Who will blink first? The Greens? Or New Zealand First?
Will the standoff between Labour’s chalk-and-cheese support partners over the highly-vexed matter of so-called “waka-jumping” legislation destabilise Jacinda Ardern’s Administration?
Could things get so fractious that the Prime Minister’s wobbly construct of a government comes crashing down?
The latter scenario is not going to happen. The component parties who make up the ruling troika are not going to risk losing their hard-won grip on the levers of power just to make some arcane point of principle with respect to something of relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Not even the holier-than-thou Greens.
The answer to the prior question is not quite so clear cut, however.
The anti-defection measure brought before Parliament late last year and currently under select committee scrutiny might well turn out to pose only a minor threat to the stability of the Government.
“For once, Peters deserves credit for not inflaming things. He has been silent.
But it is the first such test of that stability. The manner in which the parties respond to the mini-crisis will accordingly offer some clues as to the sturdiness of the Prime Minister’s Heath Robinson-like contraption.
The yawning chasm between New Zealand First’s ardent and unrelenting advocacy for an anti-defection law and the Greens’ long established and trenchant opposition to such a measure is so vast that it is nigh on impossible to reconcile.
The ball is now very much in the Greens’ court, however.
That party is going to have to make a choice — one which pits idealism against realism.
If the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill — to give the legislation its official title — does not have the backing of the Greens in terms of votes, the measure will be defeated when it returns to the floor of Parliament in coming weeks.
If the Greens vote down the legislation, they will likely incur the undying enmity of Winston Peters.
It will do little to smooth the day-to-day functioning of the governing arrangement. Quite the reverse.
Peters’ willingness to co-operate with the Greens — something which at best is already minimal — will evaporate completely.
If the Greens’ MPs are smart, they will hold their noses and cast their votes in favour of progressing the bill through its remaining stages in the House and into law.
They should do so having obtained the understanding from Peters that they will get some concession of equivalent size and value in return from the New Zealand First leader down the track.
But that is not going to happen either.
Marama Davidson campaigned for the party’s co-leadership on the basis that she will be the voice of rank-and-file members when issues are thrashed out in the party’s caucus.
The new co-leader of the Green Party sat down with TVNZ1’s Breakfast today.
She is hardly going to turn around and stuff something down their throats which they cannot abide.
Backing the waka-jumping bill would pour petrol on a fire already smouldering within the wider party.
Many members are already seething over the caucus voting in the bill’s favour at its first reading stage.
That blunder can be blamed on a number of factors, such as miscommunication with Labour and inexperience as a party in government.
But the prime reason appears to be a lack of institutional memory on the part of the Greens’ current batch of MPs.
Having persuaded Labour — the party in charge of the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill — to tighten up the procedures listed in the legislation that a party leader must follow in order to have a party-hopping MP thrown out of Parliament, the members of the Greens’ caucus presumably thought they had done their job in helping to reach a compromise acceptable to everyone.
They thought wrong.
The Greens’ historic opposition to anti-defection legislation and articulated in the most vehement fashion by the late Rod Donald is based on a simple premise: that is that there can be no compromise when it comes to preserving the freedom of speech enjoyed by MPs.
Peters’ advocacy of a law to stop party-hopping is understandable. It has its genesis in the break-up of the National-New Zealand First coalition government in 1998. That saw a clutch of Peters’ MPs jumping ship from New Zealand First and keeping National in power.
He vowed he would never again be the victim of what was treachery of the most blatant kind.
In Green minds, however, that slight does not warrant legislation which puts the the proportionality of party representation in Parliament ahead of the right of MPs to speak freely and without fear.
Worse, the anti-defection legislation now before New Zealand’s Parliament would effectively give party leaders the means to not only banish party-hoppers from Parliament, but also to expel troublesome dissidents.
The threat of expulsion would thus become a weapon with which to stifle dissent.
At Peters’ behest, New Zealand First’s coalition agreement with Labour stipulates that the signatories will not just introduce waka-jumping legislation. The document commits its partners to passing the bill into law.
The way the numbers fall in the House requires the Greens to be on board in order to do that.
The Greens’ leaders face a quandary. Do they execute a U-turn on their stance taken at the bill’s first reading stage and risk retaliation from Peters?
Or do they continue to vote in favour of the bill’s progression through the House, thereby delivering a slap in the face to such Green luminaries as Jeannette Fitzsimons and Keith Locke whose appearances at the select committee were all about injecting some spine into the caucus?
For once, Peters deserves credit for not inflaming things. He has been silent.
It is the Greens’ very public angst which has raised the stakes beyond where they should have been.
Things would be considerably easier for the Greens if they could express their opposition to the legislation by means of abstention, leaving Labour and New Zealand First to carry the day.
But National— which fiercely opposes the legislation — would still have sufficient votes to kill it.
The Greens might yet end up abstaining to mollify critics within their own ranks.
But it makes no practical difference whether the Greens abstain or end up joining National in Parliament’s “noes” lobby. The legislation would still be a dead duck.
In that eventuality, the glaring question will be how Peters chooses to respond.
He could lean on Ardern to rip up Labour’s co-operation agreement with the Greens and turn the current three-party tryst into a two-party minority government.
The Greens would be shut out of government. They would lose the ministerial portfolios that they craved for so long.
They would have little choice but to back Labour on confidence motions. To do otherwise would force a general election which no-one would want.
And there’s the rub. Is blocking the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill of such importance to the Greens that it outweighs everything else the party is now capable of achieving in the fields of climate change, conservation and other environment-related matters?
Of course not.
In this case, political pragmatism beats principle. That might stick in the craws of the party’s activists. But the price of making them feel better might be making the planet a tad more sick.
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