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.
OPINION
People are interested in only one person really as the Greens gather in Christchurch for their annual meeting,and that person isn’t even a Green any more.
Despite the myriad topics the Greens want to talk about – and Greens like to talk even more than most political party members – the big story is former Green, now independent MP, Darleen Tana.
It’s not so much Tana, however, that’s the story, but what to do with the MP, specifically whether the party plans to be the first to make use of the new “waka-jumping” law – which as recently as 2021 the Greens were trying to repeal.
U-turns are a big deal for any party, and while every party prides itself on its principles, no party prides itself like the Greens. That makes this decision more painful than it might be in another party – unless, that is, the party can argue its way into thinking that Tana’s misdeeds were so odious that it is upholding one principle (defending the rights of migrants) by compromising on another (the historical opposition to waka-jumping legislation).
Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick and the party have pencilled in time for discussion on Saturday, rearranging the AGM schedule to ensure members had a chance to discuss the Tana matter. An announcement of the outcome is likely on Sunday.
Former Green list MP Darleen Tana in their seat at the back of the debating chamber, known as Siberia. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The discussion is likely to be a listening session, with members getting a chance to voice their angst at the caucus.
The Greens have rules about “consensus” decision-making, meaning any call has to have a consensus of delegates behind it or 75% if it is taken to a vote. No vote is scheduled for the weekend.
The likely outcome isn’t that a vote is taken or a decision made to waka-jump Tana, but that members agree on something of a roadmap to decide what happens next, which could be to use the waka-jumping law to eject Tana from Parliament.
Swarbrick told the Herald information about the Tana discussion went out to members and delegates who were going to the AGM this week. There was no remit “per se”. People would not be “pushed” to take a quick vote on the matter.
“It will be a discussion and basically laying things out and putting it on the table,” Swarbrick said.
“As to as to what that process unfolds like, it very much is the will of the party,” she said.
Already this has caused some controversy. It appears only delegates physically present can take part in that part of proceedings, frustrating those who had not planned to make the journey. The administrators of the popular “The Green Room” Facebook page, where members discuss party politics, have had to stop accepting Tana-related postings, with many members venting frustration they cannot be in Christchurch to take part.
What appears to be motivating the pro-waka jumping camp is a desire for justice (always strong in the Greens). The Rachel Burt report into Tana’s conduct was damning and Tana losing their job as an MP would be a fair punishment.
Illustration / Guy Body
This side can’t articulate what the Greens gain for the cost of compromising to boot Tana from Parliament beyond one additional MP and the return of some parliamentary funding.
There may also be another principle at play. It helps to think about the “electorate” of Green delegates who will drive this process, if not actually vote on whether to pull the trigger. These delegates are people who volunteer time and money to win as many Green seats in Parliament as possible. They have little love for a low-ranked MP occupying a seat they regard as their own simply because that MP can’t find a better job elsewhere.
The “let Tana stay” side calculates that the politician’s best days as an MP are behind them and the MP no longer poses much of a threat. Having returned to Parliament, Tana is no longer of any interest to the public, or the media.
Previous waka-jumpers, like National’s Jami-Lee Ross, were seasoned MPs and could plausibly continue to mount attacks on their former colleagues given their inside knowledge and parliamentary experience. Tana has neither of these things and even if they did, Ross’ example shows all the dirt, experience, and effort in the world often isn’t enough to dent an established party’s popularity. Public interest in Tana is waning so quickly that this week the MP had to change pronouns from she/her to they/them to get in the news (and there are only so many times you can repeat that).
Swarbrick might be helped, rather than hindered, by the party’s Byzantine constitutional structure. Altered in 2022, the new structure gives a great deal of power to Te Rōpū Pounamu, the party’s organisation for Māori, and a small number of “lived experience networks” (groups for women, LGBT+, disabled and similar groups).
Formalising these structures might seem unwieldy to other parties, but in the Greens it means that for better and worse (and sometimes it is for worse), the leadership, caucus, and members, both Māori and non-Māori, are probably kept closer together than they would be in other parties. Swarbrick says she has been in regular contact with these networks, as she is obliged to be.
“I think that’s one of the benefits of the way that we do things with the Greens is that we need to do things alone and that means more sustainable and more robust decision-making because you really had to check and look yourself in the mirror before you get to making that decision,” she said.
Swarbrick might be helped by the fact the recent constitutional changes have neutered some of the more disputatious networks. The 2022 changes formalised the roles of lived experience networks in part, giving them greater power than other networks without a formal role, like the Green Left Network, a leftist grouping which challenged the party’s support of the Budget Responsibility Rules, or the De-Growth Greens Network, which argues that curbing economic growth is essential to saving the planet and fulfilling the party’s charter principles.
Greens co-leader Marama Davidson is on leave battling cancer. Photo / Mark Mitchell
These groups, which were powerful when the Greens were in government, have been neutered by the 2022 changes, which saw members’ attention shift to lived-experience networks as they gained more power and influence. Of the networks that helped oust former co-leader James Shaw at the 2022 AGM, only the Young Greens remains a force, in no small part because it is technically a lived-experience network itself.
Membership in some of the others has dropped. Many of the people who agitated for more radical positions, including ousting Shaw, have moved on.
Besides Tana, the party has a couple of other big things on its agenda.
It has to remember Faʻanānā Efeso Collins, the much-loved MP who died suddenly this year. The party needs to confirm its key office-holders, including Swarbrick and Marama Davidson. Davidson, though on leave battling cancer at the moment, must have her co-leadership confirmed by a vote (she’s expected to retain it, and has recorded a video for members).
Swarbrick is the de facto leader of the party until Davidson returns. It’s not unprecedented. Shaw’s period as sole leader between Metiria Turei resigning and Davidson being elected, during which he fought an election and formed a Government, was ultimately good for his leadership as this period might be good for Swarbrick.
She will give two speeches at the AGM. The first, on Saturday, Swarbrick says, will look at the party’s “history” and “values”. The second, on Sunday, will be more focused on the present and criticisms of the Government.
The first speech will ultimately be “making the point that if we are to live up to our own dreams of growing as a party, then we have work to do,” Swarbrick said.
“It’s an important time for us all to regroup and to focus on the task at hand.”
Does that mean a recognition that the party, and in particular the party’s caucus, have let the movement down in the past year?
Maybe not quite that far.
“It makes the point that all human beings are fallible and that my experience in politics in the last seven years has been very, very profoundly that everything is made up. I never saw that more acutely than at the time in which policy was being made at pace during Covid-19,” Swarbrick said.
“We came up as a grassroots movement, originally with our roots in the Values Party, formed in Vic Uni. I was born two years after the Green Party officially was formed.
“Time continues to march on, we continue to grow. That growth can sometimes be uncomfortable, but if we want to be the biggest party on the left, then there is work to do when it comes to growing and entertaining and working through ever more diverse opinions, and... then it takes effort, and it takes looking in the mirror – at all levels of the party,” she said.
The trouble for many members at the moment is that when they look in the mirror, it’s Tana – and the roll call of recent scandals – that looks back.
