David Cormack
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The early stars
🕑 Added 2020-12-06 05:43:45 +0000 UTCIt's been a weird period politically.
Labour has a majority but has spent the first period of its political honeymoon ruling things out. National has been navel-gazing but is yet to find itself. ACT has pretended it doesn't have any more MPs than David Seymour, while the Greens have undoubtedly been the best of the bunch, at this early stage.
There was some concern that the agreement with Labour wouldn't go through, a group of young activists from Auckland were fighting for the Greens to go into opposition. They were concerned that by agreeing to this deal, the party would be hamstrung in its criticism of Labour, while the baubles were not enough to warrant that.
While that was indeed a fair concern to have, it has not played out.
The Greens have been critical of Labour where the team in red hasn't done what the Greens would have.
The PM has come under pressure for not doing enough about the housing crisis, and the Greens have joined in that chorus of criticism, saying there are levers that Labour has access to that it refuses to pull.
Then the Greens refused to support Labour's increased top tax-rate. Not because they don't believe that the richest should be taxed more - they absolutely do - but because this in isolation is such a token gesture. We need to focus more on assets that earn money for their owners which aren't being taxed. Rather than someone's labour.
Yes, those earning $180k+ should be taxed more, but we need to move the burden of taxation away from workers and more on to assets. I'm a capital tax hard-liner. I believe even the family home should be taxed upon sale. To me, every dollar of income should be taxed. That is the fairest way to do it.
Not even the Greens included the family home in their CGT.
But then the Government declared a Climate Emergency and committed to the Government being carbon neutral by 2025. This is something the Greens has been agitating for since getting into government in 2017. They were stymied by NZFirst, but now they've made further progress on climate policies - to go with the oil & gas ban, carbon-zero act and making a plan to get agriculture into the ETS.
On top of this they're getting more media attention than they have in a long time (Green Schools aside), thanks to Ricardo Menéndez March who, as well as being an activist, is queer and an immigrant. Something that is a lightning rod to a lot of bigoted New Zealanders. Ricardo is also trolling them which is generating headlines. It may not be the media attention that someone like James Shaw would want, but neither was the Green School, and I stand by my claim that that debacle helped the Greens.
Chlöe Swarbrick is still beating the drug reform bill, which is excellent. Fighting for change even after the referendum failed is the principled thing to do. Julie Anne Genter is likely to see her hard work from last term pay off this term with major transport projects finally going ahead, and Golriz Ghahraman is going to see a lot of the electoral reform stuff she's fought so hard for also make progress.
All in all it's been a hell of a start for the Greens, and in a conversation with James I had recently you could tell he was both proud of what they've done so far and excited about the future.
Same.
And with the Māori Party back and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi already agitating, I feel hopeful that Labour will get dragged to the left whether it likes it or not.
So, Greens and Māori Party, let's keep moving them
left.
