ANALYSIS
The Green Party’s 2018 AGM should have been a celebratory affair.
In a wintry Palmerston North, Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage announced that she, as part of the first cohort of Green Party ministers in history, was starting work to reduce the amount of waste heading to landfill.
The party touted banning new offshore oil and gas exploration and revealed that, in the middle of the AGM, transport spokeswoman Julie Anne Genter had cycled to hospital to give birth to her first child. Co-leader James Shaw was joined by his new co-leader Marama Davidson and members thought back to the party’s AGM the year before when Metiria Turei revealed she had committed benefit fraud, the first in a series of dominoes that... long story... led to Dame Jacinda Ardern becoming Labour leader and then Prime Minister, all the while nearly destroying the Green Party.
At least 2018′s AGM wouldn’t be like that.
But there was a stench in the air... the stench of dead rat. As a condition of going into Government, NZ First wanted a “waka-jumping” law, which would give party leaders the power to eject from Parliament, MPs who left the party that brought them into Parliament.
The Greens hated it – they even hate the name, usually opting to calling it the “party-hopping” law, not liking the mocking tone of “waka jumping”.
The party’s founding co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons attended that AGM and spoke openly of her distaste for the bill, which had not yet passed. She and her co-leader Rod Donald were elected to Parliament as Alliance MPs in 1996 but left the party as part of the Greens’ withdrawal from that grouping to contest the 1999 election under their own banner.
The first iteration of the waka-jumping legislation, passed in 2001, was described by Donald as “the most draconian, obnoxious, anti-democratic, insulting piece of legislation ever inflicted on this Parliament”.
The problem for the Greens then was that it restricted MPs’ freedom of speech and the power they had to stand up to their leaders on matters of conscience. New Zealand’s Parliament is among the most tightly whipped in the world. Its MPs have very little freedom to depart from the party line already. Allowing leaders to boot MPs from their ranks at will only strengthens that power.
The Greens believed this as recently as 2021, when they supported a National Party Bill to repeal the waka jumping legislation they had been forced into passing.
Proponents of the legislation argue that in MMP, Parliaments and MPs – particularly list MPs – have a mandate thanks to their party, rather than any direct relationship between an MP and the electorate. For that reason, if an MP should distort the proportionality of Parliament by leaving their party, they offend against their mandate, rather than uphold the democratic virtue of freedom of speech.
Comments from Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick on Tuesday morning suggesting using the legislation to eject now-former Green MP Darleen Tana was not necessarily off the table, but no conversations about using it have yet been had, have piqued interest. The Greens’ historical opposition to waka jumping means that any consideration given to not not using the legislation is significant.
The ball is firstly in Tana’s court. She must first decide whether she wants to resign from Parliament or not.
History suggests she might think twice. Ex-National MP Jami-Lee Ross limped on for about two years after being booted from National, ex-Labour MP Gaurav Sharma left after a few months (ikely because he realised he could cause his former party more trouble through a byelection than by sticking around), and ex-Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere waited out the rest of the Parliament before retiring.
Political observers often miscalculate the importance of money in these decisions. For many, being an MP means reaching the peak of their earning potential – and for an unlucky few, leaving Parliament often means taking a hefty pay cut. Tana may choose to stick around simply because it is a good way to earn $170,000 a year while her husband sorts out his beleaguered bike shop.
Other ejected MPs kid themselves into thinking they can exact vengeance upon their former parties from the back bench. This is delusional. This week is likely to be the most significant of Tana’s political career. As time wears on, she will vanish from the limelight, and her ability to sling mud at her former party will diminish. Even a seasoned MP like Ross, who knew every trick in the book, failed to land significant blows on National after the week in which he blew up his relationship with the party.
Tana is far less experienced than Ross, and will have been privy to far less damaging information than him.
Should she choose to stick around, then Swarbick and her co-leader Marama Davidson will need to decide whether to waka-jump her.
They have fairly broad powers to do so, but will want to consult their members first (even though there is no requirement in the Green constitution that they do so). Consultation will be crucial to avoid a repeat of the fractious relationship Shaw had with members. Green co-leaders need to take members with them.
1News at 6pm reported yesterday that some members are actually on board with waka-jumping Tana, and may even put up a motion at the party’s AGM later this month. If that is the case, it would need at least 75% support, giving the co-leaders huge cover for their decision. This may yet transpire. The party detests waka jumping, but it also detests migrant exploitation. Members may see the hypocrisy of using waka jumping as a dead rat worth swallowing if it means enforcing the party’s standards against Tana.
The pity with debate about waka jumping is that it has mainly involved MPs who appear to have personally fallen foul of their parties for flawed actions and not by MPs taking a principled stand against their leaders.
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.
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