WHICH DITCH would you die in? Our MMP electoral system makes this an important political question. When a government is held together by multiple parties, knowing which ditch is the ditch beyond which any given party will not retreat is crucial to the survival of the entire coalition. If what we are told about Julie Anne Genter’s infamous letter to Phil Twyford is true, then the Greens’ ditch is public transport and cycleways. Really?
Possibly. Public transport and cycleways are the Greens’ answer to what they see as the imperative of reducing human dependence on the internal combustion engine. They regard them as critical elements in the fight against global warming.
Even so, is making sure the Wellington City Council follows the Green party’s lead on public transport and cycleways really worth dying in a ditch for? The answer is: “Of course not!” But coalition politics is a terribly fraught business. Grievances accumulate to the point where maintaining a sense of proportion becomes next-to-impossible.
Should Winston Peters have broken up the National-NZ First Coalition on 14 August 1998 over the proposed privatisation of Wellington Airport? Rationally speaking, it was an extremely impolitic thing to do. In 1996 Peters and his party had won a host of important concessions from Jim Bolger’s National Party – and there were more to come. But by the time Peters was ready to pull the pin, reason had long since left the building.
Bolger was gone: tipped out of power by Jennifer Mary Shipley – a woman who Peters loathed. His feelings were reciprocated entirely by the new National leader, who believed her party had humiliated itself by joining NZ First’s three-ring political circus and was determined to humiliate Peters in return at the earliest opportunity. Both leaders understood that Wellington International Airport could easily be fashioned into the straw that broke the Coalition’s back, and both were determined to slap it down hard.
It’s astonishing, in retrospect, that Peters never paused to wonder why Shipley was so eager to call his bluff. After all, if he were to lead his 17 MPs out of the Coalition, then Shipley’s government would fall. What he didn’t know when he gathered together his papers and made ready to leave the Cabinet Room was that he no longer had 17 MPs. By fair means or by foul, Shipley had secured just enough defectors from the NZ First caucus to carry on governing without it. Peters had forgotten that the first and most important accomplishment of a successful parliamentarian is the ability to count.
With the Alliance it wasn’t an inability to count that brought it to ruin, but an inability to recognise what truly counted. Dying in a ditch for the Taliban made as little sense in 2001 as it does in 2019. These were, after all, the people who had offered Osama Bin Laden a safe haven in Afghanistan. The people who denied women the right to work, banned popular music and publicly hanged traitors and spies from cranes. Why would anyone break up what was, at that time, the world’s most successful left-wing parliamentary party, for a bunch of murderous religious fanatics?
Superficially, it was all about Jim Anderton’s willingness to align the Alliance with George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s “War on Terror”. The Labour-Alliance Government, Anderton’s left-wing opponents insisted, should have nothing to do with the USA’s determination to exact vengeance for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Al Qaeda were the perpetrators, not the Taliban. Saudi Arabians had as much to do with the attacks as Afghans – so, why wasn’t the US threatening them with fire and death? Because, said the Alliance Left, this wasn’t about justice, it was about oil.
No. What it was about was the fact that Anderton’s management of the coalition relationship with Labour was causing the Alliance to haemorrhage support in the polls. Anderton’s favourite line was, “One day in government is worth a thousand years in opposition”. But what that meant in practice, as far as the socialist wing of the Alliance was concerned, was an endless succession of limp compromises that left the Alliance’s loyal voters wondering why they’d bothered. Especially when they could see that Rod Donald’s and Jeanette Fitzsimon’s Greens were every bit as left-wing as the Alliance and a lot more uncompromising.
Eighteen years later, it’s the Greens turn to ask themselves exactly what they are getting out of their peculiar three-way with Labour and NZ First. The answer: “Quite a lot, actually. And certainly more than you would ever get out of National!”, while true, doesn’t get to the heart of the Greens’ frustration.
Julie Anne Genter and her colleagues have to put up not only with Labour’s off-hand condescension, but also with NZ First’s thinly disguised contempt. Shane Jones doesn’t get the Greens, never has and never will, because he doesn’t really want to. And yet there he is, with billions to spend. Peters is even worse. He was the one who froze the Greens out of government in 2002 and 2005 – ostensibly because they couldn’t be trusted to govern alongside grown-ups. Grown-ups! The only grown-up in the NZ First caucus is Tracey Martin – and just look at how they treat her!
What is it in Genter’s letter to Twyford that she would rather we do not see? Anger? Indignation? The raw grief at witnessing vital principles traded away over and over again because Labour lacks the courage to call Peters’s bluff? All of the above? Probably. But I strongly suspect that the real, visceral reason she is resisting demands for the letter’s release so fiercely, is on account of how completely it reveals her readiness to get down and dirty in the pork barrel with all those other guys and stick her fork in.
A letter which proves to voters that the ditch the Greens are willing to die in has less to do with saving the planet than with getting their rightful share of the political spoils, ain’t ever going to be released. Not willingly.