The most frustrating thing about this current Green Party Phantom Coup is that it was so fucking predictable!
I warned the Greens privately and publicly in 2020 NOT to go into an agreement with Labour.
I argued at the time that the Greens either threaten an all out civil war against Labour on their incrementalism or they grant peace for a few cherished policies that they could champion endlessly to voters like free public transport.
This is how I saw the deal back in 2020, tell me I’m wrong…
The Green Leadership however will justify any crumbs as great successes and better to be in the tent blah blah blah. Normally this kind of watered down Green lime reasoning would be fine and dandy, but the fucking planet is melting and this pandemic is but the first wave of disruption from a biosphere in savage decline.
There can be no more waiting.
You can’t replace Winston as the handbrake from the last term with the entire landlord class of NZ and call that progress.
So there is an immediate friction inside the Greens between the Leadership and the new class of activist MPs alongside the sudden power of Chloe by winning an electorate.
The Leadership look focused on how to get the baubles of Office that Jacinda will offer them past the wider membership by tweaking the consensus threshold to 75%…
The group, called Tatau Pounamu, a Negotiation Consultation Group, has also settled on its terms of reference, giving a guideline for how it will settle on a final decision on what the Green Party’s relationship with Labour in Government will look like.
Tatau Pounamu’s terms of reference proposes a consensus be sought, and, if that fails, then a 75 percent vote of the Tatau Pounamu group in favour will be required “to carry a proposal that alters the status quo”.
…most Green members will be under the impression that they will all vote on this deal when in reality it’s their ‘representatives’ who will…
The terms of Tatau Pounamu agreement state: “All decisions concerning the negotiations, including what agreement, if any, would be taken to a Special General Meeting (SGM) will be taken by the combined membership of Tatau Pounamu.”
“Decisions will be reached by consensus. When this is not possible it will be by vote, with at least 75% of votes in favour to carry a proposal that alters the status quo.”
“Only members of Tatau Pounamu selected by the three-petal approval processes are involved in decision-making.”
…so what baubles would be on the table from Labour?
James Shaw Climate Change Minister outside Cabinet
Chloe Swarbrick – associate Minister of Youth Affairs outside Cabinet
No policy promises at all.
Labour would see letting someone as mild as James stay in the job a safe bet and the symbolism of a Green MP in the role inoculates them from doing anything. They would also see rewarding Chloe as a smart way of avoiding a real and popular critic from saying anything to damage them. They won’t bend on any policy.
This deal would be an embarrassment and walking away into Opposition would be far preferable and would achieve more.
So what baubles could be offered to make it worthwhile?
James Shaw Climate Change Minister inside Cabinet
Chloe Swarbrick – Minister of Youth Affairs inside Cabinet
Doubling of welfare.
A new tax (Financial Transaction Tax).
A Public Ministry of Works that directly builds State Houses and affordable homes.
Free Public Transport.
Lowering voting age to 16.
Immediate inclusion of Agriculture into emissions standards.
An economic wide drive towards ‘sustainable resilience’.
Free mental health counselling for all.
Now THAT policy platform would be worth supporting Labour for, but empty gestures would not be.
My suspicion is that the Leadership are gerrymandering the process to gain an agreement for some very low hanging fruit.
Labour want that because James and Marama are far easier to negotiate with than Chloe will be.
The membership will be up in arms if the baubles are so hollow and will be in furious surprise that they supposedly agreed to it once they see the fine print of what that actually means.
…exactly what I warned would happen has happened!
Did you all know that when Marama went into here negotiating meeting, she had written down on her notepad two words, ‘Why not’?
That was their ‘negotiating’ tactic, to get on their knees and beg ‘why not’.
By taking on the empty baubles of vacant Ministerships, all the Greens did was provide political camouflage to their political incrementalism as the planet burns!
Imagine if the Greens had spent the last 2 years OUTSIDE the shadow of the Government and had been able to attack Labour each week from the Left, they would be 15% right now!
The Greens are all lovely people, but they are woke as fuck and as such a weak. Sure, misuse a pronoun, get Te Reo pronunciation wrong, suggest female comedians aren’t funny or claim Mommy Bloggers are over rated and they’l slash your throat while they make you watch them hurt your pets, but when it come to the bear pit of politics, they have all the offensive capacity of slow growing moss.
They walked into this problem because their strategy team are clowns. This is why I fear they have lost all political relevancy EVEN IF they are in a position to finally influence labour post 2023 election as a full and equal partner of a new Government, I have serious doubts they could do anything beyond basic bitch low hanging fruit identity politics tomfoolery.
I do not believe they have the intellectual capacity to game out a radical economic adaptation plan to prepare us for the economic recession, climate change and structural inequality.
The current Green Party see the enemy as every heteronormative white cis male, they don’t see it as capitalism. The problem for the Greens is Patriarchy and Colonialism not neoliberal free market economics.
The Greens chose the baubles of vacant Ministerships over fighting a Labour Party that didn’t need them and then acted surprised when they get welded to that incrementalism and damned for it by the activists.
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Quick Greens! Open the borders to more NACT voters!!
Hang on…Marama has been an outstanding minister with many achievements!
Ha, ha, ha…nice one Sour Kraut – Marama “the C word” Davidson — deserves her Dame hood — for services to the “the C word”
Nathan Marama’s C word nonsense was no more than that, nonsense. It is her seeming part in the narrative of ‘Pakeha are wicked colonialists’ which is divisive and dangerous. She’s not the only one. Politicians and fatly-paid govt department advisors buying into and pushing pernicious propaganda are as free to talk claptrap as the rest of us, but they need to consider the social responsibilities which go with their jobs, and if they don’t or won’t, it’s not good.
True Snow White — but, the back story is great — that was her first big announcement as the co-leader after 3 months in the role… what a c!
If there us one thing our PM excels at its politics. She is an A+ practitioner! And on the subject of climate change, she has to be!
Cold hard non emotive realities for a moment; NZ produces. 017% of greenhouse gases. Of that the biggest contributor is motor vehicles at 40% of that .017. Can’t remember intense farming figures but it’s a biggish contributor. If we go pure and ban motor vehicles and all flock to bicycles what will be the change in climate change to the world? Virtually nothing.
If we ban intensive farming purely for climate change purposes, what will be the net result to climate change. Virtually nothing. 0 + 0 = 0!
But…the net result of crashing New Zealand’s economy for the equivalent of a candle light vigil contribution to world climate change levels, will be the ruin of this country to levels never seen here, ironically in fact, the complete antipathy of the Greens anti capitalism agenda and still it will rain and still the climate will change, just like before.
As woeful as Ms Ardern is at delivering on promises, she appears to know a severely counter productive waste of time when she sees one. And honestly, that is what this is. I mean, imagine negotiating anything with some of the fruit cakes of the Green Party?
James Shaw is doing literally everything he can without bringing the house down. I don’t think that is a bad thing!
Spot on, XRAY
Is funny… whenever there’s a right wing reactionary with a brain fart, such are those of x-ray’s above, there’s a minion in the wings waiting to fawn all over them. ‘thomas’? Got an opinion on that? It’s just sooooooooooooo coincidental isn’t it.
All of our political parties are the same thing. They’re a glued together raft of neoliberal windbags desperately trying to keep the logical fallacy that we have political choices afloat. Well, let me tell you, we don’t. We DO have a cadre of old privateer crooks still knee deep in our economy and they like it there and they’re not going to step out of their incestious little private pools of money anytime soon so they must keep the Great AO/NZ Institutionalised Lie alive. Aye Boys?
The only surprise for me re the green debacle is that Chloe Swarbrick didn’t follow jamie HSBC bankster shaw outside and push him under the first bus that came along then to go back inside to take over as leader of the bile greens .
Take out your spiralling, glassy, social media eyeballs and coldly and bravely look at our political line up… Go on? It’s not easy but you can do it. Now. What do you see? Japanese Death Monkeys? Very good. You’re getting there.
Boingboing.net
https://boingboing.net/2022/07/28/planet-of-the-apes-has-begun-monkeys-attack-and-japanese-city-sends-in-a-special-unit.html
Maybe there’s just more of us Countryboy? What are you gonna do about all that neoliberalism stuff you so despise? Other than rant at people on the internet? Maybe if you guys came up with a better alternative people might start agreeing with you.
What’s the significance of the Japanese monkeys? Are they proof that neoliberalism has gone too far?
The Claytons Coup
The leadership coup when you are not having a leadership coup
If the only thing the Greens can get noticed for, is to depose James Shaw as leader, to replace him with James Shaw as leader, then the Greens are finished as an electoral force.
The ETS is a failure. Emissions are increasing.
The Zero Carbon (in 250) is a hollow toothless body with no enforcement powers. Emissions have kept increasing.
Under this government’s watch the cost of living is increasing. Inequality is increasing,
The Green Party actually need to achieve something. And if the Government won’t let the Green MPs in Parliament achieve anything, then the Green MPs need to act as an opposition and call the government on its lack of action on the things that matter, as any opposition party does. As well as calling the government out on in it lack of action the Green Party and put up their alternative program as every other opposition party does.
That is the road to power, sinking into the arms of Labour is not.
So quick to cancel as that is so easy for control freaks, but the problem is, there is no plan after that.
We now see that with housing, they cancelled landlords without any plans while making Kāinga Ora more dysfunctional (Kainga Ora used to return a profit but now Kāinga Ora’s debt is now forecast to peak in 2033 at $28.9b).
Meanwhile they also made it worse for renters as now the venerable kids are growing up in transitional housing at enormous costs to the taxpayer, while Kiwibuild and Kainga Ora seem to be competing with Waka Kotahi for being the most incompetent government department.
“Despite thousands of state homes not meeting healthy homes standards, Newshub can reveal Kāinga Ora’s spent millions doing up its own offices.”
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/national/revealed-kāinga-ora-spent-over-24m-of-taxpayer-money-in-four-years-on-its-own-office-renovations/ar-AAUZXtc
Kāinga Ora paid 130 of its 1,975 staff more than $180,000 each in annual salaries for the year to June, putting them in government’s newly amended top tax bracket, while the number of public houses it delivered fell 41 percent to a net 727 from last year.
“The document, dated June 17, says Kāinga Ora is “investigating” cost-cutting measures such as pausing a programme to improve heating in homes or retrofitting old homes with improvements that make them accessible to people with disabilities. Officials said the ideas might result in some “cost savings” but they will not address the root cause of the blowouts.”
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/government-faces-60-year-debt-blowout-after-building-costs-explode/R7L54GYHNIEJD3Z6TQDFOYRJMI/
Waka Kotahi unit facing restructure deemed ‘no longer effective’, documents reveal
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/469495/waka-kotahi-unit-facing-restructure-deemed-no-longer-effective-documents-reveal
(Where is the management responsibility at Waka Kotahi and why are they not being axed instead of the workers?)
The culture of Waka Kotahi – incompetence, lack of senior management and fraud.
Ministry of Transport fraudster Joanne Harrison’s criminal history
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/stuff-circuit/113601464/ministry-of-transport-fraudster-joanne-harrisons-criminal-history-revealed
One of the Greens main election premise was to help vulnerable people with better housing, but they failed to look at the government housing first and complete that successfully with lessons learnt, because Marama seems to have an obsession with private landlords.
Hon Marama Davidson
Associate Minister – Housing (Homelessness)
Minister – Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence
As for sexual violence, we now a person using the free bus service into Auckland CBD to sexually violate and rape a victim in broad daylight. No doubt Chloe and Co, is more worried about the perpetrator’s rights than the woman victim and safety!
Greens also failed on their other core policy, deregulating dope.
It is nothing to do with Labour, Greens missed and opportunity to help NZ because they don’t have a plan or any understanding of the complexities of the portfolios they are destroying. They seem to have made Labour more of a basket case – as shown by the above fuck ups and lack of accountability with their government departments while obsessing about pet subjects, leading to their Stasi control obsessions of freedom of speech and race based water and health care.
If they had done nothing, everyone would be better off!
As well as re-creating Rotorua as a transitional housing hub of unemployed, not achieving again the safety barriers for Waka Kotahi after blowing the money, they now have tourists falling through roads holes into boiling mud!
Locals not ‘surprised’ after two tourists hospitalised following Rotorua street collapse: ‘This area of road had been fragile’
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/07/locals-not-surprised-after-two-tourists-hospitalised-following-rotorua-street-collapse-this-area-of-road-had-been-fragile.html
Most people have noticed the lack of road maintenance and corruption in roading and it’s getting worse and worse as the advertising, rebranding and massive influx of employee management continues across Waka Kotahi and councils who contract it all out.
Instead of more stupid management restructures aka health, polyptychs, more woke police and terror task forces etc, advertising and branding, Labeen should have concentrated on seriously addressing current dysfunction in key areas of concern.
social and state housing
declining road maintenance – while there seems to be more congestion by putting up cones (sometimes for years) instead of actually fixing the jobs as they come up promptly and permanently and making the fixes last and new work last for many years.
Our appalling environmental decline, much of it from the above being dysfunctional.
Too many lines of responsibility and managers and non core spending on marketing while no investment in experts or even interest of maintaining an excellent workforce on the ground who actually do the work as they endlessly contract out jobs to a low paid workforce mostly from overseas, that fail to deliver at extremely high prices!
Government and council agencies would prefer to spend 4 x as much on managers and consultants and never get a spade in the ground, than to actually pay parity to workers on the ground directly employed like OZ and have a smaller but more expert workforce who can do the job.
Save NZ I saw Ardern putting Davidson in charge of family violence as a real kick in the teeth to killed and battered babies and children and women – and those yet to be. I wish I was wrong. Add axing the Children’s Commissioner to this mix, and the invisible man as Minister of Children, and they look like child hating sociopaths.
Thanks for the rederences.
I and many others are just agog and flabbergasted as to how it is possible to actually make things WORSE than they were.
Given that Labour has had five years, unlimited budget AND they can actually make the rules.
It must take a very special level of incompetence to pull that off.
Not in just one area either… But in every area?
Oh, here’s an example;
The Health System:
National introduced a target of 95% of ED patients being seen within six hours. This saw the proportion rise from 86% to 95% and then stay in the 93% to 94% range for some years.
Labour came in and scrapped the target. Here’s what happened:
Sep 2018 89.1%
Sep 2019 84.8%
Sep 2020 86.6%
Sep 2021 80.2%
May 2022 74%
Note that it dropped well before the pandemic, and has continued to drop during it.
Shows how having NO leaders with any experience in managing anything like a massive and highly complex organisation can destroy that organisation..
Gun(shot). Foot. Hospital.
Let’s hope this happens to them a lot in the next 12 months or so, right up until the election.
Can the unicorn contest the leadership position? It should be able to and should do so.
Or a banana or the Monkeypox. They’re all valid choices in the while scheme of things ay?
The Greens are the narcissist children’s party.
Sadly that will get you 5-10% of the vote quite reliably every 3 years.
More nutters coming to NZ and being enabled here as they victimise others to join those already happily here wallowing in self pity.
Greens used to be the good guys, it’s actually pretty heart breaking now environmentalism is most needed but current Greens are busy redefining the world cunt, biggest users of hate speaking by defining everyone else for being a racist or micro aggressor and wanting more Stasi for thought crimes as the ram raids continue, putting more high needs people into motels for thousands of $$$, creating billions in government debts for worse solutions, giving away NZ pensions to anybody buying their way in, driving out professionals or pretty much anybody working a real job here with low wages, stagnating domestic tertiary training for professional careers like doctors during a pandemic, and calling everything they do a better solution while the evidence shows the opposite.
Most certainly the childrens party that’s why they want the voting age lowered.
Bob the first They want voting age lowered to capture the campus vote and everything that goes with being young, inexperienced, and sometimes idealistic.
Voting age? I’d be surprised if the percentage of 16-17 year olds who are dumb or brain dead is as high as the % from 18 years up who are like that.
Most of the anti-vaxx protestors I saw were a lot older than 18. The same as the Destiny Church/Freedom and Choice idiots wandering on roads and motorways to deliberately take the freedom and choice off ordinary people.
Normal compromises of democracy are not good enough in this crisis. Yes, it was better the Greens talked for what was actually needed.
If the rational Left doesn’t force what is needed then the Fascist Right will place their road-blocks for their short-term profit. Labour, stuck in Roger and Helen land.