With the best part of 12 months still to go before election day dawns, it might be seen as both premature and presumptuous to write off the freshly-minted Sustainable New Zealand party just a matter of days after the outfit’s official launch.
It is a struggle to harbour much optimism, however, that this particular fledgling will fly for long, if it manages to fly at all during the months ahead.
It is a tribute to the single-mindedness of Vernon Tava, the new party’s founder and interim leader, that his pet project has got this far.
Getting a new political vehicle to the launch stage is challenging enough.
It requires top-level management and organisational skills, irrepressible and irresistible powers of persuasion to get potential backers to part with their money with nothing guaranteed in return, boundless energy, deep reserves of patience and tolerance of recruits to the cause who think things should be done differently.
In particular, it means being extremely wary of those who sign up as members solely because they see that as offering them an easy route into Parliament.
Tava’s critics would warn him to be wary of the likes of Tava whose efforts to promote the interests of a party have more to do with promoting themselves.
That accusation is based on Tava’s track record as a party-hopper.
The Auckland lawyer and past member of Auckland Council’s local Waitemata board cut his political teeth with the Greens, at one point holding senior post as one of the party’s co-conveyors and standing as the party’s candidate in Northcote in the 2011 general election.
Then things started to go awry. He took a dim view of the growing influence of the faction of the party which is focussed on policies promoting social justice.
He argued the highlighting of that theme was occurring at the expense of the party’s longstanding and overriding priority — confronting environmental issues and developing policies to fix them.
Vernon Tava talked to TVNZ1’s Breakfast after his party’s launch yesterday.
He made it his personal mission to try to persuade his then colleagues that it was folly for the Greens to try outbid Labour with ever bigger promises to spend ever bigger dollars on policies to help the poor and downtrodden.
The net result was that the Greens ended up positioning themselves to the left of Labour, thus making themselves effectively hostage to the whims of the major centre-left party.
Tava’s fixation with the Greens’ direction reached its Waterloo in 2015 when he ran as a candidate for that party’s co-leadership. He was humiliated, having been eliminated in the first vote count having picked up just a single first-preference of the 127 votes cast in electorates around the country.
He quit the Greens soon after. Now he is back. But not before doing a stint as a member of the National Party during which he he unsuccessfully sought nomination to be that party’s candidate in the Northcote by-election. That was less than 18 months ago.
He is now seeking to call the political shots with the creation of Sustainable NZ, which will be a “full-time” environmental party capable of working with either Labour or National in government —thereby giving the new political vehicle much more leverage during post-election negotiations on the formation of a new government.
Tava isn’t the first politician — and is unlikely to be the last — to become entranced with finding what has so far proved to be an illusory pot of gold at the end of a blue-green rainbow.
The first MMP election back in 1996 witnessed the establishment of the Progressive Greens by a number of then prominent environmentalists. The party performed abysmally, picking up less than 1 per cent of the party vote.
There is no compelling or obvious reason why a reincarnation of something which was an absolute fizzer two decades or so ago should do much better in 2020.
Now — as back then — there is no sense of a developing public mood upon which Sustainable NZ can surf into Parliament.
Last Sunday’s launch got plenty coverage in the media. It failed to capture the public’s attention.
As clever and articulate as he is, Tava lacks for the charisma to catch that attention.
A new political party can be loved. It can afford to be loathed —the case with parties which inhabit the extreme right.
To be greeted with indifference is a virtual death sentence.
To make matters worse, Sustainable NZ has to deal with a number of negatives which did not handicap the Progressive Greens.
For starters, the party’s very name is problematic.
On the one hand, you could not come up with something which is more accurate when describing the party’s core purpose and functions.
On the other hand, the name is a recipe for confusion. There are numerous other organisations which include “sustainable” or “sustainability” in their title.
That is a minor quibble, however.
Much more damaging is opponents’ claim that Sustainable NZ is a stooge party which has been set up with the sole purpose of manufacturing a centre-right majority in the next Parliament.
Tava’s response to this charge is to repeatedly make the point that his party is a true centre party — and not some adjunct on the right of the spectrum.
His stint with National does not help his case, however.
Neither does the fact that any party willing to entertain coalition with National has to swallow the fact that the latter is pro-economic growth.
Is it possible to be pro-economic growth yet also pro-environment?
Countless numbers of forests have been felled to provide the paper for the similarly countless number of books debating the merits of labelling oneself as an “eco-capitalist”.
Even if you agree that being pro-economic growth while simultaneously claiming to be pro-environment is not necessarily incompatible in the current circumstances where climate change has become a white-hot issue, it is a stance that is not at all easy to sell to the public.
The timing of Sustainable NZ’s launch was unfortunate in coming in the wake of the Zero Carbon Bill becoming law — rather than during the legislation’s passage through Parliament.
Lacking representation in the House would have meant any contribution to debate on the measure would have been peripheral.
But it would have been better than being silent on crucial legislation dealing with the biggest environmental matter of the times.
James Shaw’s building of an across-Parliament consensus on the bill was a triumph for the Greens. It will be very interesting to see whether his efforts as Climate Change minister reap dividends for his party in the opinion polls.
Sustainable NZ already knows how much credit it can expect to get for political breakthrough — zero, zilch and nothing.
Tava’s response to Shaw’s’ victory was to try to outflank the Greens by promising to inject a whopping $1 billion over four years into the Department of Conservation to bring about the total eradication of introduced pests and halt the extinction of native species.
Such promises are the very stuff of Opposition politics. But Tava’s counts for little when placed alongside Shaw’s concrete achievement.
Even more to the point, it is arguable whether Tava’s party actually stands to gain very much at all by setting up shop in direct competition with the Greens.
Tava’s no small problem, however, is that survey data indicates that up to 85 per cent of those who cast their party votes for the Greens in 2017 preferred that a Labour-led government ran the country.
Why would those voters switch to Sustainable NZ if that increased the likelihood of them ending up with a National-led Administration?
Likewise, those voters who usually tick Labour on their ballot paper are not going to depart from that practice and tick Sustainable NZ instead if that increases the risk of them ending up with National returning to power.
Vice versa, National voters similarly have no incentive in switching to Sustainable NZ, given the risk that could result in Labour clinging onto power post-2020.
At the end of the day, the party’s fate will likely be determined by some pretty brutal facts of political life which take no heed of a party’s ideology, its aspirations to make life better for all and its willingness to act in the national interest.
As The Opportunities Party discovered in 2017 and Colin Craig’s Conservatives likewise in 2014 — it is extremely difficult if not nigh on impossible for a party to gain enough traction outside Parliament to break through the 5 per cent threshold.
Both of those of those parties had the advantage of their founders being their leaders and wealthy benefactors who were willing to pour large sums of money down the drain.
Tava is not saying whether he has any political sugar daddy (or daddies) contributing sizeable quantities of cold, hard moolah to his cause.
That is understandable. Whether that happens to be the case or not, the suspicion will linger that any such donations have little to do with getting Sustainable NZ into Parliament and a lot more to do with getting Labour and the Greens out of government.
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