National out to poach Green vote
National’s Environment Spokesperson Nick Smith delivered an interesting speech at the party’s Lower North Island Regional Conference over the weekend on his “Bluegreen vision for NZ”. Sample quote:
The mechanics of MMP make the balance of power very sensitive to the Green vote. The Greens only just scraped back into Parliament with 5.3% of the Party Vote. Only 6,822 votes saved the Greens from political oblivion last year. This was not the first time they skirted around the cliff of political survival, because in 1999 they got only 5.1% of the Party Vote and only 3,400 votes saved their bacon.
How different the current Parliament would be if the Greens had not made it. Instead of a centre-left, centre-right balance of 61 to 60, the centre-right would have it 63 to 58. Those 6,822 votes for the Greens effectively stopped Don Brash being Prime Minister.
Let me put it another way. If we can convince just 1 in 20 of those Green voters that National is a better bet than the Greens, that alone would be enough, all other things being equal, for National to win in 2008.
The rest of the speech essentially outlines how National should go about courting the Green vote, mainly by attacking Government policy in a number of environmental areas.
He also accuses the Green Party of being “Watermelon greens – green on the outside but pinkos right through the middle. They dress up their anti-enterprise and big government agenda in green clothes because old-fashioned socialism is so out of vogue.”
Oh yes, dahling, soooooo last season.
It’s actually good to see other parties taking environmental issues seriously, but Nick Smith’s speech makes it pretty obvious that National are only doing so because they think it might be politically expedient. Anyone genuinely concerned about the environment would find that pretty hard to swallow, and National’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol without offering any alternatives to deal with climate change (apart from attacking Labour) remains a major problem if they wish to appear environmentally credible.
May 15th, 2006 at 11:13 am
I agree that its not particularly credible given their lack of interest in the big issues and their anti-environmental RMA policies. But OTOH, this will hopefully force Labour to compete for the green vote as well - and that can only be a Good Thing.
May 15th, 2006 at 11:14 am
i know what you man about the water melon joke, fwwog,but just think why is a cliche cliche ??
May 15th, 2006 at 11:37 am
also with the water melon thing fwwog, the message we sublimate is that you are very soft, lacking substance etc you know,
and of course there will be attention given to your leadership and personalities,
but then more on NAT, all ACT have now crossed over,
ACT running on negative funds,
May 15th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
idiot savant: why should Labour and Greens compete? They have different policy agendas, let’s leave it there.
What the Greens failed to do in the last election was to make it clear to their ‘Watermelon’ supporters that a party vote for the Greens would be more likely to deliver Labour its majority coalition. Now that was a pricey oversight.
Labour competing for the Green votes simply causes confusion for everybody.
I think the more beneficial outcome from Smith’s speech would be to galvanise the Greens efforts to present ourselves as being neutral in terms of out-dated spectral politics and positive about business’s contribution.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Idiot, I disagree. Labour don’t need to court the Green vote, they can leave it to the Greens who are their natural partner. It is far better for Labour that the Green party continues to exist.
That is what Smith is cynically seeing. That if they can get a few Green voters, then the Green Party dies, and the Green cause with it, and the entire centre/left collapses.
But Labour do need to court the Green Party, a little bit. National could try to court them, if they could only move a few standard deviations closer to the centre.
May 15th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
James: I was more thinking that Labour would have to compete with National. Environmental politics is pretty mainstream in New Zealand, and no major party can afford to ignore it, whether they are allied with the Greens or not.
More generally, a policy auction on the environment between the two major parties can only be beneficial to the green cause as a whole. After all, isn’t the goal to pull the political mainstream more in the direction of your policies?
Ben: I think any party which advocates gaming the threshold to eliminate another and effectively disenfranchise voters is pretty vile - but I think that really shows that the threshold was a bad idea and that it needs to be removed. But if the Greens want to stop this from happening, I think that all they need to do is point the finger at National’s RMA and climate change policies; they should discourage anyone from switching their vote…
May 15th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Well yes. There’s quite a difference between Green Politics and Environmentalism. If the Green’s influence has caused both major parties to compete for the Environmentalist vote, then that’s a fantastic achievement. Let’s hope they don’t flip flop on that.
Spot quizzes:
name an aspects of Green Politics that is not related to environmentalism.
describe a way in which Socialism and Green Politics differ.
Suggestions for source material: http://www.greeneconomics.org.uk/
May 15th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
It is a fantastic achievement that the influence of the Greens has caused both parties to have strong Environmentalist policies.
Let’s have some spot quizzes:
* describe the reason that Green Politics and Socialism are fundamentally different, alternatively explain the term “Green Capitalist”
* describe two major policy areas in which Green Politics has a clear perspective, yet this is not primarily motivated from an Environmentalist point of view.
May 15th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
As others have said, this could be construed as fantastic news.
Looks like the next missions are: getting across why green politics are not simply environmentalism, and explaining why being Green does *not* infer being a Socialist.
May 15th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
so mugwump which one of your versions do you want us to keep? we’re sorry there is no edit your own posts facility here, but everyone else manages to post a correction post and we edit for them.
May 15th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Frogmaster,
please keep all mugwump posts, haven’t laughed for a while on the whole “how green can capitalism become” line of thought….
Why no discussion of moves futher left in greendom? Eg, black-greens (eco-anarchists) - ok, so some of them don’t vote but there some great mind-opening street-theatre and DA coming out of that end of the rainbow… ;-D
lovin the way the lilypad looks lately…..
cheers, katie
May 15th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
Ahh, gotta love the Nats. Funded by the GOP, ideas supplied by the UK Conservatives…
This ‘reds under the bed’ rehash is truly ironic. Consider the nats are supposedly ‘free market capitalists’, but when their american shareholder bosses feel threatened by LLU they are the first to defend Telecom’s moneygrubbing monopoly. Who is really pulling the strings there I wonder.
I do like the idea of the Greens as a party which focuses exclusively on environmental issues, and can work with either party in power, but as other posters have said, environment and economy are often two sides of the same coin and sometimes difficult to reconcile.
The best thing about environmentalism is that it takes a stakeholder / long-term view, much the same as a small business or a traditional style business. This is the antithesis of the Nats- they have a shareholder-driven enron-style model, where the long term is someone else’s problem…
May 16th, 2006 at 9:23 am
katie, capitalism can go quite a way from its current state which is essentially just slightly civilised anarchy dressed up as a “free market”. For instance if you make utmost human and animal rights a base line for its operation, you immediately eliminate many of the worst evils.
There are a number of further suggestions at the end of The Corporation, as well as in the book (posted here before, but well worth repeating the link), Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements.
With these corrections, it would probably make sense to proceed at full steam with the suggestions from the Libertarians (and others), that government should be small. I believe it is quite possible to pull this off, without violating any of the Green mandates. Right now it’s either a Libertarian pipe dream or neo-liberal bribe, of course. But one day…
May 16th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
An optimistic view: Nick thinks the only way to sell the economically blinkered Nats on this is the “chasing the green vote” story, but he’s just looking for an angle to get green policy through.
Pessimistic: Nick dreams of wiping out The Greens, making him the closest thing to a green in government.
katie: black-greens are not left. That’s fundamental misunderstanding of anarchism. We no more support leftwing statists than rightwing ones, it’s just that generally the left democratic governments are less hostile to anarchist policies.
The association between libertarianism and anarchy goes right back to when libertarianism grew out of anarchy. Politely, their plan is to let free association be mediated by money rather than force. And in that way the free market can be considered anarchic. Holes in the idea galore, but that’s where it started.
I have a whole fund of libertarian stories thanks to having libertarian friends in the US. reading the material would be funny if it wasn’t so close to US gummit policy.
mugwump: The key difference between Socialism and The Greens is that socialism puts people ahead of the environment while the Greens see humans as part of it. Do you mean green politics, or specifically the politics of The Green Party of Aotearoa? Coz the two policies I can’t name, that doesn’t fit the way I seen green politics.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:44 am
jeez didnt know there was social hierarchy now we got a master fwog