The option it has been road testing solidly for the last two weeks is a deal with the Greens. National’s core leadership have barely mentioned it, but they’ve had cheerleaders and mischief makers, as well as good honest souls, all hard at work promoting the idea. And perhaps to the surprise of the left and right, it resonates with a lot of voters.
It’s not going to happen. Well, it’s extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon. And of course that’s not quite the same thing as saying never. But it’s clear the idea has almost zero support among Green Party members and supporters. There is no chorus of people who voted Green and now say they would like their party of choice to lean on the National Party to do a deal.But it seems a remarkably large number of National Party members and supporters are keen on the idea. Some would rather the Greens than Winston. Others would rather the Greens anyway: many right-leaning voters clearly believe a good dose of environmental passion would do the National Party a world of good.
Such short memories they have. They’d prefer to work with people that would die in a ditch for someone who defrauded the government for years!
If you think New Zealand should be saved from a government with Winston Peters, don’t ask the Greens to make it happen. It’s unreasonable to expect the Greens to risk destroying themselves just to help National out of a spot.
Instead, ask National why they haven’t tried to make it happen.
Is it a core philosophy for the National Party to be a slow follower of the worldwide movement to fight climate change? Of course not. They’ve done that merely because it’s been politically convenient in the here and now.
Is it a core philosophy for National not to care whether all citizens have a reasonable chance in life? No, it’s not. They’ve already moved past that.
Is it a core purpose for National to ramp up fears among rural voters of an urban/rural divide? I’d say no to that as well.
On the contrary, National could be a party that seeks to build a grand coalition of town and country to fight climate change. Couldn’t it? This, after all, is probably the biggest task facing the government, not only now, but into the foreseeable future.
So what’s the offer National might make to the Greens that they just could not refuse?
Because while the sympathies of Labour and the Greens are obviously closer right now, the potential does exist for National to govern with the Greens. One day. It’s so unlikely this election, but what of the next, or the one after that? To make it happen, National has a question to answer, and it is this: how is it going to change?
Unless, of course, I’m wrong and we wake up tomorrow or the day after and discover they’ve both gone and quietly done an astonishing deal already. It would have to be truly astonishing and I have to say I’m not expecting it.
Nobody wants to work with the toxic Green party. Even Labour and Winston are talking about a structure that keeps the Greens from any kind of portfolio.
You can’t just be a bunch of political activists one day, and then be considered fit to be in government the next. Russel Norman and Kevin Hague figured it out and went to do the job they wanted to do for Greenpeace and Forest & Bird. In the mean time, the rest of the Green misfits are more interested in breaking things, banning things, obtaining things by force and “fixing” the unfixable while ruining the economy that lays the Greens’ golden eggs – the money they need to pay for it all.
The NZ Green party are so far up their own backsides, they don’t even realise they are the political equivalent of the plague.
– Simon Wilson, NZ Herald