Greens' major focus is economic issues, not identity politics

The public perception reflects the media's obsession with identity, not the Greens'

There is a commonly-accepted notion in Aotearoa-New Zealand politics that the Greens are radical. They are often viewed and portrayed as ideologically-obsessed with the environment to the exclusion of anything else—a bunch of tree huggers. In addition, in recent years in particular, there is a growing idea that the Greens are obsessed with indigenous issues, including issues having to do with Māori and Te Tiriti (Treaty of Waitangi), Palestine, and trans issues. In other words, Greens are focused on identity politics. They are woke and nothing more.

With the current Coalition Government torching the economy and slashing the social safety net in the service of mass privatizations, cost of living is a huge concern. The Government has said many times that they are “laser focused” on cost of living and the economy, but everything they’ve done has made things worse. So there is a real need for politics that center material conditions and economic needs, and many on the center-left have wondered who is going to step up to take the economic populist mantle. I fully agree that an economic message is likely to play very well with the general public, and I have been critical of Labour for failing to hit this hard enough and for failing to do anything substantive to take on material conditions in their last term in government.

The Greens seem to be well-positioned to take up the economic populist message, as Labour seems reticent to move in a political direction that might rattle corporate and wealthy backers, but some have argued that the Greens are still too obsessed with identity politics and really need to pivot to a more populist message. In response to a recent argument that the Greens need to become more centrist and pragmatic and less ideological, I wrote a defense of the Greens here:

Bryce Edwards wrote a post this week taking up the Green-punching, claiming that they are still too focused on identity politics. He argues that while they dabble in economic populism and their economic policies are quite populist, their main message is still based around identity politics. Speaking of Chlöe Swarbrick in particular, he said

Instead, we get Gaza activism. We get rainbow politics. We get plenty of moral righteousness about various identity-based grievances, but precious little fire directed at the people who are actually making ordinary Kiwis poorer: the bank executives, the supermarket barons, the electricity company boards milking captive consumers.

Now, I don’t mean to be singling out Edwards here, and his post is more nuanced than most that accuse the Greens of ideological rigidity. What is interesting about his analysis though, is that he faults the Greens for not being focused enough on economic issues by referencing the headlines that are written about them

In practice, Green leaders have only sporadically made corporate power their main target. They’ll talk about supermarket duopolies one week, but by the next week the headlines are about their stance on cycleways or co-governance or some niche Member’s Bill. The consistency and fire needed to surf the current wave of economic discontent just hasn’t been there.

This example and the general framing of his piece highlights a key issue with the way that people discuss and criticize the Greens and that is that their critiques take at face value that what is highlighted by the media reflects the Greens’ actual priorities and messaging. As I will show with an analysis of their public news releases below, this is manifestly untrue.

Now, before I dig into this further, I want to dispel any notion that I am some kind of Greens stan who will defend the Greens against any criticism whatsoever. I am a Marxist that believes that liberal democracy and capitalism are inextricably linked and as such the only way to build a sustainable future for humanity is to overthrow the capitalist system—and this includes liberal democracy—and establish socialism. Therefore, I do not believe that social and political reforms can lead to durable material changes.

The Greens are fully entrenched in the liberal-democratic electoral paradigm, and as such, represent a dead end in the long run for me. However, I think it important to use political levers to promote social reforms for the good of the public even if I don’t believe this to be a successful strategy in the long term. For this reason, the Greens for me are the party that will most likely produce the material changes that will benefit people should they have power in government.

I think that’s why I get so frustrated when I feel that people mischaracterize the Greens. The Coalition Government constantly slams the Greens and the media takes up their criticisms and prints them as if they are factual statements of the Greens’ positions. In turn, the public gets the idea that the Greens are ideological zealots who are focused on Palestine and trans rights and don’t care about average, everyday Kiwi issues.

One way to test whether this is the case is to analyze the public news statements of the Greens. Public news statements are a good indicator because these are the official pronouncements of the party, the things they want to say said in the way they want to say them. Once a news statement is given, the Greens have no control over whether it is picked up by the media and how it is interpreted or spun.

So I conducted an analysis of public news statements made by the Greens since 2024, the year the Coalition Government came to power. I focused my coding on five topics that are most relevant to our current discussion: environment, Māori, economy, Palestine, and rainbow (LGBTQ) issues. For my analysis, I counted up the number of news headlines (I did not read the full news release) that mentioned one of the above issues. If a headline mentioned more than one topic, it counted in each category (this happened only a handful of times).

There were a total of 281 news releases having to do with these topics since 2024. The results of the analysis are presented below. As you can see, the majority of statements (138; 49%) had to do with the economy (cost of living, wages, benefits, corporate profits, public spending, poverty). The second highest topic was, perhaps unsurprisingly, environmental issues (including climate change related statements) at 89 (32%) mentions. None of the other issues were even close in terms of frequency.

This admittedly crude analysis (a complete analysis would have to consider social media posts and other public statements) provides some evidence for what I have been arguing: that the public perception of the Greens is not driven by the actual content of their politics but is instead driven by the media’s manufactured caricature of them as an ideological party obsessed with identity politics. It is telling that the two issues highlighted by Edwards in his analysis, Palestine and rainbow politics, both have only miniscule frequencies compared to economic issues, with Palestine having only 15 (5%) mentions and rainbow issues only 3 (1%). Somewhat surprisingly as well, Māori issues are lower than one might expect given the prevailing media discourse (36 mentions; 13%). I think one would be hard pressed to argue that these topics have been a primary focus of Greens politics based on these data.

So what is going on here? Why is the public perception of the Greens that they are one term in government removed from abolishing all private property and turning Aotearoa into a communist gulag? Certainly this is the picture that David Seymour paints in his social media posts.

It is crucial to recognize that the Greens have limited ability to control what the media says about them or what types of questions interviewers ask them. The moneyed interests behind much of the media in Aotearoa have a significant interest in alienating the majority of voters from the Greens by portraying them as too radical for serious political consideration. Many of the soundbites that are trumpeted as evidence of the Greens’ obsession with trans rights or Māori issues or Palestine are manufactured by the questions and gotcha moments that are engineered any time the Greens try to make a public statement. These are then circulated on social media ad nauseum by ACT, National, and NZ First as well as the rightwing media. In other words, it is the media and the rightwing disinformation machine’s obsession with identity politics that produces the impression that the Greens are focused on identity to the exclusion of economics. I will note, however, that even though the data presented above show that there is much less of a focus on Palestine and other issues, the Greens owe nothing to anyone who requires of them to sacrifice their moral clarity and integrity on these issues in order to be taken seriously or to appeal to the majority. At a time when the West appears ready to sacrifice those who are most marginalized and precarious on the alter of imperialism and capitalist profiteering, the Greens’ moral clarity is a rare bright spot in a growing vacuum of humanity.

As Edwards notes, mentioning economic issues is not the same thing as spearheading a Bernie Sanders style campaign against billionaires. I concur and I have mentioned many times in my own writing that a strong focus on an anti-corporate message is likely to resonate with the public. The Greens aren’t there yet. But neither are they obsessed with identity politics to the extent they are portrayed in the media or in the public imagination.

As noted by Edwards and as I covered in detail in my previous post above, the Greens recent focus seems to be much more focused on an economic populist message. The speeches given by Greens MPs during the debates on recent bills take a clearly antagonistic stand against corporate profiteering at the expense of people and planet. But again, most of the public isn’t trolling through Hansard or watching footage of Parliament and so they won’t hear the Greens’ fiery denunciation of landlords, fossil fuel companies, supermarket duopolies, power gentailers, or other corporate profiteering.

Meanwhile the media amplifies any statements on Māori or Te Tiriti or Palestine or rainbow issues, pretending that the Greens are focused on these to the exclusion of the bread and butter issues of most Kiwis. This is a deliberate ploy to steer people away from the only party that offers realistic solutions to the deteriorating material conditions of the public. Some massaging of the overall messaging strategy is needed, but the least we can do is to accurately portray the Greens’ position on the issues they address politically. Those of us who would like a more populist economic message from them must be doubly careful not to amplify the misinformation coming from the Right.