Hayden Munro: Grant Robertson's Budget may decide Green Party's political fate

Grant Robertson needs to deliver a politically balanced Budget to win the next election. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION

Strange as it may sound, in two months' time Grant Robertson will deliver his fifth Budget, and it's one that may well decide the political fate of the Green Party.

In the MMP era, New Zealand politics has been littered with the bodies of minor parties that have entered government only to see themselves turfed out of Parliament or reduced to rump status at the next election.

That's because being in government is often the worst of both worlds for a minor party – you don't have enough power to deliver all the changes your voters want to see, but you have too much power not to cop the blame when people are disappointed.

Ultimately, minor parties are dependent on how far major parties are willing to go in government, and that tension can be impossible to resolve.

So far, the Greens have been different, not only scoring above the 5 per cent threshold in 2020 but picking up an electorate seat and enjoying robust polling ever since - sitting on 9 per cent in the latest 1News/Kantar poll.

Ironically though, one reason for their political strength has been the relative weakness of their negotiating position in government.

With the handbrake of New Zealand First in the first term, and a majority Labour Government in the second, the Greens' support base has had to be realistic about what the party can achieve.

But those days are coming to an end - on current polling, if the Greens are to return to government at the next election, it would only be with expanded influence as a full coalition partner to Labour, perhaps supported by Te Pāti Māori.

Their supporters, having patiently waited through two terms of relative powerlessness, will rightly ask what is the point of a Green Party that doesn't make significant strides on climate change when it finally gets its hands on the levers of power?

And then the question will be can a Labour-led Government go far enough to make a difference?

The tough political reality is that to do that, Labour will need to show it can effectively sell climate action to the middle-ground voters it relies on to win government. And around the world, this hasn't been an easy sell - the fact is that most methods of lowering
emissions often mean rising costs for families already struggling to get by.

But in this year's Budget, Grant Robertson appears to be getting ready to take the bull by the horns - he's already signalled billions of dollars of new investments to bring down emissions.

Part of this is personal - climate change is exactly the type of big nasty problem that Robertson and Jacinda Ardern got into politics to solve.

But part of it is political as well - Labour knows that as tricky as it has been in the past, climate change is increasingly becoming an important issue for middle-ground voters.

And National has given the Government a gift this week with its call to reopen large swathes of New Zealand's coastline for offshore oil drilling – a move that makes the party look decidedly backwards on climate.

Robertson appears to be betting there are ways to get the political balance right here.

This week's announcement of half-price public transport fares felt like a preview of an approach that might work – yes it helps the planet, but it also helps voters' hip pockets.

If Robertson can find the sweet spot and deliver a Budget with the same type of balance, he'll be appealing to a swathe of voters that stretches from the environmentalist base of the Green Party right through to the mortgage belt of middle New Zealand.

It won't be lost on Robertson that this is exactly the coalition of voters that the centre-left will need to pull together to win the next election, and one they will need to hold together if his junior partner is to survive the term in government.