<b>Pretty cooked</b>
That’s how Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick summed up the state of politics in New Zealand on Te Ao with Moana on Monday.
“It feels as though we are not even operating from a basis of the same facts when we’re trying to discuss, let alone debate things in the parliamentary sphere or justin politics at large,” she explained as she put the blame fair and squarely on Christopher Luxon.
“What I see on a day-to-day basis from our Prime Minister leading this government is just straight-up divisiveness and this veneer of rhetoric that is so far removed from the truth, let alone people’s reality and their experience of their lives. And I just don’t get it.”
Asked if being a co-leader was all it was cracked up to be, the MP for Auckland Central threw back her head and laughed.
“You don’t join the Green Party because you know you want to gun it right to the top position or whatever,” she insisted.
“You join the Greens because you want to fight tooth and nail for something you believe in.”
Although Swarbrick says she has a good working relationship with Labour leader Chris Hipkins, she is convinced the Greens can position themselves as the leading party on the left.
“The things we come up with, and then we socialise and then we normalise, basically tend to become Labour policy.”
A political veteran at just 30 years old, Swarbrick first entered parliament when she was only 23.
The new co-leader ended up having to manage a series of internal dramas within the party while also coping with an avalanche of government action plans including the removal of the smoke-free 2025 provisions, introduction of “anti-evidence sanctions,” and an “all-out assault on nature with the fast-track legislation with Shane Jones bloodymindedly focused on opening up more mining and the prime minister giving him a hall pass for that”.
“I am really fearful of people giving up, of accepting that this is our lot. that [we have] the greatest rates of wealth inequality that we’ve ever seen in this country on record? Nah, it’s just the way that it is. You know, we’re going to blow past 1.5 degrees of warming and all the devastation that comes with that. We’re just going to let kids live in poverty or our fellow human beings sleep on the street. We’re not going to try and fix those problems.
“I think that my job is not to ask people just to believe in me.
”It’s to ask people to believe in themselves and to believe in our collective capacity to change our world,” she said.