Act and the Green Party share the same strategic challenge. Their ideology restricts their coalition choices: they can form governments only with National and Labour, respectively, but they need to grow their own vote to maximise their power within such a coalition, and most of those gains in support must be captured off the party they’ll need to govern with.
Both parties set about this goal by presenting themselves as more authentic versions of their larger centrist partner, but this is a delicate art. If their positions are too extreme the minor party can be used as a weapon to scare moderate voters away from either National or Labour and into the arms of the enemy ‒ the other major party or, even worse, New Zealand First. This fraught strategic environment is the motivation behind the recent attacks on the Greens and the bitter war between Act and National over David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill.
If there’s one issue that voters still trust the National Party on it is law and order. So the government could not believe its luck when Green MP for Wellington Central Tamatha Paul took to TikTok to denounce prisons, followed up by an attack on police and beat patrols at a university panel discussion, tripling down with an anti-police DJ set at a Wellington festival.
Right-wing lobby groups gleefully erected fake election billboards of Paul and Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick accompanied by the caption “defund the police”; coalition politicians fell over each other in their desperation to denounce the statements.
The following week saw right-wing political operatives uncover the dubious social media history of new Green MP Benjamin Doyle, wherein the nation learned the term “bussy” – a portmanteau of boy and pussy. This was followed by an online smear campaign baselessly accusing Doyle of paedophilia.
The Greens attempted to defend themselves by insisting that “bussy” was a deeply meaningful term to the LGBT community that had been taken out of context, and to lecture everyone on correct use of pronouns (Doyle refers to themself as they/them).
Strategic positioning
For the past 15 years, the Greens have solved the problem of presenting themselves as radicals while appeasing moderates via a moderate/radical co-leader combination: Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, Turei and James Shaw, Shaw and Marama Davidson. Norman was never especially moderate; he simply understood the value of playing one on TV, but Shaw was. His strategy in government was to be capable and boring, and in 2023, this led the party to its highest-ever election result.
This was a mixed blessing: the calibre of Green MPs has declined dramatically in recent years while their radicalism has risen: the more seats they win in the House the greater the threat posed by their own caucus to the long-term credibility of the party and future left-coalition governments.
The post-Shaw leadership team of Davidson and Swarbrick is a radical-radical combination and it has failed to find a way to be relevant on carbon emissions, water pollution, protecting native species and delivering a more egalitarian economy, preferring to indulge the less conventional concerns of the internal Green factions: abolishing prisons, deconstructing the gender binary, liberating Gaza. This, combined with a succession of scandals, has led to a decline in Green support over the past 12 months, despite ideal conditions for growing the Green vote – an anti-environmental right-wing government and staunchly centrist Labour leader. The party’s strategic incoherence has become a weapon for the right; grist for a scare campaign against the prospect of a left-wing government.
Hard to let go
David Seymour has a related problem. He always insisted that his intention for the now-defeated treaty bill (“cremated”, as Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka put it) was to “have the debate”, to put an uneasy topic on the table and provoke a national discussion about the nation’s constitution. His strategy – more or less openly stated – was that this debate would pressure National and NZ First into supporting his bill.
He hoped that the ferocious attacks from the opposition parties and the nation’s intelligentsia would play into his hands as right-wing voters rallied around him. National was never inclined to give Act a referendum to campaign on in 2026, which Seymour would use to peel even more votes away from them. Their tactic has been to adopt a small target, with Christopher Luxon saying as little as possible on the entire topic, an approach that has been advantageous for his party while diminishing his stature as Prime Minister.
Instead, Seymour came under attack from influential voices on the right, notably Matthew Hooton, Chris Finlayson and Jenny Shipley. They argued the issue had little support among voters on the right, that Act was unwinding decades of treaty settlements and undermining vital accomplishments in nation-building achieved by previous right-wing governments, as well as breaching conservative principles and dividing the country for its own political gain. Shipley warned the process could lead to civil war.
This was not the debate Seymour wanted. He resiled from disputing political theory with Hooton or constitutional law with Finlayson, remaining focused on the more theatrical resistance from the left, but this wasn’t enough. In the months that the bill has dominated the national discourse, Act and National have declined in the polls, NZ First has held steady and the grand winners from the debate have been Labour and Te Pāti Māori.
It’s difficult for Seymour to abandon this issue after loudly insisting that the treaty principles as they stand pose an existential threat to liberal democracy itself. Luxon has ruled out any referenda deals in future. Seymour is considering his options and pledged that he’ll have a new scheme for promoting the issue to take to the election.
He’s certainly correct that controversy around the interpretation of treaty principles will endure, but it will take another left-wing government that follows the trajectory of the Ardern years – promoting co-governance or even co-sovereignty – to make it relevant again. And that could take a while. Both Labour and National will be even more reliant on NZ First in coming years if Act and the Greens continue to let their enemies define them.
