What’s in a name? When I first heard about James Shaw’s school funding debacle, I thought that the taxpayer funding of an outfit called “Green School” was some kind of unfortunate coincidence. Surely a Green Party minister wouldn’t be so crass as to funnel taxpayer money to a private organisation that was linked in such obvious fashion to its own political agenda? Turns out that is exactly what’s going on.
Anyone who may have missed the story over the past few days can find various accounts of the whole sorry saga online. This baffling break with Green Party policy (that private schools should not receive a cent of state funding) was the catalyst for much of the criticism. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of the criticism is how much of it came from Green supporters, including former MPs and current Party members.
Most BFD readers will not have been surprised by the hypocrisy, of course. The Greens, along with Labour and New Zealand First (let us not forget), are responsible for rising volumes of coal imported from overseas, on the back of the Kiwi oil and gas ban. The self-defeating smugness of that political party is hardly new.
The loss of faith in the Greens by its own would-be voters, donors and volunteers is quite a different matter, however. Those of us on the centre-right who could be relied upon to shake our heads and say “I told you so” were never going to vote for them anyway but when the Sue Bradfords and Mojo Mathers of the world are slamming you publicly that’s when you’ve got problems, as Green Party.
This is why it’s so amusing to hear the defence of beleaguered co-leader James Shaw, genuinely under threat from his own Party’s activists. The Greens are still worth backing, he’s been pleading because this was just “one mistake”. Whether or not the Green caucus realises it, the outpouring of angst is precisely because this is just one more betrayal of those Kiwis who voted for the Greens believing, perhaps naively but in good faith, that they would secure major wins for the environment.
New Zealand’s rising greenhouse gas emissions and the recent consenting of mining on the conservation estate, under the Greens’ watch, indicates clearly that this isn’t the first and only mistake they’ve made. Instead, it may be the last straw.
The other point worth noting when it comes to James Shaw breaking Green promises and hearts with the private school funding is that party’s sanctimony. At least a political party like New Zealand First has been more honest about its spending priorities, which could perhaps be more charitably described as “the regions”, rather than just Northland. If you hear a pork-barrel rolling, you know that it’s probably stamped with the letters N, Z and F. To listen to the Green MPs in Parliament, though, you’d never know that the “Green New Deal” is code for corporate cronyism.
It’s fair to say that the Green School debacle should be teaching Greens a lesson if you’ll excuse the pun. But what can the rest of us learn from it?
I think there’s an elephant in the room here. One of the reasons that Shaw will have acted in the way he did (all shovel-ready schtick aside) is that he knows there’s every chance the Greens won’t make it back to Parliament. If spending taxpayer funds on the Green School is something he’s quietly promised someone, somewhere along the line, then he quite possibly only has a few weeks to make it happen.
The trouble is, doing dodgy deals will make it less likely that Shaw and co are able to remain in a position to make more such decisions after mid-October. As they hover around the 5% extinction threshold, Green Party MPs are becoming an ironic endangered species and hastening their own demise.
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