Does United Future Dislike the Greens?
Topic: The Greens
A work colleague asked me the other day “Why does United Future dislike the Greens so much?”

I admit I didn’t answer her question at the time. But it got me thinking. And this is not the first time someone has asked me something similar. So how could I answer?

Emotion or Policy?
I was somewhat floored by the question, because it hadn’t occurred to me to describe the Greens on an simple emotional basis as “like or “dislike”. But on reflection I must admit antipathy – dislike – though I had thought of it in terms of policy and competition rather than emotion. So why?

Paint me friendly
In a sense no political party really likes any other party: if they did they would join them! And if you consider the ability to work with other parties and even join with them as some measure of cooperativeness, then United Future would be the most cooperative party in New Zealand’s history. So it’s not as if United Future are unfriendly. So why the perception?

Solidarity forever?
Parties of the left appear to be very good at hiding their differences for public consumption. In public they paper over disputes and deep policy divides with the odd kiss on the cheek, while getting their knives out and doing their hard bargaining behind closed doors. That’s the socialist way. Parties on the centre-right, being more individualistic, are much more likely to argue publicly and speak their minds openly and aggressively, especially about the left. It would have suited the Greens to have United Future align itself with the left, or at least say it was willing to work with them. But it didn’t suit United Future. As a centre party, UF needed to differentiate itself from Labour and the political left. At the same time UF had to be able to pull Labour towards the centre and away from the extreme left where much Green support resides. So tactically it made sense to attack the Greens vigorously.

The ‘dislike’ question suits the Greens
It suits the Greens to appear reasonable and conciliatory, and to simplify political lines-in-the-sand down to mere ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, and they did this during the election. It suited the Greens to paint the other side as being unreasonable and unwilling to compromise. It suited them to if you paint someone as emotionally biased then you can ignore their policy arguments. And the Greens avoided having to make clear how much of their own precious principles they would be willing to compromise, with the subsequent risk of alienating their own supporters.

‘Like’ doesn’t come into it
It may also be that my questioners didn’t attend political meetings, or pay attention to statements from people they weren’t going to vote for. I attended three local political forums leading up to the election. My lasting impression was that all the candidates from all the parties came across as being good people. All the candidates appeared to be very reasonable when presenting their policies – even those who expressed diametrically opposite views each seemed to make sense at the time. I think I could have ‘liked’ almost all of them and I was sorry to see some of them miss out on parliamentary seats even though I voted for a different candidate. So ‘liking’ doesn't really come into it, in terms of who one can work with.

Next time: The Centre Under Siege