The Green Party is fast shifting to the right, advocating market-based environment policies, and signalling its desire to consider going into a National-led coalition government. In this article republished from the Spark newspaper, I investigate this change. [Read more below]
The Greens have recently made their most explicit statements that they could go into a coalition government with the National Party. While no such deals are currently being considered, co-leader Jeannette Fitzsimons says they want to 'leave the door open' for a blue-green coalition. Fitzsimons believes that if the party can reposition itself in the middle of the political spectrum it can encourage a ‘green-off’ between National and Labour to win Green Party allegiance. She even suggests that National’s so-called natural constituency of farmers will not be a barrier to change, as they’re the ones who will suffer from the extreme weather produced by climate change.
The other co-leader, Russel Norman, has been reported as being equally enthusiastic about a shift in coalition policy, saying that the Greens will need to compare the other parties’ policies, and if National has better sustainability policies than Labour, ‘it would be unprincipled not to consider them’.
Norman justifies the new approach to National by saying that there is little to differentiate the parties' environmental policies - which is quite correct. The problem for the Greens is that having committed to playing the parliamentary game and wanting to be in government, they're becoming hostage to that slippery slope where the thinking is that 'if Labour aren't actually so bad, and National aren't that different from Labour, then maybe National aren't so bad after all'. It all just shows that the Greens aren't really a leftwing party at all. Ultimately their future lies in the centre of the political spectrum, being vaguely on left on some things, and right on others.
The adoption of a market approach
The Greens have essentially found themselves at a junction where they have needed to take either an anti-capitalist or pro-capitalist orientation to the environment, and they have strongly opted for the latter.
Note, for example, the Greens’ new climate change plan announced recently called Kicking the Carbon Habit. In this, the Greens propose that global warming can be averted by making use of an international emission trading market in which New Zealand businesses essentially buy and sell permissions to emit pollution. This market approach has been welcomed by everyone from Labour and National through to the forestry industry. Rightwing and business interests are starting to realise that they can actually do business with the Greens.
To have taken an anti-capitalist approach would have been to recognise that ‘Capitalism is inherently and unalterably environmentally "unfriendly" because the process of capital accumulation internalises and privatises profits while externalising and socialising costs.’ They would have recognised, for example, that while profits go to the owners of large industrial corporations that run plants that pump pollutants into the sky and waterways the costs of this pollution are pushed onto society. But instead of seeing environmental destruction as intrinsic to capitalism, the Greens want to see it as due just to some rogue businesses that need to be taught to recycle and adopt new technologies.
It is therefore unsurprising that most of the Greens’ environmental ‘solutions’ will actually hit the poor hardest. By implementing ‘eco-taxes’ and encouraging carbon trading, Greens want to push the price up for common commodities. Such changes will inevitable punish the poor, as they will have to pay a much higher proportion of their incomes than the rich do for basic activities and services. For example, although electricity prices have risen 40 per cent since 2001, the Greens would have them rise another 10 per cent or so. Air travel, to take another example, will also become even more the preserve of the rich.
In contrast, the Greens now support some sort of tax cuts – wanting $1bn to go to business, to encourage them to do eco-friendly things. The Greens really are becoming the ‘eco-business party’.
Green Party to save capitalism
If the Left ever criticises the Green Party, it is normally for not being leftwing or radical enough, or because the party merely aims to try to reform capitalism rather than supersede it. However, the Greens’ role is actually worse that this: they’re not really leftwing at all, and actually want to save capitalism from destruction.
The party sees its role not just in terms of 'saving the planet', but also to save the capitalist system. In an insightful and perceptive internet blog posting, Russel Norman - who previously saw himself as some sort of anti-capitalist - now sees his party as playing the same role that earlier left forces - such as the First Labour Government in New Zealand - had in rescuing capitalism from decline and possible death. As with the first time round, when capitalism was under threat in the 1930s, Norman believes that the more natural defenders of capitalism - business and its political parties - are out of touch with what capitalism actually needs to survive. His thoughts are worth quoting at length – they give a good indication of where the Greens are going, especially in terms of their wholehearted adoption of market solutions to environmental challenges:
It’s a funny position we find ourselves in. Just as the social democrats (Europe), labourists (UK, Oz, NZ) and new dealers (US) of the 1930s and 1940s had to save capitalism from its own destructive tendencies by introducing a range of modifications and interventions on the market system, so now the Green Parties of the world find ourselves in possibly a similar position. The best of the old social democrats like Michael Cullen are too locked in the old paradigm to understand it, and the sectional interests like the business roundtable and employers federation are too narrow to see it, but we have to intervene on the market system to place a price on resource use and pollution so that we can save the planet. And in the process we will quite possibly save the market system from its natural tendency to destroy or consume all resources leading to its own demise.
The Greens clearly do not have a class-based, progressive analysis of dealing with climate change, and are therefore going along with market solutions to the problem. This approach is simply assisting the party become more and more integrated into mainstream pro-capitalist politics.
