by Graham Adams on Centrist
In brief
- Chlöe Swarbrick wants the Greens to be the dominant party on the left.
- The latest [TV] 1News-Verian poll puts the Greens on 7 percent and Labour on 35.
- Support for tackling climate change and trans rights is falling.
- Swarbrick is trying to reframe climate change as a cost-of-living issue.
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 and 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 said she expected “far larger” support heading into the 2026 election.
A year and a half later, those ambitions look increasingly detached from reality. The latest 1News-Verian poll in December put the Greens on just seven percent, compared with Labour’s 35 percent. Even if that proves to be a rogue poll, as seems likely, the Greens will still trail Labour by a wide margin. Time is fast running out for Swarbrick to fulfil her goal of establishing Green supremacy.
Party apologists point to a string of scandals, including shoplifting and migrant exploitation, to explain the lack of momentum. But the Greens face deeper, structural problems if they want to move beyond being a permanent support partner for Labour. Since the party was founded in 1990, it has managed only a single Cabinet minister.
It hardly helps the Greens’ chances of commanding the Treasury benches that several of their core policy positions are steadily falling out of public favour.
Climate politics in retreat
Most obviously, the Greens’ long-running campaign to halt global warming by treating greenhouse gases, particularly CO₂, as a planetary thermostat to be adjusted at will is under growing pressure. After decades in which legacy media largely shut down debate and critics of anthropogenic climate change were routinely dismissed as “deniers”, the boom years for climate doomsters like Swarbrick appear to be ending.
The rise of so-called “climate realists” who accept that average global temperatures are rising, but dispute how much of that change can be attributed to human activity and object to the enormous cost of attempting to suppress global emissions, shows little sign of slowing.
Bill Gates’ public change of tone in late October marked a decisive shift away from the hysteria long promoted by the Greens. After his foundation had spent billions attempting to combat climate change, Gates 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.”
That statement sits uneasily alongside Swarbrick’s own apocalyptic rhetoric. In 2019, during a parliamentary debate on legislating net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, she declared: “We are in a climate crisis. If we don’t get this right, nothing else matters.”
Her tone hardened further after Cyclone Gabrielle in early 2023, when she told TVNZ’s Breakfast: “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.”
The reference was to the 2021 black comedy about two astronomers trying to warn humanity of an extinction-level comet, only to be met with indifference.
From apocalypse to affordability
Swarbrick is clearly aware that public opinion is shifting. Even Greta Thunberg has pivoted from climate catastrophe to Gaza. In response, Swarbrick has attempted a rhetorical reset, reframing climate change as a cost-of-living issue rather than an existential threat.
Her argument is that climate change directly drives up everyday expenses. Food prices rise as crops are affected by storms, floods and droughts. Energy costs increase as demand spikes during heatwaves and cold snaps. Insurance premiums climb as extreme weather damages homes and farms.
Whether this reframing resonates with voters remains an open question. Like many apocalyptic movements, the Greens’ most effective political tool has been fear of looming destruction. That approach works only until predicted catastrophe repeatedly fails to arrive and supporters drift away.
The deeper challenge for Swarbrick is what happens when prophecy fails. The polar ice caps have not vanished. Cities are not underwater. Increased atmospheric CO₂ has coincided with widespread increases in global plant growth.
The government, reading the mood accurately, is quietly edging away from onerous international emissions obligations under the Paris Agreement, while maintaining the appearance of compliance.
Watching Swarbrick attempt her own retreat from climate absolutism has been an entertaining spectacle. During her European tour last year, she met left-wing economists Yanis Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty, as well as the charismatic leader of England’s Greens, Zack Polanski, whom she described as “phenomenal”.
When Polanski suggested that the world’s two biggest problems were climate change and fascism, Swarbrick disagreed. She argued that the underlying issue was the economic system itself, which she said produces both climate change and inequality and therefore undermines democracy.
Interviewed by The Spinoff, she remarked that Polanski had learned: “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 reworking of Bertolt Brecht’s “bread first, then morals”, this observation belongs less in the category of profound insight than belated recognition of reality. Fear of climate catastrophe has largely been a preoccupation of the middle class, not those struggling to make ends meet.
A narrow electoral base
This helps explain why Green support remains concentrated in inner-city electorates populated by students and the affluent. The working class and the poor, whom the party claims to champion, show little interest in its agenda.
That is despite Swarbrick’s promise of free childcare, basic dental care, GP visits, a $395-a-week minimum income guarantee, and a new Ministry of Green Works to build sustainable infrastructure.
Asked by Guyon Espiner on RNZ last May why low-income voters do not support the Greens, Swarbrick suggested that poorer people are less likely to vote. Espiner pointedly noted that when they do vote, they still do not vote Green.
Swarbrick responded that the party was focused on mobilisation and grassroots organising to help people “step into their political power”. Whether that strategy will overcome entrenched disinterest remains doubtful.
The Greens’ fixation on trans rights is also unlikely to broaden their appeal. That ideology has remained largely confined to middle-class enclaves and has been steadily losing influence since the publication of the Cass Review and the release of the WPATH files in 2024.
The party’s difficulties were compounded last year by controversy surrounding MP Benjamin Doyle’s social media posts, including a slideshow of images featuring a child captioned “bussy galore”, with “bussy” being slang for a male’s anus.
Doyle was a vocal advocate for expanded funding for so-called gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers. When he abruptly resigned from Parliament in April, neither Swarbrick nor co-leader Marama Davidson attended his press conference, despite previously defending him publicly. His solitary exit was widely seen as an acknowledgement that both Doyle and the Greens’ gender activism had become electoral liabilities.