Darleen Tana’s future addressed at Green Party press conference in Christchurch

The Green Party will decide whether to eject former Green, now independent MP Darleen Tana from Parliament at a Special General Meeting (SGM) on September 1.

At the party’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Christchurch this weekend, members decided to support a caucus proposal to hold a special meeting in a month’s time where party delegates could vote on whether to use the waka-jumping law to oust Tana from Parliament.

Since quitting the party after a report into involvement with alleged migrant exploitation at their husband’s business, Tana, who has begun using they/them pronouns, has sat as an independent MP.

Swarbrick and co-leader Marama Davidson said they had written to Tana asking them to stand down.

But they would not write to the Speaker seeking the removal of Tana unless they had the clear support of the party membership. The party has repeatedly called on Tana to quit of their own volition.

Davidson tried multiple times on Friday to get hold of Tana to seek their resignation but was not successful, Swarbrick said. The party wrote to Tana again on Sunday morning.

“We will only progress with the use of the law, with the backing of our MPs and members,” she said.

Swarbrick said 200 delegates would decide on what path the party takes. She hoped for a unanimous decision but said 75% support among delegates was the threshold.

Tana had been given 21 days to respond to the co-leaders’ letter, as is required under the waka-jumping law. It means if the Greens do decide to invoke the legislation after September 1, Tana will be gone from Parliament relatively quickly.

Former Green list MP Darleen Tana. Photo / Mark Mitchell

While her party had started the formal process of removing Tana under the party-hopping law, Swarbrick said it would not proceed in using the law without the full backing of the party.

She said this initial step did not require a vote from members – but added that some members had expressed concerns about using a law that the party had traditionally opposed.

Asked about the feeling among members, Swarbrick said: “There is a general sense of relief in that we now have a process to make this decision.”

Swarbrick conceded the the process was slow and joked that the protracted debate over what to do with Tana was “one of the most Green Party things in the world”.

“We have set up a process in which to make a decision our membership has been brought along for the ride in terms of how we go about setting up that process in the first place,” she said.

She said the Greens’ historical opposition to party-hopping laws was based on concerns about too much power being concentrated with political party leaders. She said the Tana situation did not raise that specific concern.

”Let me be clear – this sucks,” she said. “This is not something anyone... wants to be dealing with.”

Tana was not the only item on the agenda yesterday. New Green co-leader Swarbrick challenged her members to help deliver on her campaign promise to grow the party into the dominant force on the left of New Zealand politics.

At the AGM – her first as co-leader and one which she led alone after co-leader Davidson took leave to battle cancer – Swarbrick challenged members to “look at ourselves in the mirror and consider whether we want to evolve as a party”.

She challenged the party, which prefers the principles of consensus to those of compromise and often fails to value the importance of moulding itself into a larger and more powerful political force.

“There’s no point in us knowing we were right if we’re left clinging to our mountains of evidence when the last tree is cut down. If we believe the country needs us, we need the people of this country with us,” Swarbrick said.

She paid tribute to Green co-leaders of the past, saying the party needed to “remember and celebrate those who helped get us to where we are today”, but she urged members not to be bound by that history.

“Right here and right now, we are the ones making that history,” she said.

While there were any number of issues to which Swarbrick could be alluding, only one appeared to be on most people’s minds: whether to compromise on the party’s longstanding opposition to waka-jumping laws in order to eject Tana from Parliament.

Swarbrick was coy about this interpretation of her speech when speaking to media, but conceded that references to the public losing their trust in politicians when they don’t “come through with what they’ve promised” could be read as a reference to Tana.

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.