Everything below her eyes is covered with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles face mask, but the few passers-by on the near-empty streets of Auckland still recognise Chlöe Swarbrick. New Zealand’s largest city is under a second lockdown to quell a resurgence of Covid-19 and Swarbrick, who became New Zealand’s youngest lawmaker since 1975 when she took office in 2017, at 23, is out for her permitted daily walk for an oat-milk coffee, the Guardian accompanying her by video call.
“This is where I wash my clothes,” she says, stepping into an empty laundromat. Swarbrick, who is spending the lockdown in her small central city apartment , has been a familiar face on these streets for years, as a philosophy and law student, business owner, alternative radio journalist, and as a candidate for the city’s mayor, aged 22, just before she headed to parliament in the capital, Wellington. When she steps back out into Auckland’s blustery wind, another “Hi Chlöe!” is audible.
People are “hungry and primed right now”, she says, for a feeling of community amid the coronavirus-related discussions of physical and social connection, and some of those who stop her in the street are friends, she adds. But is she recognised by strangers a lot? “Not to be a wanker,” she says, “But yes.”
Swarbrick, now 26 and a member of parliament for the left-leaning Green party, has been pigeonholed, even within her own side of the political spectrum, as a “youth” politician – with all the condescension that sometimes entails. She went viral for dealing to a fellow MP with the meme-worthy phrase, “OK, boomer,” when he heckled one of her speeches in parliament, and is often called upon by reporters to discuss her support for New Zealand’s upcoming October referendum on legalising cannabis – even though it was not originally an area of interest.
“When I came into the parliament, I was like, ‘I’m going to talk about constitutional reform and this is going to be sick,’” Swarbrick says. But after “properly looking into” the issue of cannabis, including the way a prohibition on its possession, sale and use disproportionately affects vulnerable people, she says, “I have become really, really pissed off by just how much politicians are willing to uphold these mythologies [about addiction], to progress, effectively, political expediency and retain their sense of power.”
“We are, I think, sleepwalking into quite a discordant society,” she says.
The global left has “failed to find a unifying narrative” to work together in combating the reach of multinational corporations and the super-wealthy, she adds.
Swarbrick claims to be less earnest than she was during her mayoral campaign, a quality that provoked some mirth on social media at the time, and has recently started performing standup comedy. Where can a brand-new comedian who is also one of Auckland’s most famous faces sneak into an open-mic night and anonymously flop?
“Oh, I absolutely can’t flop,” she says. Instead, she has had comedian friends teach her the structure of jokes.
One of her favourites points out the way that the Baby Boomer generation – who had had a free-love, cannabis-growing youth, says Swarbrick - are now the voters most opposed to the legalisation of cannabis.
“It’s attempting to make these things more accessible in a way that hopefully doesn’t destabilise intergenerational relations as I have done in the past,” she adds.
In her downtime, Swarbrick studies public policy and economics, and has been “hassling” her party’s co-leader, James Shaw, for the economics portfolio.
“When I am faced with a challenge or with people who are arguing on a ground that just seems inconceivably opaque and difficult to grapple with, but also that I feel is wrong and I don’t quite have the words to explain why, I’ll go and study it,” she says. “That’s why I dug so deep into the drugs issue. And for my next trick, I’ll do economics.”
‘I’ve never had to pretend to be anything other than I am’
Swarbrick is part of a global wave of young, progressive lawmakers who have ascended to office in the past five years, alongside a rising tide of populism – among them politicians Swarbrick admires, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 30, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, and Mhairi Black, 25, the Scottish National Party MP. But like some of her peers, she has at once been fêted for her youth and freshness (Swarbrick recently told a reporter she was “too old” for the social networking app TikTok), and criticised for it.
In October’s election, Swarbrick will stand for the electorate seat of Auckland Central – suddenly in play after the incumbent announced her resignation. It could also determine the Greens’ future in parliament; the traditional party of protest has lost some support after its three years supporting the government, and risks dropping below the 5% threshold to enter parliament in October – the alternative is winning a single electorate seat.
Labour’s candidate for Auckland Central, Helen White – who is not already an MP – dismissed Swarbrick in July as a “celebrity” nominee, asking if voters wanted “someone to do this job very seriously.”
The attitude exasperates Swarbrick.
“One of the things that kind of cracks me up is you get your kind of [media commentator] types who will say things akin to, ‘We need more young people engaged in politics. They’re all just so apathetic,’” she says. “And then somebody stands up and runs to be involved in elections, and they’re like, ‘Not like that, you have no life experience.’”
After leaving school early, she rushed at a philosophy degree and completed it by the age of 19, by which point she and her then-partner also ran a menswear label.
“The purpose of that was … shit, I don’t know,” she says. “Basically I was like, ‘We could do this.’” She worked a stint at Auckland’s independent radio station Bfm, studied law, and ran a combination cafe, art gallery and doughnut shop named after her little brother, Olly.
“It’s definitely been one of the biggest challenges of my adult life is to try and find a semblance of balance,” she says.
From childhood pessimist to ‘more of an optimist’
Swarbrick has also been open about her struggles with depression and anxiety – and then faced the discomfort of having reporters pick through the details to highlight the most salacious. She’s not planning a lifetime in politics, so she doesn’t mind the fallout – but it does bother her that politicians are expected to be superhuman.
“I feel good about the fact that I’ve never had to pretend to be anything other than I am, but I also am really cognisant a lot of people hold a lot of assumptions about me,” she says.
“A lot of people nowadays say to me that I seem really cynical and I’m like, oh, you should have met me like three or four years ago,” she says.
At eight, she learned the word pessimist and went home to tell her Dad that she was one (he responded that this “made sense”, Swarbrick says). But despite saying that she will one day retire in a “climate change world” and that she worries about having children as a result, she has changed – becoming “more of an optimist” since taking up office.
“When you really actively engage with people beyond the narratives and the rhetoric and people who think that they are vehemently opposed to you, minds do shift and change and that gives me so much hope for humanity and our capacity to solve problems,” she says.
