By Angela Beswick
With an increasing number of young supporters and a growing voter base, the Green party is not ruling out replacing Labour as the biggest party of the left in years to come.
A record result for the party in Saturday’s election saw them take 10.5 percent of the vote and 13 seats in Parliament – about a 50 percent increase on 2008.
Speaking on TV3’s The Nation this morning, Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said his party is in a “pretty good spot”.
“We’re coming back with 13, possibly 14 seats if the specials come in nicely. So we’ve got a strong caucus, it’s a pretty strong team.”
Meanwhile, after one of their worst election results saw them take away just 27 percent of the party vote and 34 seats, Phil Goff’s future as leader of the Labour Party is in question.
“I think Labour is going to have quite a bit of work to do internally, it’s just the nature of the thing after a result like this,” Mr Norman said. “The Greens are gong to have a pretty clear run at it I think.”
Asked whether replacing Labour as the biggest party on the left is a possibility or an aspiration, Mr Norman pointed to Germany where the Green Party are larger than Labour’s German equivalent. But he said only good can come from the Green Party and Labour working cooperatively.
“Elections are a competition and so it should be. I think out of the competition between Labour and the Greens, something good has come out of it already. When you look at the policy Labour adopted in the lead-up to this election, we [the Greens] wrote a lot of it effectively – cause they adopted a bunch of our stuff - which is fantastic.”
With an opposition that is usually dominated by Labour now very much a Labour-Green partnership, Mr Norman said his party will have a much bigger impact and visibility in Parliament.
“We’ve done pretty well with limited resource, competing with Labour over the last three years so, when the balance has changed toward us… that obviously advantages us.”
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The Green Party intend to continue making progress on the key areas it has identified; “kids, rivers, jobs”, Mr Norman said.
“We’ll be talking with National over the next week or so and looking at… it’s a combination of the ongoing memorandum of understanding projects; like home insulation, the cycle network, the contaminated sites identification and clean up project – which is already been actually quite important in Coromandel – and then what other projects we might put on the table.”
Asked whether the Green Party policy areas are expensive, Mr Norman says they will be focussing on projects that have good returns.
“The only seriously expensive one is home insulation, $320 million over four years – that’s still got a little bit to run out.
“We’ve done over 120,000, we’re heading for 200,000 homes retrofitted with insulation. So if you were to extend that project that’s serious money, but the benefits are at least three to one in terms of the health system – so it pays for itself three times over. People just use the health system less because they’re healthier.
“If we are going be talking about serious money – and we are in a pretty constrained fiscal environment – then we need to target projects that have good returns.”
Support for the Green Party is expected to increase to 11 percent once special votes have been counted.
3 News