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Leading into the November election, politics lecturer Bryce Edwards is hosting New Zealand politicians each Friday at Noon. Last Friday Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei took on politics students Niki Lomax and Finn O’Dwyer-Cunliffe to discuss getting kids out of poverty, getting adults their drugs, and why National won’t wear Green after the election.

Metiria Turei didn’t ever want to be a mainstream politician. She started in politics with the McGillicuddy Serious Party, a satirical party that advocated suffrage for trees (the difficulty was deciding whether native species should vote in the Maori electorate or not) and called for the voting age to be restricted to under 18s. However, an interest in matters of social justice was always there for Turei. She had an especially strong interest in advocacy for beneficiaries, the legalisation of cannabis, and the Tino Rangatiratanga movement.
 
Eventually it was her long-standing friendship with Sue Bradford and Nandor Tanczos that bought her into the Green mainstream. After completing law school in Auckland she took up work with Simpson Grierson (jealous much, law kids?). While she declared 1999 to be her “year of political silence” so she could establish her life and career in Auckland, it was also the year that her two good friends had entered parliament. They enticed her into the Greens to work on Maori policy, and the rest, as they say, is all a haze of smoke and bong water.
 
The Greens, and Turei in particular, strongly support the legalisation of cannabis in NZ, with Turei saying “there should be no criminal penalty at all for the adult use of cannabis… the law is cruel”. She expressed anger with Peter Dunne, that mad cool cat from United Future and associate Health Minister, for allowing un-regulated Kronic into NZ’s dairies in the first place: “They let the issue bubble along to a level of moral outrage which they could then use to bring in a ban, avoiding putting in place genuine regulations to make a genuine difference”.
 
It is of course not all about the drugs with the Greens. In fact, while they support legalising marijuana, it is not even on their radar in terms of their ambitions for the coming post-election negotiations. The Greens have laid out three major priorities for which they will push; raising one hundred thousand children out of poverty (yes, there are more than that many kids in NZ living below the poverty line), making our rivers swimmable again, and creating Green jobs. Turei was surprisingly astute about the economics of the Greens’ plans, not just for a Green MP, but indeed for any politician. Minor changes to working for families, and a small raise in the minimum wage is all that is required for their poverty plan to be effective, and the cost is minimal and partly offset by their revenue raising proposals.
 
It’s a refreshing change for the Greens. While they have always been successful compared to other third parties, they have never reached their polling potential of around ten percent of the vote. Turei and her cohort of new Green faces (the Greens have completely changed their caucus since they first entered parliament in 1999, without bloodshed or rancour) have sought to change the Greens’ public image of being visionary but impractical, instead coming up with common sense and realistic programmes that can be achieved under either a National or Labour lead government.
 
It is clear, however, that their preference is for a Labour-led government. Turei declared “No, we won’t go into a coalition with National… we could support Labour” on confidence and supply. However, it is the Greens’ intention to “work across the political spectrum to get stuff done”. It seems that experience has left the Greens wary of entering into any formal agreement with one of the big parties. Says Turei, “You’ve got to have real leverage” in a coalition, and “we are not going to take our support and credibility and give it to Labour or National”.
 
The day’s chat ended with some fun questions about euthanasia (she feels it’s very complicated), tea drinking (she likes it so much she may actually be tanninsed rather than Maori), and when offered a superpower, she chose flying.  Look out for Turei and the Greens in November come post-election bargaining time.