ranked 11 on the party list, agrees, but argues that the Green stereotype of a young, hip, urban voter is simplistic. Low-paid workers, beneficiaries and some rural voters, including organic farmers, also figure in the survey.

Sapsford says the research also showed two other trends for the party. Support dipped sharply among the over-40s, picked up in the 50 to 60 group - which he expects is the "Values generation" from the 1970s - and disappeared completely after 60.

More encouragingly, the party, which calculated its overall support at 7 per cent, identified a potential 11 per cent gain among female voters aged 20 to 40 who listed Green as their second preference after Labour.

Sapsford and Serpe say these young women continued to vote Labour mainly because they liked Helen Clark. If their concern over issues such as safe food persuaded them to vote Green, the party could theoretically reach 18 per cent.

No one is sure whether the surge of voters telling pollsters they will vote Green on Saturday is made up of housewives, students or anyone else. Sapsford says his guess is a mixture of both groups, but Faehrmann says the Greens are not polling because they cannot afford it.

Bale also warns that the polls could be overestimating Green support because young voters are notoriously bad at enrolling. At last count, he says, 70,000 18 to 24-year-olds were still not on the roll and many others may not bother to vote.

Not surprisingly, Faehrmann disagrees. She claims polls usually understate the youth vote because young people often are not at home at night when pollsters ring.

Can the party avoid going the way of NZ First and the Alliance?

Opponents predict that the Greens' niche constituencies will disintegrate under pressure, especially if large numbers of unsuspecting middle-class New Zealanders vote for a party with radical and occasionally hard-left leanings.

The most obvious clash is over cannabis law reform, or as one Beehive watcher put it, when the soccer mums find they're supporting dope smoking.

Other issues could be less emotive but equally difficult. Green policies to make New Zealand farming completely organic by 2020 and turn 20 per cent of the coastline into marine reserve are unlikely to happen.

But they scare many farmers and fishermen, along with other businesspeople who find the Greens terrifying. Senior business leaders rated the prospect of a Labour-Green coalition at 2.2 out of 10 in a Business Herald survey this month.

The Greens have also been attacked for not costing their economic policies. Opponents say their proposal to introduce a $300 million carbon tax and $300 million diesel tax will go nowhere near paying for the party's promise to abolish tax on everyone's first $5000 of income.

But as Bale points out, for most voters these questions will not come up until well after the election. He sees this campaign as similar to 1996 - the last time when the economy was strong enough for voters to concentrate on quality-of-life issues rather than the state of their household finances.

Six years ago immigration got NZ First into Government. This year a mix of immigration, crime and Treaty of Waitangi issues is working for NZ First and Act, just as GM is helping the Greens.

Bale believes the biggest longterm problem for all small parties campaigning on quality-of-life issues lies not in their own policy but in circumstances largely outside their control.

It takes only a small economic downturn (predicted by some commentators as early as next year) for voters to refocus on their wallets, as in 1999.

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