Green Party Leader James Shaw talks with Tristram Clayton of NZ Herald Focus on Thursday night as a new poll puts the Greens on 7 per cent. Photo/Nick Reed
Green Party Leader James Shaw talks with Tristram Clayton of NZ Herald Focus on Thursday night as a new poll puts the Greens on 7 per cent. Photo/Nick Reed
Tonight's Colmar Brunton poll result has buoyed the Green Party, with leader James Shaw saying he is not concerned that they won't get over the threshold to enter Parliament.
In a Facebook Live Q&A with Herald Focus this evening, Shaw said he never took one poll as gospel, but that it was clear the election was "incredibly tight".
"Clearly the polls are all over the show. It's very volatile. So I just say you've just got to look at the trend, just got to go out and get every vote. That's all I take from it."
The two most recent polls have the Greens swinging wildly between forming a Government with Labour and being cast into political oblivion if none of their electorate candidates were voted in.
Tonight's 1News Colmar Brunton poll had the Greens polling at 7 per cent, which would make them the third largest party. Labour polled at 44 per cent - enough for a Labour-Greens coalition to govern on its own, without New Zealand First.
But Newshub's Reid Research poll on Tuesday had National on 47.3 per cent and the Green Party on 4.9 per cent - which would see National in power on its own and the Greens dropping out of Parliament completely.
The party does not have much in the way of internal polling but "actually from what I've seen we're doing alright", Shaw told Focus' Tristram Clayton.
He said it was now "entirely possible" that Labour and the Greens could govern without Winston Peters, and "that makes me very happy".
"We've always said we could work with him in a coalition but we don't want to be dependent on him because you just don't know what you're getting. Who is he going to go with, which of his various policies is he going to try and insist on?"
He was not concerned about reaching the 5 per cent threshold. "We are going to make that and, I mean, I have no real concerns about that."
His "primary obsession" for the next eight days was changing the Government.
Responding to a question about how the mood of the party had changed following co-leader Metiria Turei's resignation, Shaw said the party was running its strongest ground campaign ever.
In 2014's campaign the party made around 20,000 - 30,000 direct contacts with voters; this election they have already hit 130,000, he said.
Green Party Leader James Shaw talks with Tristram Clayton of NZ Herald Focus on Thursday night. Photo/Nick Reed
Questions from the Facebook Live audience also had Clayton ask Shaw asked about electric vehicles, solar power, the use of 1080, dirty rivers and legalising marijuana.
Shaw defended the party against one Facebook questioner who claimed the party had gotten "bogged down" in social issues at the expense of the environment.
"We got a lot of stick back in the early 1990s for being a single issue party. Nobody wanted just a single issue party that just focused on the environment," he said.
"Not that many people voted for us. So we started to speak to, what are the other concerns that people have got?"
