While the Kerekere drama may be allowed to fade from the headlines, the identity crisis at the centre of the Green Party is no closer to being settled, Marc Daalder writes
Analysis: When Elizabeth Kerekere sent a message on the chat app Signal to all Green Party MPs and a number of staffers, mocking her fellow MP Chlöe Swarbrick, senior members of the Greens' team in Parliament may well have breathed a sigh of relief.
Co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson revealed on Saturday, after Kerekere quit on Friday night, that they had for some time held concerns about the newly-independent MP's treatment of staff and caucus colleagues. No one had come forward in a formal sense, leaving their hands tied about what to do. The April 5 message, which had been meant for a different chat group, gave them the perfect reason to launch a more wide-ranging investigation of what had happened.
Shaw said he and Davidson agreed on an internal investigation before the message leaked to the media the next day, though the announcement only came after RNZ reported on existence of the message. This would explain why the pair were so vague about the timeline for the investigation. Already, they expected it to reveal new and concerning evidence of bullying - though they didn't use that word.
"What's important here is the pattern of behaviour which does not focus on just messages that people may know about. Those concerns were brought to us and we deemed them serious enough to start an internal investigation. As co-leaders, we have a responsibility for staff and caucus wellbeing," Davidson said on Saturday morning.
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The investigation was conducted in line with Green Party processes established in the wake of the Francis Review into bullying at Parliament. It was extensive and allowed all parties to comment at every stage. Shaw emphasised the process was agreed to by Kerekere and all other caucus members last year, as a way to take the politics out of any potential allegation of bullying.
Nonetheless, there will be some political schadenfreude at Kerekere's rapid self-immolation at the highest echelons of the Green Party. High-ranking staff have long suspected Kerekere was behind the attempt to unseat Shaw from the Green Party leadership at last year's Annual General Meeting.
Of course, this whole thing was avoidable if not for Kerekere's misplaced ego. Had the message never been sent, the Greens would never have had cause to launch an investigation into the rest of the alleged "pattern of behaviour". And in retrospect, the message is a bit pitiful.
The use of the term "crybaby" isn't really the issue - people say mean things all the time. Instead, the parts of the message complaining about Swarbrick's luck in having her member's bill pulled from the ballot right as party members begin to engage in the list-ranking process is problematic. It shows a naked personal ambition, rather than a belief that a rising political tide lifts all boats which more closely matches the Greens' kaupapa.
Moreover, Kerekere was ranked fourth on the draft list released just days before. For an MP who had relatively little public profile, most famous perhaps for her involvement in the ban on conversion therapy or else for breaking Covid-19 isolation rules last autumn, this should have been a fantastic placing. To complain about it and hope to displace Swarbrick, the Greens' only electorate MP and arguably their most high-profile member, shows a lack of self-awareness about Kerekere's own place in the greater scheme of things.
Looking forward, while comparisons may be drawn to the internal caucus conflict over Metiria Turei in 2017, which saw the Greens' polling numbers crash, this situation is quite different. Kerekere's low profile means the average voter won't even know she's gone. And while internal conflict is always a bad look, there are only two parties in Parliament which have yet to suffer caucus drama this term - ACT and Te Pāti Māori.
The Greens are hardly alone in struggling with how to deal with problematic MPs. Gaurav Sharma and now Meka Whaitiri have given Labour headaches, while National saw their leader rolled less than two years ago in an embarrassing sequence of events.
What could be unique to the Greens is how they never fail to drag out the pain for as long as possible.
It took less than two weeks from Sharma's first troublesome column in the New Zealand Herald to his expulsion from Labour's caucus. After that, the issue largely disappeared from the headlines.
When Judith Collins misfired by kicking Simon Bridges out of caucus over a historic sexist comment, the party stripped her of her leadership the next morning. Within a week, they had a new leader and a united caucus.
Here, that "natural justice" process dreamed up by the Greens in response to the Francis Review prolonged the issue for far longer than necessary. One long-time Green Party figure recently quit over the party's inability to deal with these problems cleanly and quietly.
"The dogged persistence with which the Greens determinedly fight for their right to violently f**k themselves in front of the electorate and make the country watch - it's just really embarrassing and it's just so distracting," he said.
The Kerekere saga grabbed headlines intermittently for more than a month, even with Kerekere herself remaining silent until Friday night. The Sharma saga, by comparison, was forgotten within a month and only lasted that long because Sharma himself continued to prosecute his case. Labour's process for Sharma is an example of how to minimise the damage, the former member said.
"That's the model that a political party has to use and what the Greens have done is what I'd expect from an NGO. You've got a bunch of members who want to feel like they're included in the political system but ultimately can't bring themselves to accept that requires, fundamentally, compromise," he said.
"That extends to both the macro-political - coalition negotiations, cooperation agreements and the concessions made in those - but also closer to home, in party structure and party process, you don't get to have the open and deliberative processes that you may expect in a less public forum when you're also trying to maintain the confidence of the electorate and demonstrate an ongoing ability to form part of the governing coalition."
It's part of the Green Party's ongoing identity crisis, heightened since it joined government in 2017 - to be a political party or an activist group? Should the perfect be the enemy of the good? There are still differing factions within the party's membership which disagree on this fundamental question about its path forward. While amending processes to be more politically convenient is a no-brainer from the perspective of one faction, doing so would violate the Green kaupapa in others' eyes.
While the (remaining) members of the caucus may be united for now and the Kerekere drama can finally disappear from the headlines, these issues will keep cropping up in awkward and public ways until the party's base identity is permanently settled.
