Green letter day for Darleen Tana

“From the outset,” says Chlöe Swarbrick, “we have done all we can to navigate the situation in front of us with our values as the guiding star”. Let’s just pause there. That’s some high-falutin’ rhetoric from the co-leader of a party that’s just abandoned what was once among its more closely held principles – the moment that maintaining the principle became politically and financially inconvenient.

On Thursday night, Green Party delegates endorsed the use of the so-called electoral integrity clause in the Electoral Act to eject Darleen Tana from Parliament, if she continues (obdurately) to refuse to quit. Swarbrick and her co-leader Marama Davidson have written to the Speaker to trigger that process. Tana entered Parliament on the Green Party list a year ago, but only 15 sitting days later, she was suspended pending a party inquiry into her involvement in alleged migrant exploitation at her husband’s e-bike company.



She eventually quit the party, but not Parliament. What the 185 delegates agreed, by consensus, was to set aside the Greens’ long-held opposition to the crudely nicknamed waka-jumping bill. (Crudely, in my view, because ‘waka-jumping’ is a phrase that was first used to disparage Māori MPs like NZ First’s Tau Henare, Rana Waitai and Tuku Morgan, the Alliance’s Alamein Kopu, Act’s Donna Awatere-Huata or Labour’s Tariana Turia – at least one or two of whom left their party on a matter of undeniable principle).

The first iteration of the party-hopping legislation, passed in 2001, was described by Greens founding co-leader Rod Donald as, “the most draconian, obnoxious, anti-democratic, insulting piece of legislation ever inflicted on this Parliament”. The second iteration was similarly castigated by the late Jeanette Fitzsimons, the other founding co-leader of the Greens, in . “Dissent is a valuable part of the political process,” she said.

“Without it, MPs are just clones of their leader...

The remedy is inclusiveness and listening and wide discussion, not shutting down the political process.” She acknowledged that in some cases leaving one’s party might be an act of integrity, as when it had compromised its policies or abused proper process; in other cases, it might be just self-serving political expediency. But it should be for electors and the law to decide which is the case, not for party leaders wanting to claw back the MP’s parliamentary funding and speaking time.

Ironically, Swarbrick also argued against the party-hopping law, when she cast the Greens’ vote to repeal it in 2020. “The Parliament of Aotearoa New Zealand is, as I think most in this House would be aware, one of the most whipped in the world..

. We have a very tribalist system. I think all of us have seen just how ugly that can get.

” What is the problem with this party-hopping law? Constitutional expert Professor Andrew Geddis has argued it puts an awful lot of power into the hands of a party leader. “And where there is power, then there is the temptation to use that power in ways bad as well as good.” And the Inter-Parliamentary Union has been advocating since 1889 on best practice for parliaments around the world.

It is damning of these laws, saying they create “political party dictatorships”. A critical flaw in the party-hopping law is that it treats political parties, and their proportionality, as the be-all and end-all. But MMP (which I have wholeheartedly championed for more than three decades) was carefully designed to reflect electors’ preferences for both parties and individual candidates.

Voters must be assumed to have have made informed decisions; they cast their party votes to reflect their support for the named candidates on that party’s list; they cast their constituency votes to reflect their support a named candidate in their community. Today, the Greens believe Tana was complicit in abusive employment practices. She believes they abused proper process in their investigation.

There is disputed evidence. There are unresolved Employment Relations Authority complaints. There are claims and counter-claims.

If not for the party-hopping law, Tana would be a long way short of breaching any threshold that would cause her to lose her seat. There are very few offences that will cost an MP their job: being convicted of a crime punishable by two or more years in prison is one, or failing to attend Parliament for three straight years; aligning themselves with a foreign power, ceasing to be a citizen, a corrupt electoral practice, or being confirmed to be mentally unbalanced after six months on a compulsory treatment order. Not just that, but Tana has continued to represent constituents as an MP.

Her recent questions in the House show she is engaged and passionate on issues impacting her community. That knowledge and passion may now be wasted. This is not to defend her actions at the bike business, but to reinforce that, whether or not the Greens were guilty of abuse process in their treatment of the investigation, they certainly are now abusing process by retrospectively changing the position on which Tana was elected, in good faith.

Back in 2020 when Swarbrick spoke against the party-hopping bill, she said: “Everybody has stood up tonight and given pretty high and mighty speeches. There’s been a lot of talk about principle, but the fact of the matter is not too many people have actually acknowledged the machinations behind the scenes here tonight, and that is politics.” That was an apt characterisation then, and it applies equally well to her high and mighty talk this week of values.

For the Greens now, it’s about rebuilding and professionalising the party, including putting in place better systems for recruiting and managing MPs, if they want to avoid another string of scandals. And they may need to rebuild their own supporters’ trust in their adherence to principles. The Greens are right that a weight of available evidence suggests Darleen Tana’s actions were unbefitting a Parliamentarian.

But she was democratically elected by voters, and has not yet been found to have crossed a threshold that would invalidate that election. The Greens’ embrace of the party-hopping law to oust her from Parliament is not about values, but about political expediency..