Hosking on Greens

Rob Hosking at NBR has a good column on the politics of the Greens:

Green co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, who has become a sort of organically grown, carbon-credit-worthy grown fig leaf for what is basically a radical left-wing party, is leaving politics.

Fitzsimons herself, with her background in environmental science rather than radical politics, along with her public image of being everyone’s favourite great-auntie (and a palpable, and genuine decency) had become a front-woman for what is basically a radical Marxist party.

Strong language, but three of their senior MPs – Locke, Bradford and Norman are or were Marxists. And Turei, despite having worked as a lawyer, is definitely on the far left.

It has become something of a cliché to describe the Greens as water melons – green the outside and red on the inside. It’s a bit more complex than that.

Better to think of them as traffic lights – red one minute, green the next, and a sort of funny orange colour when Sue Kedgley accidentally eats a food additive.

Heh.

Fitzsimons has argued the Greens are not really left-wing because they “reject the model of the big all powerful state that makes all decisions for people, in favour of a community model that empowers.”

How does that sit with, say, Sue Kedgley’s calls to ban pretty much everything she does not think we should eat or drink?

I think you can make a case that the Greens are the most authoritarian party in Parliament, now NZ First have gone. They see the role of the state as to force New Zealanders to live their lives in a particular way.

And then Hosking looks at Turei:

Then there’s the two candidates vying to replace Fitzsimons. Metiria Turei, seen as the most likely successor, framed much of her maiden speech around an address by radical US academic Noam Chomsky, who said those of us in western democracies are “in a cage” and “we’re going to expand the floor [of the cage], meaning we will extend to the limits what the cage will allow.

And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking the cage when we’re vulnerable, so they’ll murder us. You have to protect the cage when it’s under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it….

“We too, in Aotearoa, live in a cage.”

Is this the cage that the Greens keep constructing, to ban things they do not approve of?