New Zealand’s Green Party held its Annual General
Meeting in Auckland last weekend. It announced a campaign
slogan for the November 7 election, “For all of us,” and
released a manifesto outlining various policies.
The
event was held amid widespread hostility toward the major
parties. The conservative National Party is polling around
29 percent and is in a coalition with the far-right NZ First
and ACT Parties. The main opposition Labour Party is polling
around 32 percent. It would need the Greens (currently
polling 11 percent) and another party to form a
government.
Both the current government and the
2017–2023 Labour-led government, which included the
Greens, have imposed a worsening economic crisis on the
working class. Real wages in NZ plummeted by 6.4 percent in
the last five years, while the wealth of the billionaires
increased. About 2 percent of people are severely housing
deprived and 10 percent are relying on food
banks.
Health, education and other public services are
being starved of funds in order to keep taxes low for the
rich and divert money into the military.
Under these
conditions, the Green Party is seeking to contain mounting
social anger and anti-capitalist sentiment by peddling the
lie that it can pressure Labour to adopt progressive reforms
as part of a coalition government. The Greens’ record
shows precisely the opposite: it has joined successive
right-wing Labour administrations that imposed austerity
measures, protected the interests of the financial and
corporate elite, and strengthened the military in
preparation to join US-led wars.
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At the Greens’ AGM,
co-leaders Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick avoided
mentioning the party’s participation in the 2017–2023
Labour-led governments. Labour lost the 2023 election in a
landslide defeat after its policies led to soaring living
costs and increased homelessness and child
poverty.
The Greens supported all Labour’s budgets,
which bailed out corporations with billions of dollars
during the COVID-19 pandemic and funnelled billions more to
the armed forces, while imposing austerity in hospitals and
schools and freezing wages for public sector workers. In
April 2020 the Greens’ then-co-leader James Shaw admitted
that generations of people, meaning workers, “are going to
be paying back the debt that we’re currently racking up to
get through this crisis for many, many decades.”
In
a demagogic speech, Davidson focused on denouncing the
current government, which “spit on communities like those
in South Auckland [a working class area], while they
cheerlead for the super rich and big corporates.” The
Greens’ policies, she said, would “ensure people can
live affordable lives,” improve the environment and water
quality, and “make the super rich and big corporations pay
their fair share of tax.”
As the WSWS noted, the
Greens’ proposal for a modest increase in tax on major
corporations and a 2.5 percent tax on wealth above a $10
million threshold would increase government revenue by only
3.5 percent. This would not be enough to even begin to
address the crisis of under-resourced hospitals and decades
of cuts to schools, universities and social
programs.
Swarbrick’s AGM speech emphasised the
Greens’ pro-business credentials by hailing the party’s
“Buy Kiwi Made” policy, originally implemented under a
2005 agreement with the then-Labour government. The Greens
worked closely with the trade union bureaucracy and the
corporate lobby group Business NZ on the scheme, designed to
boost the competitiveness of NZ capitalists against imported
products.
Swarbrick said the idea was to “build
support for our own communities, building the jobs, spaces,
events and infrastructure that ensure we’re all happier,
healthier, safer and having more fun.”
In fact, Buy
Kiwi Made gave free advertising and grants to businesses,
including the supermarket duopoly and various manufacturers.
These handouts did nothing to prevent the destruction of
thousands of jobs when the 2007–2008 financial crisis hit,
in construction, manufacturing, transport and other
industries.
Swarbrick also touted the Greens’
proposal to spend $980 million to establish a
government-owned power company, Kiwipower, “to lower
bills” by increasing renewable energy
generation.
There is no reason to believe that
ordinary people would benefit from such a policy. The Greens
are not proposing price controls for electricity
bills—which surged 12 percent in the past year—or to
re-nationalise the existing power companies.
The
Kiwipower proposal recalls the creation of the state-owned
Kiwibank by a Labour-led government in 2001,
enthusiastically supported by the Greens based on the false
claim that it would improve affordability. Bank profits
continued to soar, underpinned by house price inflation: the
four biggest banks increased their annual profits by 80
percent between 2013 and 2022, while household debt nearly
doubled in the same period.
The Greens’ AGM ignored
the most urgent issue facing the working class: the rapidly
expanding world war. Swarbrick and Davidson did not mention
the illegal US-Israeli bombing of Iran, the genocide in
Gaza, the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, or US-led
preparations for war against China. As an imperialist power
allied to the US, New Zealand’s ruling class is supporting
all these crimes.
The Greens are silent on the
agreement between Labour and National to double military
spending from 1 to 2 percent of GDP and rapidly expand
recruitment. Conscious of widespread opposition to war, the
established parties are determined not to discuss this
shared militarist agenda during the election campaign, and
to keep workers in the dark about the immense dangers they
face.
The Green Party manifesto states that the
National-led government has “turned a blind eye to
atrocities and authoritarians and has deepened our military
integration with the United States.” It does not mention
that the previous Labour-Greens government pursued the same
course.
The manifesto calls for New Zealand to
withdraw from the Five Eyes, the US-led
intelligence-gathering network, and to decline to join
AUKUS, the security pact between the US, Australia and UK
aimed at militarising the Pacific for war with China. It
also calls for NZ to “sanction Israel” and recognise
Palestine as a state.
None of these are principled
positions; they are designed to be discarded as soon as the
Greens enter a coalition government with Labour. Davidson
downplayed the manifesto’s significance, telling the media
that it reflected the Greens’ “longer-term ambitions”
rather than immediate election priorities.
The
promotion of the Greens as an “anti-war” party,
including by its pseudo-left cheerleaders the International
Socialist Organisation and Socialist Aotearoa, has always
been a fraud.
During the 2000s and 2010s the Greens
supported the New Zealand participation in the brutal
imperialist war in Afghanistan and the Australian-led
military interventions in East Timor and the Solomon
Islands.
In January 2017 the Greens’ then co-leader
Metiria Turei told Radio NZ that the party’s supposed
opposition to the Five Eyes was no obstacle to working with
Labour. “We disagree, that’s perfectly fine, we can
still work together to change the government,” she
said.
In October that year the Greens entered a
coalition government with Labour and the right-wing
nationalist NZ First Party, which proceeded to strengthen
New Zealand’s alliance with Washington. In 2019, Green
co-leader James Shaw and NZ First Defence Minister Ron Mark
produced a document arguing for a stronger military able to
deploy rapidly throughout the Pacific.
In 2022 the
Greens glorified NATO’s proxy war against Russia as the
government deployed New Zealand troops to Britain to train
Ukrainian conscripts.
The Green Party’s claim to
stand “for all of us” is a lie. No party can speak for
“everyone” in a society riven by historic levels of
social inequality and class warfare. The Greens represent
sections of the bourgeoisie and the affluent upper middle
class, whose wealth and privileges depend on ramping up the
exploitation of workers and maintaining New Zealand’s
status as a minor imperialist power allied to the US and
Australia.
If it enters the next government, the Green
Party—just like the Greens in Australia and Germany—will
support deeper austerity measures and militarism, which is
the only answer the ruling class has to the historic
breakdown of capitalism.
To fight against war, social
inequality and dictatorship, the working class must oppose
all capitalist parties and join the struggle for the
socialist reorganisation of society. We call on workers who
agree with this to contact the Socialist Equality
Group.
By Tom Peters, Socialist Equality
Group
29 July 2026
Original url: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/29/giaf-j29.html
