By Chris Trotter*
The exposure of Elizabeth Kerekere is at once trivial and important. That members of the same political party can harbour intense dislike for one another should surprise no one. As the Nineteenth Century British statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, famously quipped: “No, Mr Speaker, before me sit my opponents. My enemies are seated behind me.” That the full measure of a member’s dislike may occasionally surface in view of the public is equally unsurprising – no matter how amusing its expression. What is indisputably important, however, is when the inadvertent revelation on internal party animosities reveal ambitions and machinations serious enough to affect the future political course of the entire nation.
Elizabeth Kerekere is not only an ambitious politician, but also, within the confines of the contemporary Green Party (of which more later) an effective one. To rise from an unwinnable nineteenth ranking on the Green Party List in 2017, to ninth position (and a parliamentary seat) in 2020, to a provisional ranking of fourth in 2023, indicates a willingness to exploit the dynamic internal divisions currently racking the Green Party. Kerekere’s leadership role in securing the passage of the legislation outlawing so-called “conversion therapy”, coupled with her ground-breaking academic research into takatāpui (a Māori person who is gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender) strongly suggests an ideological orientation towards the Greens ultra-radical faction.
Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, explicitly identifies Kerekere as: “someone who has been rumoured to have been positioning a far more extreme woke clique within the Greens”. The accidental release of Kerekere’s chat-group criticism of fellow Green MP Chloe Swarbrick – “omg what a cry-baby” – is characterised by Bradbury as “messaging co-conspirators who are involved in manoeuvring a new co-leadership team of Kerekere and Ricardo [Menendez-March]”.
Menendez-March was born in Mexico to a Mexican father and a New Zealand mother. Returning to New Zealand with his mother, Menendez-March first entered the political arena as a serious player when he became the convenor of Auckland Action Against Poverty. An articulate and resourceful advocate, he was unsparing in his criticism of Jacinda Ardern’s failure to deliver on her promise to dramatically reduce child poverty and homelessness in New Zealand. Ranked tenth on the Green Party List, Menendez-March entered Parliament one place behind Kerekere in 2020.
With neither Kerekere nor Menendez-March susceptible to the increasingly disqualifying “Cis” prefix (she being lesbian and he gay) and with both MPs being considerably more comfortable espousing radical cultural ideas than most of their Green Party caucus colleagues, it was hardly surprising that they should find themselves cheered-on by the two Green Party “networks” at the core of the ultra-radical faction – the Rainbow Greens and the fervently anti-capitalist, Green Left.
Adding a further wrinkle to this factional manoeuvring on the part of the “ultras” is the overlap between party activists on the one hand and parliamentary staffers on the other. Well-resourced and supremely well-located at the very centre of political power, these staffer-activists appear to have been extraordinarily successful at lifting their preferred parliamentary candidates into winning positions on the Party List. Undoubtedly there are some within the Greens who blame these radical apparatchiks for the fiasco surrounding James Shaw’s re-election as Green Party co-leader in 2022. Inevitably, less radical Greens will also blame them for Kerekere’s dramatic rise from 9 to 4 in the List rankings.
Those familiar with left-wing political history will object that all “big change” parties have their ultra factions. No matter how fierce they might appear, however, the radicals’ numbers are so small that, should they be foolish enough to force key policy issues, a huge moderate majority stands ready to slap them down. The question is: has the Green Party still got a moderate majority? Or, have the Greens – always a very cliquey outfit – undergone the same degree of membership burn-off that has undermined so many “progressive” organisations? There is a degree of emotional violence in highly-motivated radical activists that only the most robust spirits are either willing or able to face down.
The Green Party of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, within which the principal ideological divide fell between the radical environmentalists and the eco-socialists (with some avant-garde “treatyism” and second-wave feminism off to the side) has long since ceased to exist. The Green Party of 2023 is a volatile mixture of “decolonising” Māori nationalism, revolutionary anti-capitalism, and uncompromising Rainbow zealotry. The idea that these are nothing more than frothing eddies of youthful activism, and that deep down the slower currents of ecological wisdom and political responsibility continue to flow serenely on, may soon be exposed as the purest wishful thinking.
The test will be the final Green Party List. Over the next few weeks the Green Party membership has the opportunity to study the provisional list presented to them by the party’s ruling bodies. If the provisional list seems wildly out-of-sympathy with the membership’s mood, then members have the power to re-organise it from top to bottom.
If those deep currents of ecological wisdom and political responsibility really do exist, and are not merely figments of New Zealand’s political imagination, then the all-too-obvious activist-staffer-Green MP shenanigans revealed in the leaked chat-group exchanges will be severely punished. Elizabeth Kerekere will be lucky to find herself left where she is at ninth position on the Party List. A Green Party determined to signal to the electorate that it has no place for such “mean” and all-consuming ambition would slot her in at twenty-ninth!
If, however, Kerekere remains where she is, or even leapfrogs over Chloe Swarbrick into third position, then we will know that there is no steadying majority of moderate Greens to keep the party within the confines of electability. It will be clear that the extraordinary civility and gentle strength that won the admiration of even the Greens’ electoral rivals under Fitzsimons and Donald really has gone. The effect upon the tens-of-thousands of Green Party voters who recoiled in disgust when the chat-group exchanges were leaked will be profound. Their faith in the Green Party as a responsible political organisation run by principled grown-ups (already strained by the nonsense associated with Shaw’s re-election and Marama Davidson’s “It’s cis, white males” comment) will be shattered – and their votes will be lost.
That will be extremely important. Because it may well see the Greens fall below the crucial 5 percent MMP threshold. On current polling, a Labour Party stripped of its Green allies will have insufficient parliamentary support (even with Te Pāti Māori) to form a government. Electoral victory will be claimed by National and Act.
And that will be no trivial matter.
*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.
74 Comments
They weren’t that bad 5 years ago either but going a bit crazy now. I like Shaw and some other MPs are quite good, but a few too many extremists now. There are some pragmatic enough to know that you need to be electable to be elected, that number seems to be reducing.
JJ
Agreed. Shaw with a vocal focus on environmental and climate change will have considerable older conservative "Forest and Bird" support for the Greens.
Roll Shaw - which nearly happened - to be replaced by the likes of Kerekere with a vocal radical social focus will mean loss of that conservative "Forest and Bird" support. Unfortunately I don't think that many of those within the party who have a sole social focus will be concerned about retaining that element despite its detrimental consequences to the Greens support.
Oh well..... They'll all be learning the meaning of another maori word. Which is 'Wharepaku'.
They'll be spending a lot of time in one contemplating about, "How did we end up here?"
Oh, by the way. This 'takatāpui' story is made up by kerekere. It doesn't exist in maori history other than a figment of her imagination in one of her stories she wrote in one of her academic writings only a few years ago.
Don't blame us maori for her illness.
looking at the photo in this article, over half of the trans rights crowd were white men and the main support for Posie Parker came from Brian Tamaki and his mainly Maori followers. Why isn’t the narrative given by the Greens ever challenged by the press when the evidence is overwhelming that they are peddling misinformation.
You can only interpret from the column and comments that there is much unbridled personal ambition sewn into the Green’s caucus, percolating away. Priorities of me first are obvious. Recall on 2020 election night, even before the ballot boxes had been stashed away, Ms Davidson proclaiming stridently that she expected to be in cabinet. She obviously, had neither understood nor acknowledged that Labour had been returned with no actual need for the Greens to be in government. In fact if I recall correctly, on the night, the Greens were running fourth.
What stood out for me in this article is the implied violence. CT describes Kerekere as both an ambitious and effective politician. Yet her behaviour appears to be that of a bully. What other purpose would be served by calling a colleague names? Yes she got called on it, but the fact that she believes she can harbour, and act on those feelings with impunity speaks volumes for her character, and the parliamentary environment. Even worse, coming from the trans community, of all people she should understand just how harmful such behaviour is. Can she or anybody be 'ambitious and effective' without being a bully?
The other concern the article highlighted for me was just how much religious based prejudices intertwine so many of our day to day values and prevent us from being able to just accept people for being how God made them.
Greens 2023 are such a fractured party it's hard to get a handle on what they stand for ... it's a confusing mishmash of policies & personnel ...
... the debacle over James Shaw's reelection as co leader revealed something weird that few of us knew : Greens can have two female leaders , a man/woman combo , but not 2 men ...
So , we've witnessed sexism / racism /ageism / and a sneering " cry baby " jibe ... they're a divided party who exude many odious traits ...
If in 2020 the electorate contrived to use MMP to block vote for Labour in order to stymie the Greens from being in government in cabinet, then the electorate will hardly have changed its mind given the latest ructions. Six months from now, Mr Hipkins is simply dreaming if he thinks he can propose to the electorate his own party breaking ranks with a seething faction, The Greens backstabbing and spitting out vitriol, and TPM all at extremes, and proclaim it will provide NZ a stable government in the face of the mounting difficulties NZ faces as a whole. That prospect is simply not credible.
The thing is... the Greens would actually fit BETTER and achieve more with the Nats.
They have achieved F ALL under their coalitions.. other than ruin gas for more coal, ruin food supply chains, ruin roading for unused cycle ways, and ruined NZs togetherness with radical divisions.
They are just mouthy self righteous opinionated morons... To be fair!
Yep - you can't say fairer than that. If only any of them would be reading this!
And with Eugenie and Jan going there won't even be a tiny smidgeon of green . Well to be fair, there is still Julie Anne Genter who rode her bike to give birth - must count for something.
Actually she bikes all the time, with the kids in her front carrier part of her bike (bike looks like this one: https://www.urkai.com/urban-arrow-cargo-bike-canada/). I know, I see her all the time on Wellington water front, we go opposite directions and I always pass her. Been like that for years. She bikes really fast too and not really that safely TBH, she goes around some blind corners at speed.
I also often see Chloe down the waterfront, most of the time on her phone talking to someone. Possibly not on her phone, just so that she doesn't get approached.
Don’t overlook Sage playing lackey to Mahuta, the Greens in cahoots with Labour to clandestinely sneak through Three Waters entrenchment in the dead of night. That was a calculated and wilful attempt to undermine parliamentary protocol and an absolute middle finger to democracy. If they can’t or won’t respect that, they should definitely not be in parliament.
The strange thing is that Kerekere’s mother is Irish and Davidsons’ husband is white. They seem to love stirring hate and division for political gain whilst being quite multicultural at home. Seeing the anti-violence minister in a mob holding “stomp on TERFS” banners was also a little jarring. The media focussed on the cis white men comments but for me it was the incitement of violence against women that was the most disturbing. I always thought I was quite liberal but apparently not by the new definition set by the Greens.
I thought it was disgraceful that Marama said only white cis males were responsible for violence. It completely undermines all those who have been victims of violence from other races and other sexes. Having personally witnessed the effects of violence perpetrated by all types of people (I work as a psychiatric nurse) I thought her statement devalued what should be a clear boundary of what is unacceptable behaviour from anyone - regardless of race or sex. It hinted at a sense of entilement on her behalf and possibly others in her party - that non-white, non-male violence is somehow acceptable. As a white male I don't really care if Marama apologises to us or not. But she should apologise to those who have been victims of violence perpetrated by non-whites or non-males. And she should apologise to all New Zealanders for not been clear that violence is unacceptable behaviour regardless of who perpetrates it.
Similar then to when Hone Harawira angrily declared that if a daughter should bring a pakeha boy friend home, he would be made unwelcome, or worse. If I recall correctly strident justification from such as Willie Jackson “that’s not racist.” Blimey one way traffic, one way lens. Just visualise, for a moment, a government with the extreme factions in Labour and the Greens in cahoots, because if you vote Labour you gonna get the Greens, warts and all, like it or lump it!
Down here in Christchurch since the death of Rod Donald the city has lacked solid environmental urbanist advocates. The new generation of Green Party activism has focused on other issues as this article clearly outlines. I miss Rod. I would have considered voting for his version of the Green party but the current lot is not something that appeals.
Rod & Jeanette were the best Greens leaders combo ... Russell Norman was effective too ... but there's been a void with their exiting the party ... James Shaw has held them together , and look how they " rewarded " him for that !
... wildcats fighting in a small cage seems to be their current modus operandi ...
Actually I think the rot began to set in with Norman.His rhetoric was too often coming from a judgemental place of us and them and consequently I felt his style was too divisive. He lacked the leadership style of being able to bring together the ordinary middle of the road kiwi to see the value of sound environmental solutions.
If Luxon is shrewd enough he would offer Shaw to continue his climate role, outside of cabinet. That way Shaw’s acclaimed expertise is not lost and he himself will have the ability to further his work in this area and that must be of huge priority to him. Shaw and Luxon apparently worked well together when the latter was at AirNZ. Of course that would really set the banshees in the Greens wailing, one would imagine.
I don't know too much about the Green Party Wellington scene. I have met Julie Anne Genter a few times - who lives in Wellington (having moved down from Auckland). She is clever, bright and fairly sensible. I have tried to encourage her to get the Green Party to advocate for more Christchurch environmental urbanism issues with limited success (she asked some written questions in the house about the lack of transport spending for Canterbury).
Completely well said and timely thank you Chris. As one who was a member since the days of Values, I am astonished to contemplate the steady regression from excited wholesome reverence for the living planet to irrelevance and ill-will. They have no more right to the title 'Green' than Hipkins has to the title 'Labour' - both once honest and descriptive - long ago.
I earnestly hope that these unworthy people will lose their place in the next government.
Great article as I used to vote for green, but not now, since the rogue comments made in public. They certainly need a path correction and seem to have lost their way.
Go woke, go broke - The affect, seems to have been to separate people, it has no family values, which keeps a society civilized. I just don't get what they are about these days.
Watermelons - Green on the outside, reds on the inside.
Letting these current greens members participate in government or anywhere near parliament is a mistake. It is effectively a pack of degenerate spiteful mutants vying to impose rents upon everyone else to benefit themselves in the name of environmental justice.
Kerekere over Swarbrick would be the kind of decision I'd expect from the party that refuses to work with National and thus castrates their own ability to negotiate coalition agreements. I like Swarbrick, I think she's a generational talent but she is wasted in the Greens with this lot around her. She will go no further with their desire to put certain concerns ahead of capability.
What a shame her and Shaw cannot be tempted to a Blue-Green outfit that would at the very least, be open to working with National. Even if they didn't, they could very well send the current mess that is the Greens to the sub-5% mark.
The Greens need a UK New Labour moment, the time when Blair split from the more radical left and made Labour electable again. The Environment focussed Greens could set up a New Green party that stands for Biodiversity restoration, pollution reduction, climate change action and mainstream social justice. I think they would easily hit 5%.
Recall pre-election, you offered a wager in contradiction to my contention that a Labour Greens formal coalition would inevitably fragment? The electorate saw to it that that election outcome did not eventuate but given the discord that is now starkly obvious in both the Greens and Labour caucuses, I would wager I would likely have won?
Indeed, environmentalism and conservatism are the same thing. Wanting to preserve planet Earths life support functions is about as conservative as it gets. The NZ parties labelled conservative/libertarian are more like a fact free cult that reinforces itself with anthropogenic exceptionalist fantasy.
Looking overseas at the number of grand coalitions that govern many countries the only way we are ever going to truly tackle our social justice, environmental and our current system of raising and distributing taxes equitably is with radical ideas debated in the mainstream. The status quo has got us this far very successfuly in many ways but at the cost of the 3 areas I outlined above. Perhaps we need these grand coalitions negotiating to form a government where some of the so-called extreme/radical ideas get integrated in some fashion to move our country forward in these areas. I am not defending any bad behaviour except to the degree that radical and useful ideas often come from not very well packaged mainstream people.
The problem with the aggressive approach taken by some members of the "Green" party, is that it drives moderate people away. They may consolidate their base but they no longer influence mainstream thinking. It reminds me of Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the Sun. The more Davidson and Kerekere shout, the more firmly conservative thinking people will hold onto their positions. They need to change their approach and start bringing people together.
As a sometime Greens voter - on the basis of environmental, economic and social concerns - I will be looking closely at the party in the runup to this election. If these issues become distracted by culture wars and internal politics, my vote will go elsewhere.
[Just as an aside, I don't think that 'Cis' is affected by someone being lesbian or gay - I think it's to do with gender identity and birth ...]
This is the run up to the election - newsflash this ship has left the port.
Verdict is in the greens hog the environmental vote while doing nothing for the environment - focusing exclusively on nonsense. Its actually evil when viewed through this lens, actively harming the environment while not leaving for space for people who do actually care.
Been gay and fighting for less child poverty and homelessness is ultra radical ??? Dear old dear .
The whole basis of this article has a problem . Swarbrick would be classed as on the side of the "ultra radicals".
Why would they attack her???.Surely Shaw would be the target?
Not really , that is in fact my point. Wether gay or not should be entirely irrelevant, and not every environmentalist would vote Green party. But would be interested to know what part of the Greens he finds too radical . Its such a broad statement, and I think Chris is trying to compartmentalise NZ'ers , when in fact we don't really have the big factions , such as you might find in rural USA for e.g , and what someone like Trump would thrive on .
I am no admirer of the Greens but I respect and appreciate both the acumen and tenacity of Chloe especially when she doggedly hunted down the fact that The Treasury were basing an important set of calculations and predictions on little more than a fanciful whim. Good on her!
You perhaps need to separate existential ecologists from environmental.
There is an environmental group which includes many of the Forest-and-Bird types, who earnestly drive electric cars, recycle, buy 'eco' and vote Green. They are not existential ecologists; those are here: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
Go to the William Rees episode, and spend the time. Then ask: is you b-in-law just one of the 'lite' ones? Because that would make sense; an existential ecologist has no chance of fitting with the bluegreen spin (which is all it is).
It is our consumption that is killing the planet we cannot live without - I doubt National have any reps brave enough to acknowledge that - and certainly not their current leader.
Agree there. Sad commentary that when both the major parties were required to elect new leaders neither had more than one supposedly viable contender for the respective position. But where on earth anyway are you going to locate any politician of sufficient merit to lead global recognition, let alone redress, to the approaching storm.
And of course, we the consumer (voter) are the problem. The green party know perfectly well what needs to be done, and to what degree. But what % of the population will vote for that? Might make 5 %, might not. And then be in coalition with a major party, who will water it all down anyway. People say they would vote for a straight environmental party, but they are not thinking of a party that proposes the scale of changes you ,(and to a lesser degree I) think are necessary. They are ranging from picking up the poodle poo, to cleaning a few lakes or rivers, to more public transport for other people to use.
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