This piece is one in a series of profiles of electoral parties in the lead up to the 2026 General Election.
The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is currently the most left-wing it has ever been. It is the largest pole of attraction for radicals and even socialists in the New Zealand political landscape. They have easily the most left-wing and justifiable policy programme of the parliamentary parties. They have been decent fighters in the Palestine liberation movement and in other political movements which socialists support. Their rhetoric can be radical and inspiring to many. Why then, is this article not titled “The New Zealand Greens: A Marxist Celebration”? The fact is, despite their admirable qualities, not only have the Greens had a politically inconsistent past, but their project is fundamentally incapable of achieving the better world we need. Despite their radical rhetoric, the Greens are committed to the root cause of the problems they seek to address: and that root cause is capitalism.
The Green Party was founded in 1990 out of the remnants of the Values Party. Since then, the party has undergone many political twists and turns. The Greens first contested elections on a national scale as part of the Alliance, an alliance of broadly left-wing parties opposed to the neoliberalism of the major parties. Membership of the Alliance was a major point of contention in the Greens. Many within the party were fairly right-wing and backed a more “blue-green” eco-capitalist approach. In 1995, the Greens split along these lines, with many of the right-wingers forming a new party: the Progressive Green Party. The Greens saw some limited electoral success within the Alliance. From 1999, the Greens contested elections independently and have struggled to win votes beyond single digit percentages.
Historically, the Greens’ environmentalism and left-wing position on many political issues have not been based on a particular loyalty and orientation to the working class or hostility to the ruling class. Rather, they are driven by a mix of petty bourgeois moralism and political orientation to the gap created on the left by Labour’s consistent shifting to the right. This is evidenced by the Greens’ attempts to pander to the ruling class. Russel Norman, who was co-leader of the Greens from 2006–2015, was a proponent of green-capitalist market solutions. He asserted that he was more committed to market forces than the National Party, stating that “the fact is my view, and the Green Party policy, is that markets are a really good solution to the big challenges we’re facing in sustainability, so that’s why we’re very pro the use of market forces, whereas National are into state intervention, which is the exact opposite of the predominant discourse, right?” Norman advocated reducing company tax and introducing climate measures like the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
Norman was succeeded by James Shaw (2015–2024), who had a corporate background and was a proponent of the green-capitalist view. In 2016, he presented the Greens’ migration policy, which was a clear capitulation to anti-immigrant rhetoric and blamed immigrants for infrastructure and housing problems. The policy was eventually scrapped due to backlash. Shaw was also a supporter of the ETS.
The Greens have generally refused to be an effective progressive opposition when the Labour Party is in government. Instead, they choose to tie their hands behind their backs in exchange for a handful of low-powered ministerial positions, or even just input on particular government policies. This has been a feature of the Greens for decades, but is most recently embodied in their confidence and supply agreement with the 2017–2020 Labour-New Zealand First government, as well as their cooperation agreement with the 2020–2023 Labour Party absolute majority government. Both of these agreements gave the Greens some out-of-cabinet ministerial roles and policy input, resulting in little more than them tinkering around the edges of major threats to the working class, such as the climate crisis. These case studies demonstrate the Greens’ willingness to act as the managers of capitalism, rather than its opponent.
But that was then, and this is now. The Labour Party lost the election in 2023, and we now have one of the most right-wing governments in New Zealand history. The Labour Party has been a feeble opposition, having drawn all the wrong lessons from their election loss. The resignation of James Shaw and the ascension of popular left-wing MP Chlöe Swarbrick to the Green Party co-leadership marked a significant blow to the right wing of the party and posed opportunities to present a strong left alternative.
To what extent this opportunity has been seized on is hard to pin down, though clearly progress has been made in some sections of the working class. The Greens have been visible on picket lines and in movements with fairly radical – even anti-capitalist and class-based – rhetoric. The Greens have a “Union Greens” network working to win over the trade union movement, as well as a solid pro-union policy that is arguably to the left of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions’ own “Reimagining Aotearoa Together” policy package. The latest NZCTU Mood of the Workforce survey had the Greens receiving the same or more support than the Labour Party among respondents. The Greens have also managed to attract many young radicals, progressives, and socialists. The party has a sizable explicitly anti-capitalist faction called the Green Left Network, which counts MPs among its membership (though, notably, not Swarbrick).
To argue that the Greens, taken as a whole, are anything more than social democrats would be foolish. The party fails to recognise and address the fact that capitalism, the system of profit accumulation, competition, and crisis, is the root cause of every major issue it seeks to address. Climate change and environmental destruction is a result of capitalists competing to generate maximum profits. All exploitation and oppression is a result of class society, where a tiny ruling class (the capitalists) own everything and are compelled to divide and hold down the majority (the working class) to extract the maximum amount of value from them. Exploitation of people and planet makes up the very foundations of the capitalist system, and there is absolutely nothing in Green Party policy, rhetoric, or action which seriously acknowledges this, let alone lays out a desire or plan to abolish it. In fact, the most honest look at the Green Party political project indicates nothing more than a desire to become the managers of capitalism (or even to just have a seat at the managerial table) to make it a bit nicer, while leaving the fundamental oppressive and exploitative structures of capitalism intact.
Even if (and it is a big if, given the dominant forces in the Greens against this) the Greens had a dramatic theoretical shift to socialism, massive issues with the project would remain. Every inch of the party is geared towards electoralism and winning power within the capitalist framework. The idea that working class emancipation – socialism – can be handed down from captured capitalist institutions like parliament is both theoretically implausible and defunct in practice. The only way we are going to get rid of capitalism is through victorious class struggle, the self-emancipation of the working class. While we do not reject the use of parliament for socialist aims, the subordination or substitution of the class struggle for electoral aims is doomed to failure.
What is needed is a mass workers’ party committed to developing the confidence and consciousness of the working class. A party capable of pushing the workers’ movement forward, leading struggles, calling and supporting strikes; ultimately defeating the capitalist class, abolishing and replacing the capitalist institutions, and smashing the exploitative and oppressive structures of capitalism. A party that can respond to the horrors and crises of capitalism with a clear alternative. The political project of the ISO is laying the foundations for such a party. Any socialists and those seeking to build a better world, who are organised in the Greens or considering it, would be making better use of their time in an organisation committed to promoting the ideas of socialism and building the kind of party we need to get there.
Banner Image: Green Party logo. Source: Wikimedia commons.
