Davidson and Shaw prepare for a second term in Govt – Newsroom

Week in Review

Green Party co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw say they've learned to adjust to campaigning and policymaking in the era of Covid-19.As part of a year in review series, they spoke to Newsroom about the impact of the pandemic, their views on Jacinda Ardern and their hopes for the next three years

When I last sat down for an interview withGreen Party co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw, it was for a pre-election profile I ended up writing on August 11.

That night, the Prime Minister announced that four community cases of Covid-19 had been found in Auckland, with no obvious link to the border. My article still ran the next day, but it was overshadowed by the news that the virus was back and Auckland was headed into Level 3 lockdown.

For the Greens, this was just another in a long string of interrupted campaigns, media pushes and policy announcements. When I met the co-leaders again on Thursday, I referenced our last meeting, saying that the resurgence of Covid-19 had plunged my piece into irrelevance.

"As were we all," Shaw says.

Election result a surprise

The challenges of 2020 made for a uniquely difficult campaign, but the Greens managed to make history by improving their share of the vote as a minor party after being in Government and winning, for the first time, an electorate seat without the help of a major party.

"Because we've been a small party and have been in opposition for the vast majority of our history, until very recently, we don't have memories of success," Shaw says.

"There's been a lot of little ones along the way obviously. Those have all been celebrated and recorded. But other than 2011 when we bounced up into the double digits for the first time, we've not really had an election result quite like that."

Given the last poll before the election had the Greens on 6.5 percent and the party tends to underperform the polling, the Greens expected their return to Parliament would be on a knife edge.

"There are lots about it that surprised us. Chle surprised everyone except Chle. But we raised more money than we'd ever raised before - we actually finished the election campaign in a better financial position than when we'd started it," Shaw says.

"The fact that our polling got it right for the first time. Our polling told us that Labour were going to win an outright majority. None of us really believed it, because we'd never really believed our research before, because we can't afford the frequency and the coverage and so on. So when we got it, we applied the standard sort of discount."

"That was the main thing for me, was, I refused to believe it until I saw [the final results]," Davidson says.

"All through the night, I was looking at the numbers going, 'It can't be'. I was working off the research and the evidence base and the evidence over the years told a different story. So I took off a couple of points here and there."

Rewriting the narrative

The co-leaders say their success wasn't necessarily achieved despiteCovid-19. While the pandemic rendered face-to-face campaigning, at least in Auckland, impossible and had MPs so busy in Parliament that they were unable to campaign, Davidson says it also highlighted the importance of the party's message.

"We had to sort of rewrite some of our narrative. We had to work harder to make the connections, to bring climate and environmental protections into the space of a public health response to Covid," she says.

"The light being shone on the inequalities that we had always been strong on, but Covid was bringing them to the forefront even more so. We needed climate change to be in the forefront of peoples' minds, and it wasn't necessarily, so we did need to do some work."

The main thrust of the campaign's strategy - a focus on six key issues like poverty, transport and agriculture, as well as the "Think ahead, act now" slogan - was developed in late 2019, before the word "Covid-19" was even invented. Nonetheless, Shaw says, the party adapted the strategyto the context of Covid-19 and stuck to it.

"Historically we're not terribly good at following our strategy," he says, to a chortle from Davidson.

"We tend not to stay on strategy. This time we did."

"I felt like no matter what result, we had done well because we stuck to our game plan. But it also got us the results," Davidson says.

Cooperation agreement

After the election, the pair hashed out an agreement with Jacinda Ardern to earn themselves ministerial portfolios outside of Cabinet. Shaw held onto the climate change role and picked up Associate Minister for the Environment (Biodiversity) while Davidson earned a brand new title as Minister Responsible for Family and Sexual Violence Prevention. She is also responsible for homelessness with an associate housing role.

The decision to cooperate with Labour despite having no leverage over the bigger party wasn't a foregone conclusion, butthe party went along with it because of the achievements over the last three years.

"That was the core of the rightfully rigorous debate. It was in the context of us having just come through our first term in government with ministersgetting some stuff done and, especially for our campaign, maintaining our political independence and point of difference," Davidson says.

"We went into those discussions wanting to do both. And of course our party had those vigorous discussions back and forth. But we've had some experience now. We've had three years of being able to show influence, getting stuff done that makes a difference on the ground to our planet and to peoples' lives, as well as being able to speak up, when we knew it was important, on our priorities."

"The scale of what we were able to do in those three years of government is so many multiples greater than anything we'd been able to do in the 20 years previously, in opposition," Shaw says.

Going into negotiations, some commentators doubted that the Greens would be able to win much of significance, given Labour's outright majority. But Shaw, in the days leading up to the discussions, had publicly outlined a theory which held that politics was not quite so transactional as the media was making it out to be. Relationships mattered, he said, and the Greens have a good relationship with Labour in general and Jacinda Ardern in particular.

When asked whether he still believes that and whether he will carry that philosophy forward over the next three years, Shaw doublesdown.

"The only reason we're in this arrangement is because of the quality of our relationships with the Labour Party. They didn't have to take us, right? And if we had acted in a transactional manner in the last term, we would probably be in opposition," he says.

"I feel quite vindicated with that view. In this arrangement, we canonlyget things done as a result of our relationships. It's critical."

Transformation?

That doesn't necessarily mean the new Government will go as far as the Greens might like. When asked whether Ardern will lead a transformational Government, the co-leaders hedge their bets and say it depends on the issue.

Shaw says the Prime Minister has her own theory of change - something she reiterated to Newsroom in her own year-end interview - which holds that the change which matters most is the change that sticks. Often, that is "incremental" Shaw says.

"You take the country with you on a journey over time. You need to keep building permission," he says.

"She may well be proved right. But we take a view that some of the crises that we're facing have a degree of timeliness to them which means that it simply requires that scale of transformation in a shorter period of time."

"They campaigned on a manifesto. That's what their programme is," Davidson says.

"The things in it are good and necessary and need to happen and for the most part, we support them. But they, on their own, aren't transformative. That's what they've committed to and that's what they have a mandate for as well. There are some potentially founding things for transformation in there, but that's where the Greens have some value to add, is really being able to push for and work with the transformational stuff."

Davidson says the work she is trying to do in her family and sexual violence portfolio is "laying the foundation for transformation". She also points to the Green Party's continuing advocacy for a wealth tax in the face of housing becoming an increasingly contentious political issues.

"Some transformational work does need to happen in that space. That isn't in the manifesto. On some issues, that's where the Greens will send a really strong signal and build mandate for those particular transformational shifts."

Looking ahead

On climate change, Shaw is more optimistic.

"That's an interesting one, right? I actually think, in climate change, in the new arrangement, there is a greater likelihood of transformational government than there was in the last three years. You can see the Prime Minister is wanting to lead in ways that, I think, she felt constrained from being able to do so."

Looking ahead, the Greens say they aren't worried about the Year of the Vaccine - as Ardern has dubbed 2021 - overshadowing their policy priorities.

"I've come to terms with the fact that the Covid overview of things is going to be with us for years, if not for the rest of our lives," Davidson says.

"But actually, that is also the platform for us to talk even more so about these issues. Climate change is a health issue. Absolutely, as a health resilience and recovery issue. Housing is a health issue, very clearly. It provides us with another opportunity to relate it back to this collective wellbeing - child poverty, people having enough to survive on, is a health issue, a climate issue, an environmental protection issue."

Shaw says he will be pushing to make sure that, "as a vaccine rolls out, we don't just revert to type. One of the things I keep saying about climate change is that innovaiton is a function of constraint. When the squeeze is on, that's when you get creative - generally. Covid has been an enormous disruptor but you can also see that there are innovations that are occurring in government and public policy, and also in the private sector, which offer incredible hope.

"I just hope people don't drop that and say, 'It's cool, there's a vaccine, we can just go back to employing cheap labour to do crap work.'"

He is also looking forward to the release of draft recommendations from the Climate Change Commissionfor New Zealand'semissions budgets through 2035, recommendations for strengthening our Paris Agreement target and recommendations for how to treat agricultural methane. Those are due February 1 and he expects them to really shake things up.

"Next yearin the domain of climate change is going to be a doozy," he says.

"It's gonna be massive. And I think there will be a lot of stories to write. I think that there will probably be news in there, that people see the reality of it for the first time."

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Davidson and Shaw prepare for a second term in Govt - Newsroom