Monday, April 03, 2017



A good problem to have

The Green released their preliminary party list over the weekend, pending rearrangement by the members. It looks pretty good, but the commentary around it is whether they've made enough space for new blood in the expected "winnable" spots. They haven't done too badly at that, but they're in a bind because of their underlying problem: as a party they simply have too many talented people.

Seriously. When I look at the Parliamentary caucuses, the Greens have the star lineup. They have active and vocal spokespeople who are able to effectively push their policy arguments and put Labour to shame. There's only one who I think isn't quite up to it, and they're retiring; one more who is merely as hard-working as the average major-party backbencher. The rest are effectively the front-bench of a major party, crammed into one a third the size. Throw in a flood of high-profile, talented candidates wanting to represent the party, and they were always going to have tough decisions. And that's a good problem to have - far better than Labour's one of dealing with back-biting, treacherous, talentless time-servers in safe electorate seats, let alone NZ First's one of pointless non-entities.

(Labour of course has some excellent people. But hell do they have a useless tail dragging on them...)

In the case of the Greens, those hard decisions are ultimately going to be up to the members. It'd be nice if they pushed Chloe Swarbrick or Golriz Ghahraman up a few notches, just to cement that brand as the party of young talent and make sure they get more new blood in if the party polls badly on election day. But that's up to them. And if you really care, I guess you can always just join them and vote...