OPINION:
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ re-ignition of the incinerator for policies he no longer likes – and the Green Party’s response to it – led to a very rare red and black on green attack this week.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Deborah Ngarewa-Packer took aim at Green Party co-leader James Shaw rather than Hipkins, saying she thought the Climate Change Minister should resign (either in disgrace or protest) for having allowed Hipkins to scrap some climate change measures.
Ever since the faux-challenge of his leadership last year – and his own pledge to fight for the grassroots issues more - Shaw is super-sensitive to any suggestion he does not push the Green Party line hard enough.
That is especially the case when it comes from an ally. Te Pāti Māori and the Greens hold the same positions on a number of issues. At least one of them, if not both, will also almost certainly be needed by Labour if it is to stand a chance of forming a government after the 2023 election.
Ngarewa-Packer had a point: Hipkins had acted in a bad faith by scrapping green programmes with no to minimum consultation.
But Shaw was less than happy with Ngarewa-Packer’s suggestion or others’ suggestions the Green Party should send a strong message by walking away from its cooperation agreement with Labour.
Shaw’s response was it might indeed send a message – but it wouldn’t achieve much. Not right now anyway.
In fact, a short-term tantrum now would be counter-productive in the long term.
Shaw will deliver his State of the Planet speech this weekend. His ultimate goal is to take the Greens to a place they have never been before.
That is around the Cabinet table and in a position to get more gains than was possible with NZ First in tow, or under the current Labour Government.
Shaw will tell the party faithful on Sunday that the only way to get back the things Hipkins has dumped - and to get more - is to get around that Cabinet table in numbers, and with a strong hand.
But it isn’t just the base he has to convince of that. It is the voters in the same places identified as key by former co-leader Russel Norman in 2006: the city suburbs.
Climate change is the issue that can work for the Greens with suburbanites while Hipkins and National slug it out for the cost of living motivated vote.
Those voters are the reason the party re-branded in the past to put behind its wild and woolly days.
But they need to be convinced the Greens will also offer stability. They too are getting used to the Hipkins leadership, rather than Jacinda Ardern’s.
What Shaw was setting out to demonstrate by turning the other cheek this week was that the Greens were a stable and predictable governing partner for Labour – and have been now for some time.
It is a pre-emptive strike against the likely Opposition attacks in the campaign against some of their more extreme policies.
Throwing out a co-operation agreement in a huff over a few projects just seven months before an election would do little to instil public confidence in that, no matter how much the Greens’ core base might applaud it.
Other than the contretemps with Te Pāti Māori, it was a very good week for the Greens. It gave them a chance to show that bread and butter was not the most balanced meal: a side of greens can’t hurt.
What is clear is that Hipkins’ shift to bread and butter issues has opened up breathing space for the Green Party in the climate change area again, after years of being starved of it by Ardern.
It gives them much more of a point of difference from Labour. Climate change was so central to Ardern’s agenda that the Green Party could not offer that. Hipkins does not have the same grasp on the issue as Ardern.
It now has its best chance to strengthen its position.
Whether it will recognise that and run with it is another question. One Labour insider said this could be a real “climate change moment” for the Greens – the risk was they would waste it by focusing on social policies instead.
It has had a promising start though. MP Chloe Swarbrick was the one who mounted the strongest criticism of Hipkins’ moves. She is not only freer to speak (Marama Davidson and Shaw are both ministers), but she is the face and voice they need for that suburban vote.
The accusations he has sold out on climate change won’t bother Hipkins too much.
The extent to which Hipkins has backed away from that has been over-exaggerated by some – as Shaw himself noted when he pointed to the things that were still in place and had made a difference.
The programmes he scrapped had marginal value – the stuff that is doing the real heavy lifting (the key architecture of the climate programme and the feebate subsidies for electric car buyers) remains in place.
The cost of living is the turf he has decided to fight on. On that, he has read the room and it was written in very large font.
In doing so, some have accused him of shifting away from Labour values to lurch to the centre ground.
But is Hipkins really the one shifting away from Labour values – or did Ardern do that, and Hipkins is now correcting course?
Is Hipkins simply now shifting back to the more traditional Labour values? Those were articulated by Norm Kirk in 1969 as “[people] have to have somewhere to live, they have to have food to eat, they have to have clothing to wear, and they have to have something to hope for.”
There is a time and place for great vision and aspiration - that may have been the case in 2017 when Ardern came along.
Where Labour started to struggle was when it continued with that even after that window closed: when Covid came along.
Hipkins has – quite rightly – judged a cost of living crisis is not the time for grand vision and aspiration. Vision-fatigue had set in, voters were worried about other things.
The total savings from all of Hipkins’ cuts are $1 billion – it is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, as National’s Christopher Luxon pointed out. But it is important in showing intent. All governments say they will dispense of things that aren’t working – few actually do it.
Hipkins spent a third of that $1b straight away: he announced Cabinet had overridden the automatic increase in superannuation and benefit rates by the average wage – and instead decided to index that to the higher 7.22 per cent of inflation.
The Greens liked that part of his announcement a lot more than the cuts.
And perhaps by way of making up for the slap in the face at the start of the week, Grant Robertson gave Shaw a little present at the end of the week.
Every week, Shaw has been asking when the Organic Products and Production Bill would make it to its first reading without getting an answer.
On Thursday, Robertson announced there would be urgency when Parliament next met in the last week of March. Among the bills put down to go through that week was the Organic Products and Production Bill.
He's facing five charges for alleged crimes over three days.