With Labour doing so badly this election (and indeed, doing badly every election since 2008, except when Jacinda was in charge), Sue Bradford has suggested that they might soon be overtaken by the Greens:
The Green Party could surpass Labour at the next election if it does not get its act together, former Green MP Sue Bradford says.While I'd like to see this happen, a dose of realism is in order: on preliminary results, Labour won roughly two and a half times more party votes than the Greens, and more than twice as many as the Greens and Te Pāti Māori combined. They'd need to collapse to well below their historic minimum (with all votes going to the Greens) for the Greens to come close. And even with their recent awful performance, I just don't see that happening soon, because there's generations of tribal loyalty there.Bradford told Morning Report Labour has been taking more of a middle-ground approach to its policies.
"At this point, if Labour goes on like it is, I think that there's every chance that Greens can even potentially overtake them in terms of percentages and numbers in the House, unless Labour does get its act together and become a lot clearer about who they stand for..."
Longer term, though, its a different story. Every election brings more young voters, who have different values to Labour's older core, and who are energised about Aotearoa's core problems of climate change, inequality, and housing. And every electoral cycle, the Greens convince more of the public that their solutions – emissions reduction, a wealth tax, increased public spending – are what we need. If Labour continues to resist offering those solutions, if it continues trying to protect the status quo and the wealth of its house-hoarding MPs, then voters are going to look naturally to the party which does offer them. Botched, status quo responses to the crises those problems will cause will only strengthen that trend. So it's nowhere near unimaginable for the Green vote to grow and eventually overtake Labour’s, especially if Labour remains crap.
If Labour wants to avoid this fate, they need to not be crap. They need to actually respond to our problems, and promise to fix the bits of the status quo which are so obviously rotten and not working, rather than simply promising to manage it better. And its not clear if they even want to do that, or if the "no more revolutions" / "vision is for people on drugs" conservativism ushered in by Clark has so infected their party as to make it utterly unresponsive to the real world. I'm hoping that they do want to do it, and that they decide to be a better party which offers people something. But if they don't, if all they ever offer is endless austerity as things fall apart, then they deserve to be eaten for lunch.
