GRAHAM ADAMS - Election 2026: Swarbrick’s plan for Green supremacy falters

When Chlöe Swarbrick became the Greens’ co-leader in March 2024, she announced that she wanted the party to go “mainstream”.

Her professed aim was to supplant the Labour Party to ultimately form “the nation’s first Green-led government”, all without compromising the movement’s core values.

In June that year, she claimed it was achievable through “mass mobilisation”. A month later, she told the party’s AGM: “We can and we will lead the government in the not-too-distant future. I mean it to the core of my being.”

She urged members to build the biggest Green movement the world had ever seen and expected to have “far larger” support going into the 2026 election.

However, a year and a half later, her ambitions appear to have been the product of a fever dream. The latest 1News-Verian poll in December had the party on seven per cent, compared to Labour’s 35 per cent. Even if that turns out to be a rogue poll, as seems likely, the Greens will undoubtedly trail Labour by a long way at this year’s election. Time is fast running out for Swarbrick to fulfil her aim of establishing Green supremacy.

Party apologists will cite a series of scandals — including shoplifting and migrant exploitation — for the lack of momentum but the Greens have far more deep-seated problems to solve if they want to move beyond being just a support partner for Labour. After all, they have only had one member inside Cabinet since the party began in 1990.

And it can hardly help its prospects of commanding the Treasury benches that some of its longstanding policies are rapidly falling from public favour.

Most obviously, the Greens’ quixotic campaign to halt global warming by treating greenhouse gases — particularly CO2 — as a thermostat to be twiddled is under significant pressure. After decades of the legacy media shutting down debate — with critics of anthropogenic climate-change theory routinely denounced as “deniers” — the boom times for doomsters like Swarbrick are clearly ending.

The advance of what have been termed “climate realists” — who acknowledge that average global temperatures are rising but contest how much can be attributed to human activity and who object to the gargantuan cost of trying to lower emissions worldwide — appears unstoppable.

Bill Gates’ public change of heart in late October marked an unmistakeable shift from the doomster hysteria long whipped up by the Greens. After his foundation had spent billions over many years trying to fight climate change, he wrote: “Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

His statement is a far cry from Swarbrick’s apocalyptic assertion in 2019 during a parliamentary debate on engineering net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050: “We are in a climate crisis — if we don’t get this right, nothing else matters…”

Or her astonishingly cloth-eared claim on TVNZ’s Breakfast in early 2023 after Cyclone Gabrielle’s devastation: “This is not a recovery and rebuild moment! This is a ‘Don’t Look Up’ moment. This is what we mean when we talk about the climate emergency.”

“Don’t Look Up” was a reference to the 2021 black comedy about two astronomers who go on a media tour to warn humans of a planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth — and are greeted with indifference.

Swarbrick is obviously aware that popular opinion is shifting (with even Greta Thunberg switching her attention from impending climate catastrophe to Gaza) and she is running to keep up. Her tactic is to swivel from existential dread to emphasising that “the climate crisis is a cost-of-living disaster”.

By that she means climate change isn’t just an environmental problem. Rather, it directly makes everyday life more expensive, especially for those already struggling financially. Food prices go up as crops are hit by storms, floods and droughts; energy costs rise as heatwaves and cold snaps increase demand for air-conditioning; and insurance premiums soar as extreme weather hits homes and farms.

Whether focusing on climate change as a present-day, cost-of-living crisis rather than a future threat to humanity’s existence will help capture the interest of voters remains to be seen. As with all apocalyptic cults, the Greens’ most powerful weapon has been stoking fears of looming destruction — but that works only until the predicted doomsday once again fails to arrive and supporters drift away.

The fundamental problem Swarbrick has to grapple with is what to do when prophecy fails. The polar caps haven’t melted as predicted; cities aren’t underwater; and the increased CO2 in the atmosphere has resulted in the flourishing of plant life across the world.

Much to Swarbrick’s performative outrage, the government — correctly divining public sentiment — is sidling away from onerous international emissions obligations under the Paris Agreement while pretending it isn’t.

Watching Swarbrick trying to manoeuvre away from climate doomsterism herself is certainly entertaining. During her Grand European Tour late last year, she met prominent left economists including Yanis Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty — as well as the charismatic leader of England’s Greens, Zack Polanski, who she described as “phenomenal”.

When he suggested the biggest problems facing the world right now were the “climate crisis” and “fascism”, Swarbrick sharply disagreed. She nominated the “economic system” because that is what produces both climate change and inequality, which “undermine democracy”.

Interviewed by The Spinoff, she said that Polanski has realised: “You cannot get people to care about the end of the world… if they cannot afford to put food on the table at the end of the week.”

As a twist on Bertolt Brecht’s maxim “Bread first, then morals”, this observation belongs more in the “Well, duh!” category than a devastatingly fresh insight. In reality, it underscores the fact that fear of a climate cataclysm has only really infected the middle-classes who have no trouble putting food on the table.

It never caught on amongst the poor, which is just one reason the Greens find their support depends on inner-city suburbs populated mostly by students and the well-to-do. The poor and the working-class, whom the party professes to care deeply about, take very little interest in its policies — despite the social-democratic nirvana Swarbrick is promising with free childcare, basic dental care and GP visits alongside a $395-a-week minimum income guarantee. And a Ministry of Green Works to build sustainable infrastructure.

Asked by Guyon Espiner on RNZ last May why the poor don’t vote for the Greens, Swarbrick claimed lower-income people tended not to vote. Espiner cruelly reminded her that when poor people do vote they don’t vote for the Greens.

Swarbrick: “That’s something which we we’re [going] around the country mobilising and organising and working with people on.

“There is work we need to do when it comes to people stepping into their power politically and… that’s the outreach that we’ll be doing building grassroots momentum and organising skills so that we can achieve these things come the next election.”

It’s certainly hard to imagine the party’s promotion of trans rights helping broaden the party’s base either as its MPs go about the country building “momentum”. That perverse ideology has also barely moved out of middle-class enclaves and its influence has been steadily waning since the publication of the Cass Review and the WPATH files in 2024.

Last year, the Greens weathered a storm centred on MP Benjamin Doyle’s social media posts and a slideshow of photos, which included a child. The slideshow was captioned “bussy galore”, with “bussy” being slang for a male’s anus.

Doyle was an outspoken advocate of increased funding for “gender-affirming care” — including puberty blockers. When he abruptly resigned from Parliament in April at a press conference, neither co-leader attended, despite both Swarbrick and Marama Davidson having previously defended him in public. His lonely exit has been widely interpreted as a sign that the Greens’ leaders had recognised belatedly that he — and possibly his “gender-affirming” stance — had become a liability.

In fact, the most common criticism of the Greens is that they have sidelined environmentalism in favour of a grab-bag of “social justice” and identitarian policies.

Swarbrick, for instance, has an overwhelming obsession with Palestine (but not Ukraine) and pushes LGBTQ+ rights and drug law reform even as she tries to shoehorn climate change, Te Tiriti, degrowth programmes, and social justice into one baffling bundle.

Delivering them in a cohesive form remains a challenge. Swarbrick is the Greens’ most voluble cheerleader and can talk about this policy pot-pourri at length without taking a pause for breath or making sense of the jumble — all the while repeating stock phrases such as “caring for people and planet” and “evidence-based solutions”. In that way, she is the poor woman’s Jacinda Ardern, who could also talk for some time without saying anything meaningful but who was more personable.

Swarbrick is often asked why the Greens are no longer seen as a party primarily for environmentalists. When Polanski raised the topic, she replied: “People who frequently wag their finger and say, ‘You’re not talking about the environment anymore,’ really don’t give a shit when we are.” Which is a clear admission of the failure of an integral part of the party’s mission — or “kaupapa” as she likes to call it.

Her belief that turning her attention to reforming the economic system — including raising tens of billions via extra state borrowing and wealth and inheritance taxes — will lead to electoral success is a heroic assumption given the bitter taste the profligacy of the Ardern-Hipkins government has left in many voters’ mouths.

The Coalition government understands that most voters don’t want to pay more tax; what they want is the tax they already pay to be spent much more prudently.

Although Swarbrick has insisted recently that the Greens are “in a really good place” going into election year, she must be acutely aware that her plan to make the party the dominant force on the left is not proceeding nearly as well as she hoped.

In fact, her ambition seems to be reduced to being a prod to Labour by setting the progressive agenda.

At the party’s AGM in August, Swarbrick pitched the Greens as “a vehicle for political change — the big ideas factory — inside of our current electoral system.”.

A “big ideas factory” — staffed by “a bunch of earnest nerds”, as she put it — is a very long way from dominating the left.

In short, Swarbrick’s fever dream has broken.

Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore. • An abridged version of this column first appeared on Centrist.