Greens letter reveals ‘damage to staff morale’
A letter from disgruntled Green Party staff to its MPs has revealed complaints of low morale, bad communication and unfair treatment.
It highlights how difficult the party has found the transition into government, with a greatly reduced caucus and managing new ministerial responsibilities.
The Green Party has always prided itself on its tikanga, campaigning strongly on workers rights, speaking frequently at union events and describing work as “being valued and valuing each other”.
However the letter reveals staff are unhappy with the way they’ve been treated since the party has become part of the government.
RNZ understands there has been a push from senior party staff to hire external people for key advisor roles. There was some pushback, with one minister, Julie Anne Genter, going against the directive and hiring existing staff.
The fact that this letter was leaked to the media by disgruntled staff is enough to sack for treason, but the simple truth is that it is indicative of the meltdown that has been building inside the Greens for some time.
The audacity of the Green Party tactics team complaining about the leadership needing to bring in talent from outside the Wellington clique is hilarious when you consider it was the total lack of anyone gaming out the damage from Metiria’s confession that cost the Greens half their vote.
This total lack of tactics has seen the Greens spend 3 years misstepping and being held hostage by the Wellington Twitteratti. The fact they almost fucked up the last election is utterly denied by everyone concerned.
The grim truth seems to be that no one inside there sees the opportunity of policy they could actually get through if they targeted specific Labour MPs and NZ First MPs for legislative gains.
The madness behind their Waka jumping legislation ‘strategy’ showed a level of incompetence that is bewildering.
Every time I see the Greens in the news headlines now it feels like the nervousness you get when the kids take the car out for a drive. You know it’s going to come back written off with a whole bunch of excuses and explanations that it was someone else’s fault.
The Greens don’t know if they are Arthur or Martha, and if they did it take a 6 month committee meeting to decide on pronouns.
The only hope now is that Marama Davidson is elected co-Leader and she can bring some stability to a Party that desperately needs to ask itself if it wants to wield real political power for real change or just be an exclusive club that makes those who are members feel special by their exclusion of others.
That it’s come to this is extremely embarrassing.
Hold on there Martyn. The vote won’t be until March or whatever.
And that assumes Marama gets elected and does what she has promised. Considering the stupid elephantine u-turns her brother and sister Greens have been pulling recently, that seems a slim hope indeed.
In the meantime the one leader ‘co-leader’ can happily lead these fuckwits and their endless ‘consensus’ yobbos into all sorts of deep divisive damaging shit.
I’m afraid the action is needed now Bomber not when the sun comes out (tomorrow!)…
I think Greens need someone who speaks conservation and can calm so I think Eugenie Sage as co leader would be the better bet to get the missing 100,000 voters back to Green. She has a touch of Jeanette Fitzsimons about her. She is not controversial and will not divide voters who either love her or hate her as Marama will do.
I love your passion Martyn, but I think your championing of Chloe for example (and now Marama) is part of why the Greens tanked so much and led to the bust ups. No matter how young, stylish and amazing certain media people seem to think they are, both Chloe and Golriz should have had to put in some hard graft electioneering to be ready for 2020 not jettisoned in newbies who had little Green credentials but MSM like Metro and Spinoff promoted to deGreen the greens and anger the conservationist Green voters.
Same issue with Marima, she’s respected but not going to get the missing 100,000 back. More like fight out Labour for Maori vote and that will cause trouble. Another bad idea to try to get the Maori vote from Labour last time as well as not doing a deal in Nelson and allowing Nick Smith the master polluter back in. They always seem to be going for some fringe voter that may or may not vote for them. Stick to the solid supporters!
Chloe & Golriz might be lovely, articulate and look good in mags but it was not just Metiria that tanked the Greens. She just lit the match and the party list incinerated much of the rest of the voters. The word Green means conservation to many voters and ridding the Greens of conservation in favour of a divisive social justice promotion has just pissed off all the old solid supporters who the Greens need to rely on.
Shaw and Gareth are mixed in skills, Marima, Julie Ann, Jan, Golriz are all heavily only invested in social justice, Chloe seems to be there because of her social media skills that the MSM talked up. It’s sad that only one conservationist seems to be left in the Green Party out of 8 MP’s on the list.
If there is not environment then there is no social justice. Who pays most when there are floods, earthquakes and rising sea levels – the poor. When food becomes too expensive for people to be able to afford and people’s health suffers through pollution and poisoning. The Green environmental values are more important than short term increase in benefits or whatever – $60 extra a week is nothing if a flood takes your home and you have little chance to get another one or you are poisoned by your own water supply.
Also those who think that young people can do ‘social media’ are delusional. Youth are the consumers of it, not the authors! Social media is run by old men and organisations like the Cambridge Analytica’s misusing tech than some researching academic created in the last decade and then used by the .01% to manipulate consumers and profits.
You pretty much know any organisation (apart from a drinks brand etc) is gonna tank when someone gives a 22 yo a leading role, because they lose MUCH more people than they gain with their ‘social’ media attempts for those over 30. I don’t blame Chloe, it’s the parties advisers fault because they don’t understand what they are doing. Most ‘youth’ don’t understand social media, they consume it, not control it. Huge difference.
The other concern I have is in the age of dirty politic how robust is the Green’s voting system. Could people join as members to vote up candidates that are going to destabilise the Green vote? We know the dirty politics brigade are capable of anything. There used to be around 250,000 Green voters but only a fraction will be members with voting rights. Now there seem to be only 150,000 Green voters with all the MSM promotion of the Greens and their list is not geared towards conservation anymore. Hmm that’s saying something.
Labour let the unions have a part of their voting of leader which keeps their leader more left wing. Maybe the Greens need to work out if the amount of members they have is enough of a percentage for voting when clearly something has been going wrong with the focus and decisions. The other issue is it could be someone advising them and making the mistakes. Either through stupidity or deliberately making appalling decisions.
One good thing, I though Shaw has actually done a good job through the chaos and managed to get the deal with labour that led to change of government, supported other members like Metiria and did the deal that saw them finally part of the government. I had my doubts but he seems to be getting MUCH stronger post Red Peak.
I mean where have you been this whole time. That’s the most mischaracterised mischief Iv seen outside of The Standard. You know you should really be directing those concerns towards Weka. Not Martyn
But it’s easier to virtue signal at Bloggers and wail about National And Labour keeping you down than to actually build the sort of grassroots base that would make winning higher election numbers possible.
That and the…quality of leadership in minor parties is erratic at best.
National and Labour have nationwide machines built up over more than a century and a solid foundation of party loyalty, they can cope with bad leaders and have multiple levels of buffer. Minor Parties don’t, and bad leaders just make them look more irrelevant and silly in the voting publics eyes.
This election was practically tailor made for a strong minor party showing…and both Greens and NZFirst stayed just above the 5% threshold, largely because Metiria and Winston were unable to capitalize on the discontent with the two major parties. They got some protest votes, but most of those were people who were going to protest vote if the Green and NZFirst candidates had been a head of lettuce on a rocking chair, not people who thought that they were serious candidates with serious policies.
As a tool toward party building, leaders bring exposure and helps you recruit new people, helps build more extensive donor lists, gives them experience in campaigns and such. Something like half the Green party are outgrowths of Labours campaign organizations. People in general pay a lot more attention to major parties than anything else, so that needs to be harnessed.
Further and more importantly, In around 2/3 of your candidates getting recognized as an official party, so your ability to be on the ballot with a Greens next to your name, rather as an independent is tied to the vote share your Leader, or in some cases other well known candidate, received in the previous election.
Lastly there’s a decent chunk of money available to parties that get more than 5% of the vote so use it or lose it.
those tacticians/advisers who had neither the nous nor the the testicular-fortitude to point out to turei what a bad idea that was – and who cheered her on..should have been made to walk the plank back then..
they were the architects/enablers of the biggest political cock-op in eons..
and in fact they set new benchmarks in bad-adviser/tactician..
and they do have some nerve to think they should still be listened to..
they should just slink right off..
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