Ellie Stevenson

Mar 741 min read

Riding The Ouroboros

Part I: The Highway To Hell Is Paved With Middling Intentions

So I graphed the word count of every article I have ever written for Frozen Peaches.

From modest origins sticking to a 500 word count, I have vaulted up and down as my whims have fancied. You can see my five longest, and all of them make sense. GZG was my first truly big piece, looking back on wars fought over two decades. Labour's Spent was specifically intended to be comprehensive, taking the long view on a government over the five years I'd known it. TOP's Dead...okay, I just thought the Teal Card was a bit daft and I hadn't converted to MANJIMANIA!!! yet. My 2024 Republican primary setup was something I'd been waiting for years to do, though of course it turned out to be of little consequence.

And the opening to my "Who Should I Vote For?" series had to break word count records: I had to give every party their fair due (and the mashed potatoes of NZFirst a heaping of contempt gravy). That seemed sure to hold the crown for years to come. Never again would anything I’d run on a particular news story or faction be able to stretch out so far. After all, I’ve become much less about dumping walls of text, and much more about crafting stylish, creative forms of presentation.

Now watch what happens when I add the piece that you are reading right now:

In the wise words of a foolish himbo, “What have I done?” And the answer is: fulfilling my destiny. Joining the dark side. Engaging with...The Discourse.

⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡

(thunder sounds)

(hail noise, briefly. then silence)

Also, I got COVID and channeled my cabin fever (and literal fever) into writing some more.

When I set out to write this article, I didn’t see this word count coming. All I had were my thoughts on Swarbrick’s leadership announcement (positive). She stumbled through an interview with Jack Tame a few days later and I decided to include that too. Weeks passed. The word count ran on and on. There’s a long tangent about Germany. I hijack the music of Kiwi artists to contrast their perspectives. I almost break Frozen Peaches’ First Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Speak Of Israel-Palestine).

How can this be? The answer is that I’m an iceberg. I can be plenty verbose about a topic in person or for the blog, but I still selectively choose what topics to cover. Some topics exist on one side of a Venn diagram, where they come up frequently and are of interest to me, but do not meet the cut to discuss on the blog. There’s only one topic I’ve deliberated on whether to shift into the “maybe I will discuss on the blog”, but naming what, exactly, it is is nebulous. Call it progressivism; call it wokeness. Call it a little more than that - the white uni-educated left-leaning bubble tends to be my preferred nomenclature.

You can’t follow politics (or exist as a young person, or go to university) without coming across this a lot, and so I’ve given it plenty of thought. I hadn’t known how to approach the subject. I don’t like the feeling of joining in an ouroboros - the endless nitpicking of nitpicks, round and round in circles, heedless of the world still turning. I have my beliefs, but I continue to pride the blog on being genuinely critical of all sides, not a centrist-in-name marching soldier for anyone or anything. (Except The Truth™! Just kidding.) And that dynamic takes very different forms with different sides.

So I accumulated my thoughts, and devil’s advocated them back and forth, polishing them to clarity, as I do on many matters. They didn’t seem like they were ever going to wind up finding a home. Until I started writing this, and slowly, the floodgates opened. Half of Chlöe Swarbrick’s interview concerned Israel-Palestine; well, now I couldn’t not talk about the subject (however obliquely) if I wanted to evaluate her fairly. The changing of the guard from Ardern and Shaw to Chippy and Swarbrick represents the end of one era and the beginning of another on the New Zealand left.

(Also, I really wanted to talk about German politics at length.)

Swarbrick means something unique to our generation, so close to our age and experiences, up and coming during coming of ages - the European migrant crisis, Trump getting in, Jacindamania, all that has come since. This, then, is coming full circle. Then, Swarbrick was as old as I am now. Now, she is making the dream of then come true: young and fresh and different, genuine and honest and authentic, taking leadership and heading for power. And I am reaching back into the past, talking to my past perspectives, trying to see if any of us know how the dream can live.

Call it hope.

You can talk the talk

But will you walk the walk

Will you bring us comfort

Poly- poly- poly politician

Can you make a right decision

For all of us

Kora - Politician

2004

Part II: Respect

I cannot discuss the Greens without first speaking about two of their former MPs. The sudden death of Efeso Collins is an absolute tragedy. I’m not going to reckon on political implications past the statement of the obvious that he had so much more to give, and represented a potential new direction for the Greens. For now, that door is closed. Efeso’s passage means something really gutting: that the hopes of his community he carried with him, what he represented to many people, and his fight for his girls and everyone like them, is gone out of the world. My sincere condolences to all those still feeling that hurt. May he rest in peace.

Golriz Ghahrahman’s repeated, compulsive shoplifting has required her resignation. This is a real shame, and yet another example of where failures for political spaces to support the mental health of politicians outside the historic norm - politicians of colour, female politicians, politicians with disabilities, refugee politicians - has made our politics less functional. What’s more, these losses mean people who could bring their different perspectives and experiences to our politics face foreboding signals as they weigh up whether to enter the arena. Will anything be done? I’m sadly doubtful. Certainly, this seems like the sort of ground the Greens and TPM could really discuss.

These saddening early endings to two parliamentary careers deserve note in their own right. They’re also a necessary introduction to any look forward for the Greens. The party ended last year on a high. They won their most votes ever, and with Labour on life support, they could plausibly hope to wrestle for primacy on the left. Losing two MPs so rapidly, under some circumstances, must feel awful. I had to stop and speak about that before I could progress on to the Greens's wins: the Lambton Ward by-election to replace Tamatha Paul, and nabbing Swarbrick to run for co-leader.

Part III: It’s Hers, And She Wants It

Previously, I analysed the potential challenges for Chlöe’s candidacy. She has already passed her greatest test: motivation. She wants to be the leader, and running at a time like this, under circumstances like this, shows she isn’t an emergency stopgap. If you become leader at the start of Opposition, when your party’s doing well, you are saying that you are willing to sit in Opposition for as long as nine years, just so you can occupy a senior role in government for another nine. That’s a major commitment and one she will have considered seriously, even though its full enormity - over half her lifespan; six elections ago, she was in Year Six - is probably hard to grasp.

We can safely presume she will successfully navigate her party’s nomination process. Her response to the prospect of challengers was to laugh and say “come take me on”. The sum total of her challengers so far is one Dunedin party member, who agrees she’d be a fantastic leader. (He wants the Greens to talk about the working class more. You already know what I’d say to that.) Nobody wants knives out when the party is still reeling from their losses.

Her announcement of her candidacy reflected that reality. She barely tried to persuade the Green membership that she, specifically, is the right candidate compared to any hypothetical alternative. She stuck almost uniformly to typical Green talking points that any MP could recite. If you passed somebody who knew all the Green MPs the transcript for her speech, they’d likely struggle to identify the speaker.

In many ways, the entire announcement was surprisingly muted. Swarbrick betrayed the tiniest shakiness as she started but still got good marks. She never reached for the rhetorical ceiling. The promise of somebody so young and new, unmistakably representing a unique candidacy, went practically untouched. The very framing, Swarbrick alone, pressed up against a solid green background, seemed oddly claustrophobic, instead of expansive, hopeful.

Most probably she was simply abiding by a code of conduct, unable to invite along other Greens who would appear to be aligning themselves. She is not prematurely celebrating. The visual of her caucus uniting around her can wait for her coronation. As Swarbrick moved past her prepared points into the press conference, her true focus became clear. She cast aspersions on Labour’s rhetoric of transformation versus policy of tinkering. And she openly set her sights not only on leading the Opposition, but on a Green-led government in the future.

Allow me an extended discursion into German politics.

Part IV: The Proudest Boast

Germany's Greens certainly have a different history from ours. They served in a centrist government with the SPD (Social Democrats - analogous to our Labour) from 1998 to 2005. Participating in the Hartz reforms, they helped to crack down on beneficiaries: hardly the preferred place to be at for any Green Party, and a cause of a lot of soul searching on the German left in the following years. Helen Clark conspicuously shut the Greens out from any such partnership. Both of the Green Parties have gone through the ritual of shedding hippie vibes to be trusted with the keys.

Leading up to the 2017 election, and particularly in the days after Metiria Turei revealed her benefit fraud, the Greens really hoped that they could win the most votes on the left in 2017. At this time the Greens polled at 15% and Labour at 24%; if, say, 4% of Labour voters peeled off to the Greens and 4% more to NZFirst and National, the Greens could experience their usual vote-night dropoff and still come out ahead. They could then expect to form a Green-led government. That probably wasn’t happening that year, given Labour’s piddling numbers, but they could look forward to their shot in 2020.

And then Jacindamania hit, and Ardern effectively axed Turei by warning the Green co-leader could not serve in her cabinet. Everything fell apart. Turei resigned. The Greens were consigned to a junior role. NZFirst held more sway than them. They passed the test of proving they could serve as a reliable governing partner. They had not yet fulfilled their own goals of real power with which to make real change.

Instead, they were left to watch the German Greens. That same year, Germany’s Greens seemed poised to enter a new government, replacing the SPD-CDU/CSU “Grand Coalition” (akin to a Labour-National government here) with a new Merkel government, a “Jamaica Coalition”, of the CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens (think National-ACT-Greens). In the end, negotiations fell apart when the FDP walked away.

The Greens had to adjust. They harnessed anguish at a continued stale “GroKo” and stoked the flames of fear around climate change - very much, as it turned out, to their benefit. Meanwhile, on the local level, battles between left and right raged on, continuing to provide them with opportunities to speak up. The rise of the AfD in local elections vindicated Green criticisms about the far-right and anti-refugee sentiment, after Merkel’s welcoming approach during the migrant crisis. Berlin slammed through a markedly left-wing rent control program that became a focal point of court battles for years. As the tired SPD sagged, much of the middle class and youth came to the Greens. By 2018, astonishingly, the Greens were polling ahead of the SPD.

This ran parallel to, and interconnected with, internal change for the Greens. Annalena Baerbock fulfilled the classic Green co-leader role of the more moderate, public-facing option, the “Realo”. However, in 2018 she was joined by Robert Habeck, a fellow Realo. He brought real experience in local government, serving various cabinet roles in Schleswig-Holstein, where he had won acclaim from both environmentalists and agriculturalists. One sees a passing resemblance to James Shaw here.

The Greens hit a sweet spot: by nominating Baerbock for Chancellor, they tapped into a mood for change and social justice to turn out their base, mobilise non-voters and avoid messy internal disputes. At the same time, their leadership team could be trusted to run a government competently, reassuring more centrist voters and establishment forces.

Yet events, once again, overtook prospects on paper. Baerbock (along with half the Bundestag, it seemed) suffered from scandals coming to light, such as plagiarism. Voters gravitated to the SPD's Olaf Scholz, a more popular candidate than his own party. He offered continuity Merkel more than either Baerbock's uncertain promise or the buffoonish CDU/CSU candidate Armin Laschet. At the end of it all, the Greens got their government and a decent amount of power, but their "Traffic Light Coalition" - SPD/FPD/Greens - was headed by Scholz.

The government remains in power to this day, and boy have they struggled. There were times that the Greens polled at 26%. Now, they rest at 13%. The SPD is at 15%. And the AfD is 19%...

Let’s come back to Aotearoa.

Part V: Welcome Home

Did you enjoy your trip abroad?

This is an instructive example for Swarbrick’s own chances. The Greens face a government that is new today but, as with all governments, doomed to appear out-of-touch and faded eventually. Ministers get tired, or drop due to scandals. Retirements accumulate. New ideas run out. Donations dry up. The media narrative turns. This is particularly potent in the case of those more on the conservative side, which this appears to be both in makeup and agenda.

One can picture a refresh several years from now where, say, NZFirst drops out of Parliament while Nicola Willis and BVV take up the reins. (I know the prospect of liberals in the lead is unlikely; I’m waiting for more conservative candidates to build their profiles so I can name them.) However, we’ve seen from recent New Zealand political history that bringing in a tail-end Charlie PM doesn’t transform the result. I’ll have more to say on that another time.

The hope, then, is for NZ’s Greens to do what the German Greens couldn’t. Not only does Swarbrick wish to bring in more votes for the left bloc than the right, but she wants the Greens to do so while being the biggest party on the left. She’d have a mandate to make herself Prime Minister and to set a more ambitious direction for policy change than Labour ever would. That in turn, could threaten to normalise Green rule going forwards, and permanently consign Labour to the role of junior partner.

The final note of caution I must sound in comparison to Germany is that you can only beat a government that looks old and out of touch with new ideas. The Greens, like many left-wing movements, seem concerningly wedded at times to old ideas that are the worst of both worlds: they scare older voters who remember them and their interpretation is shallow amongst younger voters who are unfamiliar with them.

The classic example is everybody from MPs on down who jumps at the chance to say they’re a socialist. Sorry, buds, you could win a Greens majority and it’s still going to be a capitalist welfare state country. And you know that, which is why your policies are about adjusting welfare state settings and governing within a capitalist market. We’re not a huge red scare country but nobody in need is helped by rich politicians calling themselves socialist instead of just saying they’re left-wing progressives and presenting exactly the same policies.

That’s a little thing, but the big one for me is that some Greens policy ideas feel distinctly like they don’t actually have new solutions to problems. Their signature new promise last election was a wealth tax (sure) to kill the bottom tax bracket, an idea with plenty of merits…but at the point at which you’re promising new revenues to fund tax cuts, rather than deliver public services, what are you doing as a left-wing party?

I’m not opposed because I think it’s some unthinkable ideological heresy, but I think that betrays a fundamental lack of confidence in “how do we actually get public services working”. After all, the entire thesis statement of left-wing government is tax dollars are more efficiently/equitably used if they are spent on public services rather than returned to the taxpayer.

The other big headliner I’ve got to ding them for is cosplaying Berliners, by which I mean rent controls. God only knows why we’ve got a left-wing environmentalist party worshipping at the altar of Muldoon and Nixon. Rent controls are not a good idea. Price controls are not a good idea. I’ll be fair and grant them their merits: they give you legitimate socialist street cred you can spend at Bélen or Mojo, they allow you to womansplain German politics at length, and they make life better for those who get to spend less of their money…in the short term.

Long term, you’re opening yourself up to a world of hurt, as the US found out in the 70s and NZ in the 80s. If you want to make a third Rogernomics/Ruthanasia likelier, and easier for ACT to implement, then by all means hand them a housing market that has gone through rent controls and they will not only kill them with the support of everybody who isn’t a renter, they will use the chance to heavily tip the balance towards landlords and property speculators over renters and first home buyers.

Yet this isn’t just about governance: it’s, to use a tired trope of mine, basic NCEA Keynesian (i.e center-left!) economics! You do not have to like landlords or the rents they charge or the condition of their flats to acknowledge the more apartments landlords provide, the better that is - not only because more people can physically occupy apartments, and have more choice over where they live, but because they compete and consequently slow down each others’ rent increases.

Rent controls leave you with the same supply and the same demand in the short term. All you’re gonna do is mess up the actual quantity supplied as fewer apartments get put up. We’ll wind up with even less construction and more empty properties being sat on by greedy speculators, exactly the thing the Greens hate.

I don’t explain this super well, but I intuitively understand the obvious: price controls are just another form of protectionism like Trump’s tariffs. They are meant to channel populist anger and anxiety, not to give people in vulnerable economic positions security. They belong in the past. If the Greens could actually figure out how to make the left’s other housing throwback work - massive state builds - that’d be cool. Yet Kiwibuild has made skeptics of us all: that direction is worth trying to solve, but only ever as an auxiliary, a difference maker for a few people, not to be relied upon to mend a nation.

No, the way forward remains to change the supply: make building houses easier. Yes In My BackYard. Greens, you believe that; show us how your policies for YIMBYism are better than the other parties. In particular, they need to navigate the Great Contradiction: being more left-wing, the Greens naturally believe in more regulations than most parties, but of course regulations add time and costs and challenges to doing stuff, and building accommodation is a pretty important stuff. How can they regulate more to raise standards of living and build more houses? They’d best put their years in Opposition to work developing the solutions.

Swarbrick can look forward to taking on the government - but, like Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck, she will have to wait several years for her opening. In the meantime, Labour will have the chance to rebuild from their dismal position - unlike the SPD, which was trapped within the GroKo. The SPD got by largely on the popularity of their leader and the failures of other parties. Labour have more room to manoeuvre. The question then becomes if Labour can make the most of being in Opposition.

Part VI: Is Labour Broke?

Two truths emerged out of the election. One, there was a strong reaction on the left that Labour had done too much to move to the centre, notably with ruling out the wealth tax plan. If Chippy continued to defy that feeling, he would be putting himself at risk of, say, a David Parker challenge - unlikely to roll him, but setting the stage for a left-centre civil war in the party. From what we know, Barbara Edmonds seems to favour a more left-wing tax approach. Having read her profile the other day, she seems to me like their best choice for a future leader. Instead, he has put tax reform back on the table.

Two, by the nature of their collapse, Labour’s caucus is completely transformed. Gone are the electorate and list candidates across the country who got into Parliament through the 2020 landslide. These candidates were much more vibes-based than ideological. They liked to be part of the winning team and represent the simple goodness of navigating a pandemic and being kind. In particular, those electorate candidates represented more centre-right or outright right-wing regions of the country. On average they tended to be more centrist both in their backgrounds and by virtue of representing their communities. (This is a reckon, for what it’s worth. We’ll never know if it’s true.)

You are left with a nucleus of MPs overwhelmingly from the Labour heartlands: South Auckland, the wider Wellington region, Christchurch, Dunedin. Does that make them raging lefties? No: to belabour my ever-trusty point, these areas (largely excepting Dunedin) comprise a lot of working-class voters of diverse backgrounds, rather than white-collar whites who are more reliably lefty. But these regions, and their MPs, certainly don’t have an appetite to concede on Labour fundamentals to appease the centre.

It’s too early to say for sure, but I believe we are seeing the early signs of a new strategy from Chris Hipkins. He is moving back towards the left, hoping to shore up Labour’s reputation with their core constituencies and win back Greens voters. In 2017, Jacinda Ardern first crushed Turei to grab around a third of their vote, and then came for 5% of the vote or so, depending on how you analyse the election, from National. That approach - first the left, then the center - worked. Hipkins saw all this up close, as a friend and colleague.

So, how is Hipkins moving left? There was, of course, the tax move. And Labour hasn’t bowed to the government or right-wing winds on any matters. For example, they shot back at Stuart Nash’s criticism of Labour for not adopting a harsher policy towards gangs. The minister in his sights was Kiri Allan, who is no longer in politics. If Chippy wanted to go pure realpolitik Blairite (and exasperate a lot of people), he could say there was some truth to Nash’s criticism and pledge to be tougher yet on crime. That’s not what we got. Remember, the Chippy we got during the election campaign was surprisingly willing to stand for more left-wing positions, such as stopping ram raids through rehabilitation, and talking up co-governance. (To what end? Who knows. We don’t do policies here.)

Chippy has made one other big change. He broke with New Zealand’s tradition of bipartisan foreign policy to criticise the government for not doing more to defend Palestinians in Gaza. Labour politicians remain less than beloved at pro-Palestinian rallies. Regardless, this makes sense as a way to signal Labour regaining their historical moral clarity on foreign policy issues (from Vietnam to nuclear testing). This is an issue that matters a lot to the activist left and which, importantly, has plenty of appeal across different communities. Let’s leave Labour there; we’ll see if their approach works over the coming year.

Part VII: The Israel-Hamas War Is A Terrible Issue. Kiwis Aren’t The Solution

As usual, I invoke my first commandment to say as little as possible directly about Israel-Palestine. However, the subject leads us neatly back into Swarbrick’s most notable public appearance since declaring for the leadership. This runs the risk of what Baerbock fell afoul of: once put up in front of the public for more direct scrutiny, she faced challenges around her personal credibility. Swarbrick will now face more media criticism than she ever has: she must prove worthy or she will hurt her cause as leader.

Perceptions of the Jack Tame interview seem to have generally split along partisan lines. Those on the right found her to be overly activist, hypocritical or a raging anti-Semite. Those on the left found her to be strongly moral, justified, and unfairly assailed. I don’t think her positions are nonsense or clearly in the wrong, nor do I think this will impact her chances much for the leadership: any attack on a Green MP for being too pro-Palestinian can only help her. However, I thought the interview was an absolute travesty from Swarbrick, and we’ve seen some doozies out of the Jack Tame studio in the past year.

Why I think the interview was a disasterclass reveals the real issue for Swarbrick in the coming years. Much is made, particularly on the left, of positions on issues, which makes sense, lol, that’s politics in a nutshell: deciding what to do about problems. In short, then, the expectation from those with strong positions on the conflict (as opposed to the politician’s tendency to hover towards the median acceptable position with their party/constituency/country) is that we can and should push heavily to successfully get our country to change its approach towards Israel-Palestine, so that Israel-Palestine will change.

Now, I am not writing this to be dismissive of how much so many people care about this conflict. There are so many reasons and factors that don’t need listing as to why somebody can be personally attached to or otherwise care about Israel-Palestine. Regardless, I can’t approach the issue without this framing that should come first in any line of reasoning about Israel-Palestine. Everything anybody can say about either the IDF and their civilian superiors or Hamas absolutely confirms these actors are extremely intransigent, and that outsiders have minimal impact on their behaviour.

You can see the angle if, say, you’re an American leftist or a Palestinian-American who is outraged that your nation’s aid plays a significant part in enabling Israel’s policy settings, which I’m gonna describe apolitically as “pretty fucking ballsy” for a small country (fewer people than Greece or Hungary and on less land than Belize, Djibouti or North Macedonia) surrounded by historically hostile states. In that case, it’s your taxpayer dollars and your representatives which do have a material impact on what one actor in the conflict chooses, even though that doesn’t prove the other part of the thesis (that you’ll actually be able to change American policy towards Israel).

We are little New Zealand at the bottom of the world. Hamas does not care about us. The State of Israel does not care about us. The Israeli population does not care about us; the Palestinian population does not care about us. In every possible statistic or intangible you could measure for our relationship with them, the result will come out as negligible. Think of this like the situation currently facing the left in Opposition: however far they want to run to the left or to the centre, because they hold negligible power, those positions are largely irrelevant as they’re just words, not actual changes for anybody’s lives. (The difference is that might change for the Opposition; New Zealand is not going to become remotely influential in the Middle East, ever.)

The killings and the destruction and the terror felt have been horrific. There is no wonder that people feel the need to do something about this. All I can advise is that this conflict presses right on the nerves of bigotry and malice everywhere in the world, including here. Any time that there is a flareup in the conflict, people across the globe who hate or fear or resent Muslims, or Jews, or Arabs, or anybody with a vague resemblance centre that hate and act on it. They yell their slurs and intimidate communities, they tag community centres and houses of worship, they attack people. They make parents explain to their kids why they have to be cautious now, or why they’re being treated this way.

Channel that urge to do something into looking after our communities of different faiths and ethnicities. I don’t have the answers as to how we do that, beyond the usual laundry list. Call out racism. Explain stuff. Learn stuff. Avoid stereotypes. Check in on how people are holding up. Keep an eye out. Love thy neighbour. The Israel-Hamas War is life-altering for many thousands of people, and we cannot do much about that. Any one of us can personally make the difference for any other New Zealander: the Palestinian New Zealander, the Israeli New Zealander, the Arab New Zealander, the Jewish New Zealander, the Muslim New Zealander who deserves to live here safely and to be treated with dignity. We should, as a country, put our minds to that.

Let’s return, then, to the politicians. Why do words in Opposition matter? Well, Swarbrick is trusted to be across the details on the issues. While she’ll continue to be put to the test for that, I doubt that that is where this “well-researched radical” will be exposed. Instead, for now, Swarbrick in Opposition must be all about presentation and style to cut through with the media. Her job right now is not policy change, because that’s a job for the government. Her job is Opposition: to attract voters who, in 2026, will likely have little ability to actually impact the country’s direction.

The issue for Swarbrick, then, is that she is so eloquent she has looped around to being blindingly incoherent.

Part VIII: Who, from the heights of divine apathia - divine athambia - divine aphasia - loves us dearly, with some exceptions, for reasons unknown, but time will tell…

This stuff really grinds my gears. I was Pete Buttigieg's #1 hater in the 2020 Democratic primary. White college-educated voters were falling over themselves across the nation to gush about how inspiring and intelligent his vague platitudes were. His glaring issues with black, Latino and working-class voters went unaddressed. And look who won that race. The analogy isn’t perfect - “Scranton Joe” was hardly a divine avatar of the average gal for most of the campaign - but you don’t have to be a good candidate to win. You just gotta be less worse than the next one down.

Swarbrick's stances and values are far firmer than Secretary Buttigieg. I bring up his example to illustrate that those on the left who adore everything she says really, really need to assess how her delivery sounds to voters not already committed to the Greens. Those are the voters the Greens need to win to make big changes in the future. Otherwise, they are ceding ground to leaders with more centrist positions and better messaging, who will take those voters and use them to implement their positions instead.

Put as plainly as possible, Swarbrick uses big words. A lot. She has a very uni-educated phrasebook, and she responds to criticism by saying it’s reductive. You may agree with her analysis of why a specific criticism reinforces an unfair paradigm, and that doesn’t matter. Whether she’s right or wrong, the average centre-left voter is not as smart as her, may not have had the same educational opportunities that she has, and does not live in the same bubble that she does. I’m not trying to condescend here: plenty of people from very different bubbles care about the same things and discuss the same issues. The work of a good politician is to connect people, not to erect barriers to engagement. That’s what progressives don’t like! That’s what Swarbrick doesn’t like! Yet she does just that!

Let me give an example. Jack Tame starts the interview by asking her why she’s running for leader. After a ten second intro, she sets out the following: “...politics is made to look incredibly complicated, and that’s how we’ve ended up alienating and ostracising many people from being engaged in decisions that impact and saturate our daily lives, the ramifications of which we see represented in the greatest inequality we've ever seen on record, the housing crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, and, of course, the issues currently confronting us, with regards to polarisation, so I think we have an incredible opportunity right now to unify Aotearoa New Zealand, and to push for the kind of country and systems that all of us deserve, which ultimately uphold people and planet as opposed to exploiting them.”

…

What?

I cannot fathom how she can be so worried about people being locked out of politics by the subject being presented as above their heads, and then rattle off that way of presenting her worldview. I mean, I can fathom it, I just wish I didn’t. It’s what you get when everybody you live around, and the base and the social circles that you give speeches for, talk a certain way. And, even when you’re not around them, when you’re in Parliament or on the morning shows, you prioritise that way of saying what you want to say as the best way of saying it.

She’s not offering us word salad and her presentation is confident and clear, especially compared to her announcement, but the phrasing and language is all wrong. And I think a lot of Greens voters hear her talk, or would hear me say this, and feel confused, and say it’s clear as day to them. That’s precisely how the echo chamber works, particularly because most people who say “that was nonsense” say it in much ruder ways. She’ll get a positive reception for this from her usual audience, and yet this won’t work with everyone.

Let me take a crack at saying this more simply to break down the difference. “...politics is made to look incredibly complicated. That's why almost one in five people didn't even vote last year, three in ten young people. Nobody trusts politicians. And the public have good reason to be angry with us! Working people are earning too little and paying too much. Our housing market is cooked. We are killing our biodiversity. We are watching while our children’s planet burns. So I'm running for co-leader because I know I can engage voters, can put an end to the division we've seen, and bring us together to say no to trashing our environment and an unlivable economy and yes to people and planet.”

This is glorified fanfiction and it’s pretty mid. It’s too long, a bit too granular for an opening statement, negative in tone, treads on the toes of the follow-up electability answer, risks opening up to criticism of why you all and specifically James didn’t do enough in the past several years…but what I'm trying to get across here, is, if you think people are earning too little and paying too much, just say that “people are earning too little and paying too much”, not that "ramifications [are] represented in the greatest inequality we've ever seen on record, the housing crisis…” It’s both confusing and impersonal. You’re asking a lot of the viewer at home to actually follow along with you, live, as you leap from one point to the next.

The first half of the interview is about Swarbrick’s general leadership pitch and politics. I like that she continues to develop her local engagement theme. If I may draw one more parallel, that bears some resemblance to Habeck establishing Green credibility on the issues by getting it done on a local level. That’s the right approach, and that specifically fits the “Old Town/New Town” themes of modern NZ politics by cultivating YIMBY votes through delivering on building more housing.

She’s still too evasive in this segment. She speaks about how we need to change the culture, and not just think through a parliamentary political lens. That's very in keeping with the worldview of a Greens voter, but you're not a Greens voter, Chlöe, you're running to be the bloody parliamentary co-leader. Pardon my language, I’m not angry at her at all, but I’m just baffled how you prep an answer like that without hearing how obvious the response is. (Jack Tame, in one of only two slip ups in an otherwise strong interview from him, doesn’t even land the hit fully.)

This is symptomatic of an issue with a progressive worldview in general, as I flagged earlier vis a vis Israel-Palestine. Everybody is in different positions in life and can have different impacts on different issues, but because progressivism is so closely entwined with identifying and confronting massive crises, its theory of the case logically demands massive and uniform action. But if you want to do the most to confront the crisis, this doesn’t make any sense!

Swarbrick is a political leader. There are tradeoffs in her political effectiveness without a comparative cultural impact if, say, she starts talking about how we need to rethink animal rights or responds to every criticism by challenging the coded sexist and ageist lens it comes through. Let others - celebrities, activists, media allies - who have more cultural influence and don’t have to make those tradeoffs do the influencing to change the culture. They can make it easier, not harder, for her to, in turn, to make the necessary changes from her political position.

The Greens already implicitly accept some level of tradeoff in not getting to do everything they think should be done, even if most of them don’t think of politics in this way. Otherwise, presumably the members would just elect a leader who’d jack taxes over 100k to 90% and abolish air travel. However, subjective, stylistic factors mean that, from a progressive perspective, politicians are divided between tradeoffy, compromisey moderate centrist or bold leftist radicals, maybe with a couple caveats.

There isn’t room in that worldview for somebody who is to the left and more radical, but who also makes some tradeoffs and compromises, just fewer than the centre-left. She risks being straitjacketed from the start if she carries the expectation that she must speak out on every minutiae of process and phrasing, or else become just another tradeoffy, compromisey moderate centrist embodying a damaged status quo. (Or she could just be dodging the question and buying time. That’d be worse.)

Hell, we have her on the record that she wants to talk about the issues, not just, for instance, being a young person in politics. We know she wants to talk primarily about stats and policies, not being in her 20s or battling with depression or being queer, so just, do that! She wants or feels the need to tackle those other matters? Then do so in the right forum, like an interview with North&South, because it’s more effective to discuss culture and non-policy change in a cultural forum, where the questions will be framed around culture, and where the audience are interested and engaged in culture, rather than with Jack Tame, who will treat you like a hostile witness if you try to! Argh!

Part IX: What’s The Deal With Teal?

She may struggle to adjust to her new role as a co-leader of a political party. There was also a pretty baffling miss from her as Tame asked her why the Greens wouldn’t coalition with National to be a handbrake against their environmental harms. The concept has an enormous appeal to the kind of voter who says they like James Shaw or Russel Norman but worry the Greens have gone too far left for them; a silly characterisation, but one that must be overcome to win their votes.

Remember, the Greens need to expand. They already have 11.6% of the vote, NZ’s most left-wing groups; they need people who like the idea of an environmentalist party but are scared by the idea of a party that’s too left-wing. They need their votes so they have more power to carry out more left-wing and environmentalist policies. And the path to soothing their worries begins by explaining the Greens are resolutely for the environment, and, thus, cannot countenance environmental degradation, which they see as unacceptably high under the National Party. In short, a stand against National is not for the left, it is for the environment.

A Greens-National coalition is a stupid idea. This is not, however, a stupid idea not because of why the average Greenie thinks it is - because National are the worst, so it’s morally wrong to prop them up. That doesn’t explain why making National 10% less worse somehow makes the Greens handmaidens to evil, nor why the most important issue for the Greens is safeguarding the moral character of their well-paid MPs rather than ensuring Queenstown has drinkable water.

It’s a stupid idea because the Greens would lose all their votes from those average Greenies, which would strip them of the ability to make change the next time a Labour-Greens government gets in. Which, in short, is trading off acting instantly on the environment for long-term political gain, or exactly the sort of thing the average Greenie despises in theory.

A National-Greens coalition is a stupid idea, but the thought is going to be bandied about until well after global warming has burned us all to crisps. The question is actually a great opportunity, too. You can obscure the tradeoff you’re accepting by not working with National by putting forward strong rhetoric about how National will never fundamentally compromise in favour of the environment, how they can’t be trusted not to work around you in a coalition, and how you’d like to see a future where you could lead a Greens-National coalition and dictate to them.

Instead, she prevaricated and tried to avoid the question. Tame made it seem as though the Greens had personally enabled oil & gas exploration with their misguided socialist priorities. If you run for co-leader of the Green Party, you surely have to expect that this question is coming, same as a new Labour leader being asked about tax raises or a new National leader being asked about service cuts. Why would you not be prepared for this?

To recap, then, her introduction has been too verbose to easily follow. She has gotten sidetracked into microdebates that will accomplish nothing, and signalling that is entirely unprofitable, i.e academic language that appeals to her base who were going to choose her anyway and scares voters who might or might not choose her. She isn’t prepared to deal with stupid punditry. She does have a distinct pathway forwards around local government, so there’s potential. All in all, though, you can see the seeds of problems planted: a real challenge succeeding as a competing party co-leader against Labour and the rest, when the other party leaders are so much more versed at appealing to typical voters.

Part X: I break my one rule and talk, side on, about Israel-Palestine, as cautiously and sensitively as possible.

We come now to the second half of the interview, where Swarbrick is asked about her use of “from the river to the sea” as a pro-Palestinian chant. By my own logic earlier, while the war is extremely important, I cannot have any impact by getting into the nitty-gritty. Also, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict genuinely is a really complicated, awful mess. I know, it’s a copout statement, but it’s impossible to study the history and not come away with that conclusion.

My own views are firm but I am not looking to share them. Also, I have not studied the phrase (or the recent war) nearly as much as the conflict in general, so I am unfamiliar with any deeper layers of the debate here. In this case, that works to the advantage of the article: I am coming at this to try to explain to Greens voters, who have surely consumed more infographics about this phrase and such than I, how this can sound to average voters. Most New Zealanders just don’t discuss or know much about Israel, Palestine, the Middle East, Judaism, Jewishness, Islam, Arab cultures, et cetera, et cetera, and I’m among them.

However, it’s necessary for me to clear up some of my thoughts to proceed here without tying myself into knots. Here’s what I’ll flag up top for you: that I personally believe you can sufficiently argue the case for using the phrase; I do not hear this phrase as one of those phrases where it’s such an automatic disqualification that any defence is instantly digging yourself deeper, such as “states’ rights”, “go back to your country”, or “globalist elites”. I get the idea that, if you say Palestine (=Palestinians) should be entitled to freedom, safety et al, then that’d better exist within Israel too, i.e from the river to the sea.

I can also see how it can very easily be argued to be anti-Semitic. All you need to do is persuade somebody that “from the river to the sea” = “the State of Israel should be eradicated”, and given Israel’s particular history it’s a short step from there for that person to conclude “that would result in the violent deaths and expulsions of the world’s largest population of Jews”. Swarbrick failed to make the case for why she’d used this phrase or why her approach could be trusted going forward, and this is a bad sign for her ability to handle future controversies.

If you are a Greens voter, you’re the likeliest voter in the country to believe that media and other institutions possess a right-wing bias, and will attempt to mercilessly mischaracterise a left-wing leader as unreasonable. In that case, they’ll be able to achieve their malign purposes much more easily with Swarbrick as co-leader (and thus set back progress) if she continues to give interviews like this.

Her phrasing is so impossible to divine a clear meaning from that anybody can project what they want onto it. This is bad news because not only can the media parse this how they like, but any voter at home looking for a reason to be suspicious about her can organically start a social media furore or a rark up with their mates that she is foolish or dangerous.

Aside from legitimate discussion, there absolutely are a segment of trolls and bigoted hypocrites who have made a sport of targeting left-wing women (and particularly women of colour - Golriz Ghahrahman got by far the worst abuse of any NZ politician) in the social media era. They will relentlessly dredge up these episodes the same way they’re still going on about trans rights arguments from yonks ago, particularly because they armour themselves in them.

That matters less because there’s less pressure to officially engage with these people who will never vote for you and influence few others, but that still makes for a toxic environment - and a further siloisation of left-wing voters who witness all this and flatten out nuance. (I’m not saying nuance in the “water down your position” centristy sense, I mean in the “consider how multiple groups - i.e Jews and Palestinians - can be harmed” sense.)

Most concerningly, if the left consider themselves to be more morally authoritative on issues of race and bigotry, then they cannot afford to lend crucial aid to racists and bigots trying to escape scrutiny. For instance, Sean Plunket just interviewed David Seymour and called for him to go on a “pogrom” against opponents of the government. If anybody calls Plonker out for an anti-Semitic dog whistle, he or any defender of his can just yap “I didn’t mean that, and you’re so hypocritical for claiming that when Chlöe Swarbrick actually said ‘from the river to the sea’ and embraced making Jewish people uncomfortable”. If you break down the supposed moral paragon of hope and truth, then everything collapses into a samey grimdark in the eyes of most people, because what role model are you supposed to contrast troublemakers with? Cynicism carries the day.

There are two thrusts from Tame here. The first is, paraphrased, "Is this phrase wrong to use?” He cites unspecified objections from some Jewish groups and her being hauled in front of the Human Rights Commission (that David Seymour wants to abolish), which would likely glance off of the average voter but sufficient to meet the progressive bar of concern about hate speech. Her response to the HRC issue is that the process is confidential. Which. Sure. But surely you’d proactively front up some response upon getting HRC’d to explain how you’re not spreading anti-Semitism? The Greens would be happy to demand answers or drive home their point if another party’s MP faced this scrutiny.

In terms of Jewish objections to the phrase, her response is that other Jewish groups support the phrase and have spoken about feeling brainwashed. I think was her strongest material by far, and any characterisation that this was her saying “I have Jewish friends” as very uncharitable. I think this material was poorly explained, but I get why. This is where the uniquely extreme complexity of Israel-Palestine comes into the picture.

So many racist stereotypes have been built up over centuries around Jews, Arabs and Muslims - I say that because racism towards Palestinians inevitably rebounds onto Arabs and Muslims, just as racism towards Israelis unavoidably hits Jews, even though most Arabs and Muslims are not Palestinians and most Jews are not Israelis. There are many different opinions on the conflict between individuals and groups within Israel, Palestine, and the many millions of people within those different identities that, despite not being in Israel or Palestine, identify with or are otherwise related to the issue.

On top of that you have the actual material facts of the current war and the historical stages of the conflict. Any answer in detail risks tripping wires around either getting your facts wrong, or repeating stereotypes. As just one example, if Swarbrick keeps talking about Jews brainwashed by other Jews, she runs the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist convinced that Jews manipulate the media or society. When it comes to prickly subjects I usually try to either break them down to simple summations or avoid them. I wanted to tackle this subject because there’s a lot of interest to talk about here, but you can tell how much of a run-around it’s giving me! Imagine being in her shoes!

Compare that to, to give an easy example of NZ’s past criticising racism or oppression abroad, South Africa. David Lange could just come out and say “from Cape to Kalahari, Africans should be free”. If any white South Africans said that that was hateful towards their heritage, or supporting terrorist groups like MK, or endorsing the revival of the Boer camps, he could pretty much say “tough shit”. And that would be that.

Not so in Israel-Palestine, where the very phrasing (there’s that word again!) involves massive ambiguity: does “from the river to the sea” equal a territorial ambition to push Israel back into the sea, which would represent a free Palestinian state but also imply Israeli genocide, or does it mean a political and ethical desire for a continued Israeli state that Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims can exist within, free of discrimination or authoritarian controls?

This is why I’ve made such a big deal of phrasing nitpicks in this article. Sometimes, ambiguous phrasing really impacts what your substantive positions are! You can’t insist “the media are distorting my words and refusing to engage in the substance that matters” if your every word defines the substance. A lot of issues allow you to be pretty free with your words in how you come at them. This isn’t one of them.

More specifically, he also brings up how a Jewish school in her electorate complained to her and got her to stop a couple years ago. She initially responds with “I don’t recall” before admitting they had said something along those lines. That’s always a terrible look for a politician. She seemed like she was lying and deflecting, rather than taking the opportunity to explain an evolution in her views.

So, based on these arguments, Swarbrick hasn’t effectively defended the phrase as okay. All she has done is cite that not every Jewish person sees the phrase as not okay, which can also be said for any offensive phrase and marginalised group under the sun. Just in this article I’ve used queer, but that doesn’t mean some people won’t flinch at it. I’m not equating FTRTTSPWBF with slurs, but you can see the argument by example.

I’m also really not trying to dismiss Jewish people who would defend the phrase, come out swinging as strongly anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian et cetera. A key concern for a lot of Jewish people with that perspective is feeling like the way many Zionist Jews and Israel define these debates so that one cannot be properly Jewish without being Zionist. (This makes intuitive sense to me but is anecdotally based off of scrolling Jacob Geller’s Twitter in my COVIDelirium.)

This seems like safe grounds for Swarbrick to move into: that we should hear out and discuss all perspectives, acknowledging that there are big disagreements within Jewish communities as in all communities, not define an ethno-religious group as a monolithic hivemind. There are still pitfalls here as an outsider and you won’t please everybody, but in my view, you can hardly go wrong with “people is people, yo” as a starting point.

The second thrust from Tame (still paraphrasing) is “Irrespective of whether the phrase is wrong, given there is clear disagreement about it and you simply see it as a way to say ‘Palestinian life and liberties should be respected’, why not ditch the phrase and use a different one?” The reality of why Swarbrick uses this phrase is probably mundane: it’s commonly used amongst activists and protestors, and it would be conspicuous and awkward if she did not. She also may just not have given this a ton of thought compared to the substantive issues of the conflict or everything else on her plate.

There’s surely plenty of partisan siloing at work here. If you’re in a pro-Palestinian protest, you 100% believe that you and the people around you sincerely believe in saving the lives of Palestinian children, not in getting away with a Nazi hate march. In parallel, you do not treat your critics as acting in good faith, from right-wingers who never had an opinion about Israel before suddenly flocking to this opportunity to take potshots at you, to people on social media yapping about how the IDF is the most moral military in the world. (And all of this, again, gets messier with the subtext of caring not just about one state or another, but one group of people or another - after all, most New Zealanders are not particularly proactive about caring about or supporting Jews, Arabs or Muslims.)

Swarbrick gives her quote of the interview here, where she essentially says we should "lean into the discomfort". Great. What does that mean? The trends of partisan interpretations are at their sharpest here. The left applaud her for having the courage to stand up to an apartheid state and its attempts to cynically weaponise the charge of anti-Semitism against criticism of its policies. The right denounce a leading critic of hate speech for now openly embracing the idea of making Jewish people uncomfortable and charging them to examine themselves and their own beliefs, with undertones of being a fifth column, a painful insinuation with a very long history for Jews. All of this, yet again, runs through the difficult currents of separating Palestine from Arabs and Muslims and Israel from Jews.

This is the ambiguity problem at the heart of Swarbrick’s speech. She never explains what leaning into the discomfort means. She never sets out what she means to accomplish. She is, yet again, assuming an audience that is primed not just to accept her message, but to understand her message. Most people haven’t heard this matter phrased this way in the first place. If she wanted to go on with Jack Tame and say, for instance, we should lean into the discomfort of challenging white people about our anti-Māori racism, it’d be clearer and justifiable; but it’s murky, as everything is, when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

And on Israel-Palestine, I just don’t think the New Zealanders left has banked enough goodwill with Jewish New Zealanders or other minority groups to have much room to manoeuvre here. This has been a bit of a trend in recent months: as anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Jewish hate have spiked around the world, from social media abuse to threats at community centers, we STILL have not seen a proportionate response - nothing more than people posting on their Instagram stories “We can stand against anti-Semitism and for Palestinians at the same time”.

Great, that’s 100% true, but…what does that mean in practice? How do pro-Palestinian progressives actively fight anti-Semitism? I absolutely believe that most of them are sharply critical of and hostile towards your usual suspects for anti-Semitism, like internet Neo-Nazis. However, I just haven’t seen a consciousness or awareness in these recent months that it’s particularly a problem to tackle right now. There’s only this persistent aggravation at Israeli government social media accounts for bringing up anti-Semitism.

That makes sense given the opinions I alluded to earlier about the weaponisation of anti-Semitism. However, the perception I get as a laywoman is most pro-Palestinian progressives only bringing up anti-Semitism around Israel-Palestine in the context of “what bunkum, there’s no anti-Semitism here”, not “here is what anti-Semitism to do with Israel-Palestine looks like, here’s how we deal with that and make our Jewish communities safer”. And, of course, truly fighting anti-Semitism (as opposed to defending the Israeli government or military) surely shouldn’t present any conflict with being pro-Palestinian.

It’s the same hollow, pat phrases and tokenism that progressives love to criticise conservatives for all the time, the Greens amongst them. This is why, for instance, David Seymour gets heckled when he speaks te reo on the marae; because it’s perceived as a too little, too late contribution from somebody who hasn’t done the mahi over the years to engage in the community or actually deliver for them.

And so a political leader like Swarbrick reaps the whirlwind of a weak and unclear position in the wider culture. She cannot speak authoritatively and with confidence and clarity on racially sensitive issues like progressives typically can on, for instance, Te Tiriti. Not only that, she lives in this cultural bubble, and so her positions, yet again, lack clarity.

Swarbrick can take what positions she likes. She can dodge the question and herd towards the centre. That is traditionally identified in the Western world as support for a two-state solution and pat phrases about how it's a complicated situation over there and the violence must end. Or she can continue to be a fresh, honest voice with left-wing views, as I believe she is. Either way, whatever position she chooses, she needs to speak more plainly, or she’s going to have trouble on her hands.

And she can argue that it’s the media misrepresenting her or that what she’s saying makes sense…but how does that win you votes? How does that shift forward policy goals? That’s just another politician defending her own paycheck, rather than what the unique appeal of Swarbrick, the authentic, new generation leader, is supposed to be. Just…make sense. Represent yourself well. I wouldn’t recommend that for every politician because some of them are not capable of that, but I know she has it in her!

US congress voted…

California to the Jews…

The twelve tribes of Israel got down

In Gaza for the last time

By the time they got to the

West Bank baby it was Palestine…

She said don't fool me now

I believe every word that you said

Don't hold out while it's

Sounding so good darling

Don't fool around when what you

Believe could come true

Don't hold your breath

Dave Dobbyn & The Stone People - Don’t Hold Your Breath

1993

Part XI: Please Gather Your Belongings And Disembark From The Ouroboros. Mind The Gap.

We’re done with that interview. Let’s wrap up what all of this is about. Swarbrick’s best moments in her pitch for leader are when she had stood out as bringing something new, not merely being a standard elucidation of Greens values and positions. As usual, I’m not trying to say whether those are good or bad; I’m just saying the better the presentation, the more they can be enacted. And what she’s promising to bring to the kitchen table is a focus on local communities rather than an obsession with central politics in Wellington. That’s smart politics and it’s smart policy after the failure of Labour’s centralisation over the last few years.

Swarbrick has her game plan: build the party’s infrastructure this year, pour resources into building up numbers on local councils, nabbing mayoralties, and saving Tory Whanau in Wellington in 2025, and then crown this growth in momentum by getting around the same number of votes as Labour in 2026. The YIMBYs and the left are going to have to step up their game. The New Town ran a worse campaign than the Old Town in Lambton Ward; they only won because of the electorate lean. They need to become better campaigners than anybody the boomers can put up.

To do that, Swarbrick must ensure that not only her personal presentation, but the Green Party she sets the standard and strategy for and the wider left-wing movement she hopes to represent, can connect with a disparate range of people with a variety of perspectives. Mainly centre-left Labour voters; some people who haven’t voted before, or much; a few centre-right voters. She can do as much as she likes to max out the base’s happiness with her or passion for progressive causes, but the party is in Opposition. This does not help anybody marginalised. The only paths forward are to grow the vote or to fail. And she’s starting from a high watermark. This is a challenging task. She needs to show she remains a standout politician.

I’d like to bookend this article on the subject of politicians that represent us and who we invest our hopes in. I’m not going to pretend that Chlöe Swarbrick is anything like Efeso Collins. However, I think it is important that, when politics is so ultimately cynical and disengaging, that people can find somebody in the long term to engage with and find genuine. I spoke in one of my very first articles about the childhood dream that came true with School Strike For Climate, that the internal scream of nothing being done about climate change would finally get externalised.

Chlöe Swarbrick is, then, the dream that has stuck with many of us from a young age - of somebody actually relatable to us throwing herself into making a change and doing so without losing herself. The thing is, she hasn’t made a change yet. That’s through no fault of her own - she did her utmost best on the cannabis referendum, and she’s a backbencher otherwise - but she is now stepping up and saying, “yeah, I’m here for the long term to make change happen”.

Hope in politics can be a powerful thing. Hope can sweep aside previously established norms and coalitions and deposit an entirely new reality on our shores. Hope feeds into landslides, and jubilant celebrations, and meaning something more than politics as usual. Hope, of course, can turn out to be cope; but take hope as it is. Hope as it is is so often both well-earned and short-lived. The election is won, and then the business of governing comes along to disappoint. Jacinda Ardern promises transformation and does not practise it.

Chlöe Swarbrick, it’s easy to say, faces the challenge of ensuring that hope does not become cope. After all, I wouldn’t say it’s the most likely outcome that a Green-led government is in power within nine years. Whether or not she pulls that off doesn’t answer the fundamental questions at stake here around tradeoffs, about presentation, concerning whether the Greens will actually get stuff done to make our part of the planet better.

This article was a look at a point in time to discuss what might bedevil Swarbrick and her vote-getting efforts in the short-term. I could be right, I could be wrong. This article was also my entry in the endless annals of the discussion of compromise versus boldness, ideology versus pragmatism, persuasion versus turnout…what I am trying to get across is that that dichotomy is a bit too simplistic. What looks pure can be politics too. What looks political can be best left to anybody but the politicians.

If the Greens are going to finally become influential in our politics, they will inspire a lot of hope. It is in the hands of Swarbrick and her caucus whether that hope is a flash in the pan of electoral excitement, serving well-paid politicians and similarly verbose bloggers, or whether our hope services a long-term project of the different and the better for people in need and the environment we are kaitiaki for. Will we add Swarbrick to the list - Obama, Trudeau, Ardern? Will she fall short - Baerbock, Corbyn, Sanders? Or will the hope finally prove to be more than ephemeral: a successful government and a raised floor? You be the Buttigieg.

Hope for a generation

Just beyond my reach

Not beyond my sight