LilBaP
The Green Party older New Zealanders remember is not the 2026 one. They have kept the logo and hoped you would not notice the change in behaviour.
Values in 1970s, then the Greens in 1990s, sold an environmental argument: go easy on the land, keep the harbour clean, be careful with GE, do not park a reactor on the coast. Most could go along with that to one degree or another.
In 1999 the shop-front window was safe food, nature conservation, stop pollution and strong communities. Today the Green Party lives in logo land.
Their 2026 document has three headings: affordable living, healthy nature and real democracy. Nature is still on the list, the way parsley is still on the plate.
The meal is ‘power and wealth sit with our communities’, te Tiriti as the operating system and a plan to tax the super-rich so the party can spend. Save the planet has become bleed the wealthy; take the till and spend more is their ‘educated’ policy. The trees and the water remain the branding background…but rarely in the repertoire.
A 2.5 per cent annual tax on net wealth over $10 million. A 33 per cent tax on inheritances and gifts over $1 million. Company tax up to 33 per cent once you turn over $30 million. A new top personal rate of 45 per cent above $160,000 per annum.
They say 96 per cent get a cut. The people who employ the 96 per cent get the invoice and a lecture about fairness. Based on the existing books the lecture is already late. In the 2024 year, the top 10 per cent of earners paid 45 per cent of all personal income tax – $27.2 billion…more than the bottom 80 per cent combined. One in 10 already carries nearly half the income tax bag.
Then KiwiMart. Force Foodstuffs and Woolworths to hand over at least 120 stores and two distribution centres. Set up a state supermarket whose one job is cheaper mince. They cost it at $2.8 billion – their calculator needs new batteries. The lawyers, the co-op rulebook and a duopoly that can afford better silk than the Crown did not make the press release. That is not “more competition”. That is the government taking the shops and promising the bread will be grateful.
Stand in the empty aisle and be happy!
Add the rest before the barber shop starts in unison. Kiwipower: another state generator, because the last public monopoly went so quietly.
Rent rises capped at two per cent and chained to whatever the last tenant paid, which is a splendid way to make a landlord stop painting the bathroom, laying new carpet or just investing in more.
Default union membership on day one: you opt out, you do not opt in…there’s those mandates again.
Political strikes. Benefits up, sanctions gone. Decline AUKUS, point the defence force at climate workshops and monitoring.
Now you’re a hand-up for the UN, UNDRIP and te Tiriti is the authoritative text. A karakia isn’t ‘optional’ before your morning coffee.
You can call that many things. Centrist is not one of them. It is a socialist toolkit with a sunflower glued to the lid so it photographs well. Last time a country ran the full version, the lights went out. Style Council already wrote the chorus… “Walls Come Tumbling Down”.
Who is selling it? Probably not the farmer, the person on the tools, the manufacturer or the small- to medium-sized business owner. Just a striking number of the faces who have never had to meet a wage bill with their own house on the line.
Golriz Ghahraman, a sitting Green MP, resigned in 2024 and was convicted on four counts of shoplifting about $8,400 of boutique clothing. The party of cheaper groceries produced an MP who preferred the designer rack…
Darleen Tana was stood down over migrant-exploitation allegations around a business linked to her and they ended up reaching for the waka-jumping law. Lots of virtue signalling, but no morals.
Tamatha Paul told parliament that English was a “bastard” language and called the other side snowflakes who cry when they hear Aotearoa. She even likes pushing the public around and telling them to move on in her brutish way.
Benjamin Doyle is the file people wave as something worse. What is on the record is a 2023 Instagram album on a handle built around sexual slang, captioned in the same register, with their child in the set. Doyle said it was not sexual, then left in 2025 after threats. There is no court finding of the crime some commentators named, but there is a judgement problem the party treated as a branding problem. We all know how we feel about this… so it does not need repeating here.
Their method is simple, but does not provide a solution. They think they can ‘Shout to Top’. Frame every price as corporate greed. Frame every extra bit of tax as fairness. Frame every critic as a snowflake. Then send the activists into the street and the MPs into the House with the same script.
Yell racism, child poverty and the rich are not paying their share at the top of their voices so the media gets their next clickbait. No facts, just a headline.
If their supermarket policy lands, the question is not whether Foodstuffs makes a margin, but whether a minister who has never stacked a night-fill can manage 120 shops and two warehouses cheaper than the people who already do it – that’s after the lawyers have had their several years of cashing in from both sides.
Fitzsimons argued about what you put in the ground and water. Swarbrick and Davidson argue over how to spend what you have left in your wallet at the end of the week and how they can grab any future earnings, now.
One of those is an environment movement. The other is a redistribution movement that still wants the conservation vote and thinks you should stop noticing the difference.
If the planet were the priority, the pamphlet would lead with rivers, soil, fish and power that actually stays on. But, no: it leads with who owns the grocery aisle and who pays 45 per cent. That is just another nudge, albeit a big one, to the left.
