Gower on Greens afraid of the big bad Winston

Patrick Gower writes:

The Green Party has “gone nuclear” on Winston Peters by threatening to call a new election if he is Kingmaker.

It is an extreme call that demonstrates the extreme fear the Greens have of Winston.

It shows us they are panicked by the current rise of Peters.

It also shows us that the Greens don’t trust New Zealand First.

But more importantly, it shows us the Greens don’t trust Labour.

It shows us the Labour-Green “Memorandum of Understanding”, which expires on Election Day, is actually more meaningless than people thought.

You can’t blame Greens for not trusting Labour or Winston.

The problem is, it doesn’t exactly make the Labour-Green-NZ First combination look stable.

In fact, Winston Peters is suddenly looking more stable than the Greens.

But that is what extreme fear does to you – it makes you do extreme things.

And the Greens are clearly extremely scared of Winston Peters.

Scared Labour and New Zealand First will try and shut them out of government.

The reality is the Greens can never force another general election. They’d get under 5% and be out of Parliament. All their problems come from the fact they have ruled out ever co-operating with National.

All their problems could be solved if their policy was along these lines:

“Our very strong preference is for a progressive government of the left. However if such a government is not possible we would consider abstaining on supply and confidence for a National-led Government in return for substantial policy conessions on environmental issues”

Suddenly they would have just as much leverage as New Zealand First.