James Shaw’s departure won’t wreck the Greens, writes Thomas Coughlan

OPINION

We only ask one question on our ballot papers: who are you voting for.

(Admittedly, in this country we ask that question twice.)

We don’t ask the far more interesting question, which is, “why”.

Good thing too. Not only is that question awfully complex (the splendid NZ Election Study asks that question, and finds that answering it takes years of work from some of our best political scientists).

It’s also, frankly, good for business. If we did know precisely why people voted this way or that, a lot of people in my line of work would be out of a job.

We try to make up why one party did well, and another didn’t, based on the best hard information we have to hand. The person with the most convincing theory, based on the best data, sort of “wins”, if you can call it that. The truth is, when you’re talking about millions of people making a private decision for their own reasons, you’ll never really know for sure why one person voted one way and another didn’t. All these theories are made up, despite some having far better factual foundations than others.

The hot topic at the moment is whether the Greens are headed for oblivion following James Shaw’s announcement he will resign as co-leader. The party will go left, go woke, and then go down apparently.

I don’t think so.

My theory for why the Greens are probably going to be fine is made up - you might disagree, but your theory for why the Greens will sink is made up too.

The theory goes that the Greens, without their token white chap in a suit, will shed the high income urban voters who like bushwalks, but are less keen on the wealth tax that might ensnare their Grey Lynn villa, or what the party thinks about Palestine.

These people are serious about climate change (cue prognostication about the loss of urban, climate-serious seats to the Teals in Australia in 2021), and would essentially like Shaw to serve as climate minister in red and blue governments until 2050.

There is one big problem with this. As the Greens have become more left wing, they have attracted more and more of these “urban liberal” voters. In 2014, the Greens ran on a relatively conservative fiscal policy of a capital gains tax to pay down debt. The party was disappointed when its support fell (albeit from a high point in 2011).

By 2020, and 2023, the Greens had ditched that for a far more radical wealth tax. The result was not a collapse in the vote in inner cities, but a raft of inner city electorates flipping Green, first Auckland Central, then Wellington Central, then Rongotai.

The person who made that happen is two-time Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick, who despite twice representing an electorate that includes the posher parts of the Auckland villa belt, is also the person who people argue would send these urbanites running back to Labour and National. Another of them is Julie Anne Genter who managed to flip Wellington’s Rongotai despite being one of the loudest critics of a new car tunnel through Mt Victoria that would link part of the electorate to the CBD, alleviating traffic. The person who won the electorate on the other side of the tunnel is Tamatha Paul, also an urban Green MP, and the Mayor of the city is Green endorsed ex-Green chief of staff Tory Whanau.

... it’s enough to make you wonder whether the Greens don’t actually have a problem when it comes to appealing to urban voters.

In 2023, the party’s hat trick of electorate wins was paired with the party’s best-ever performance in an election, winning its highest share of the vote, and largest-ever caucus.

The Greens’ re-emphasis of social and economic justice is a feature, not a bug. What unites the three electorates the party won this year? It is that they all have low rates of home ownership. Auckland Central has the third highest percentage of non-homeowners (renters) of any electorate in the country, Wellington Central has the 5th highest, and Rongotai 17th highest.

Unlike Labour and National, the Greens are not trying to find a middle ground between the home-owning middle classes and younger people locked out of the housing market. About a third of households don’t own their own homes, which is a fertile pond of available votes for the Greens. Labour has tried to shift the needle on tenants’ rights and landlords’ responsibilities, the Greens’ rental Warrant of Fitness (championed by Swarbrick), takes those policies far, far, further.

Labour and National will always need to modulate their housing policies to accommodate the majority of households that still do own their own homes, and fear things like intensification. The Greens, frankly, couldn’t care less - and New Zealand’s considerable population of renters appear to like that, and the challenge it poses to our contemporary Christatorship.

With home ownership unlikely to improve drastically in the coming years the Greens are well placed to continue performing well in urban seats. Christchurch and Dunedin’s Labour MPs should be worried, as should Mt Albert’s Helen White.

Now, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Opposition is destabilising, and leadership contests are inherently divisive. The party could very well implode no matter what direction the new leader takes it in. The new leader may lack what it takes to do the non-political aspects of leadership, the stuff that looks more like corporate HR. They might jump on the wrong issue (like Marama Davidson’s ill-fated attempt to reclaim the “c-word”). One of Shaw’s great strengths was in picking the right battles.

But if housing and economic inequality continue to be top of the agenda, which is likely, the Greens (I think) will continue to perform well, particularly in cities.

This problem was best put by former National Prime Minister Bill English in a recent Business Desk podcast, when he warned a wealth tax was inevitable if the housing affordability crisis went unresolved.

“If there isn’t progress on housing affordability then we will almost certainly end up with wealth tax and a comprehensive capital gains tax, because the people shut out of the market are not going to tolerate another round of house price growth, where they’re locked out just because of political settings around the regulation of land,” English said.

He’s right. It’s hard to see yourself as a conservative if you don’t feel like you have anything to conserve. It’s hard to care too much about a capital gains tax if you have no capital to be taxed. It’s a massive problem for Labour whose conniptions around taxation have accidentally seen it become the defender of capital.

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.