Q+A: Russel Norman interviewed by Katie Bradford

Q + A
Episode 36
RUSSEL NORMAN
Interviewed by KATIE BRADFORD

KATIE Welcome, Russel. You’re speaking of sports. Not being a big fan there, how does it feel to be an Australian in New Zealand today, though?

RUSSEL Well, it’s… I didn’t actually see the game, but by all accounts, it was great. I did quite like that guy Pocock – you know, he was that Australian rugby player, right, and he said that rugby is—you know, he obviously loves rugby, but there’s some other bigger issues as well, like climate change and all of that. So, you know, it’s about saying Rugby’s important for lots of people, which is fair enough, but a lot of other things are important too.

KATIE It may be the one time you’ll actually talk about sports, then.

RUSSEL Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

KATIE How did it feel leaving Parliament on Friday? How did it feel to say goodbye?

RUSSEL It felt good. I mean, I felt like I’ve made a contribution. I set out to achieve a lot of things, and I achieved a lot of them. Not everything, but certainly, in terms of building the Green Party to be the third largest party in New Zealand politics and the idea that sustainability is really important for the political discourse, I felt like we’ve achieved that.

KATIE What’s the biggest thing you didn’t achieve, then? Is it failing to get into Government?

RUSSEL Yeah. I mean, we were always clear we wanted to be in Government. Not under any terms. I mean, I don’t think there’s any point being in Government just to implement someone else’s agenda. You want to be there to do your own thing. But from outside Government, nonetheless, if you compare what the Greens achieved compared to, say, the current Government’s support parties, we achieved far more than any of them achieved, and we did that without ever being ministers. So for me, it’s all about what you achieve, rather than being a minister and all that.

KATIE Well, the Greens, at the last election, though, got 11%. Your target was 15%. How disappointing was that? And how much of a factor was that in your decision to quit?

RUSSEL Well, I mean, in the context of that crazy election, maintaining and slightly increasing our vote to 250,000 and holding about 11% -- I was pretty happy with that in that context – obviously we wanted more. But, really, that wasn’t really a factor in why I decided to leave. If we had been in Government, obviously it would have been different. But after nine years as co-leader, and when I started, we were just over 5%; when I left we had two elections at 11%, so I felt like the idea of sustainability, that we should live in a sustainable way on planet Earth for ourselves and our kids, that idea is now firmly ensconced within the political framework of New Zealand, so that’s important to me.

KATIE Do you blame Labour for that, in the sense that one, they didn’t agree to go into a formal agreement with you like you would have liked? Their internal problems were obviously very public, and they struggled. Are they partly to blame?

RUSSEL Well, I mean, we could have got more. I mean, yes, they got a lower result than they wanted, but we could have got a higher result, so I don’t blame them. Clearly they had their own problems, no question about it, and that was all pretty public, as you say. But at the end of the day, I don’t blame other people.

KATIE Do you think, though, that that issue of Labour not willing to go into coalition with the Greens – there’s obviously been problems in the past with that – do you think there will ever be a point that Labour will actually say, ‘Yes, we will go into Government with the Greens’ or are they always going to go with New Zealand First as their first choice?

RUSSEL There probably is. I think as MMP evolves, I mean, you get… Some of those old Labour MPs, they always felt uncomfortable about the existence of the Greens – you now, they’re just a nuisance, right? Whereas I think a lot of the Labour MPs that have come into it through MMP – they just accept that we’re a big part of the furniture, and so they’re much more comfortable working with us, so I think it’s as the system evolves.

KATIE On the flip side, though, should the Greens be looking more towards working with National? I know there’s been a lot of internal debate about that. Why not say, ‘Actually, well, let’s keep our options open’?

RUSSEL It’s funny – I was looking at some of the media coverage the day I got elected co-leader back in 2006, and all the media coverage was ‘Norman opens the door to National’, right, and all that was was that I said, ‘Look, we will work with National if we have common ground.’ And that’s exactly what we did. The programmes we delivered were very very large – a $320 million home-insulation scheme; the cycleways. The urban cycle network that’s now emerging is also, really, a function of that work we did on the cycleways. So I really do look at results. I mean, I know that in political world, people often look at who’s the minister and whatever. I really am interested in what are the outcomes. So electrification of the Auckland rail network – by getting Labour committed to that before the 2008 election, we locked in the electrification process so that National, when they became the Government, couldn’t get out of it. And that’s the only reason we’ve now got electric trains. We will then… The next step is to get the city rail link in place. We will achieve that as well. And we do that not just by working in Parliament, but by reaching out to the community and running campaigns, cos I’m a great believer of campaigning. And so I think that campaigning really makes a difference.

KATIE Should the Greens, then, though, move towards being a solely environmental party? Again, there’s a lot of talk about the direction the party’s heading in. Will you attract more votes by doing that?

RUSSEL I don’t think so. You’ve just got no choice when you’re in Parliament. You have to have an opinion about everything. You’ve got to vote on everything – you don’t really have the option – so you have no choice about where you want to put your stake in the ground on the whole range of issues, not just environmental ones. And so from my point of view, poverty and inequality – how can you not take a stand on those issues? And we did, and I’m proud we did.

KATIE Do you think you then miss out on a section of voters who think the Greens are too scary?

RUSSEL I don’t think so. I think you also open the doors to a whole bunch of other people, so it’s swings and roundabouts. In my view, what we’ve gotta do is decide who you are, what you believe in and speak out for it. Because, you know, ideas are powerful. If you can put out an idea and win people to your ideas, they’re very powerful. I mean, think about this nuclear ship visit that’s currently on the agenda. John Key would love to have a nuclear-powered ship in Auckland. He would. We all know that. The United States Government would love to have a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed ship in Auckland. Why can’t they? Because a whole bunch of activists and campaigners campaigned for nuclear-free New Zealand and won the people of New Zealand to the idea, and now John Key cannot bring a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed ship to New Zealand. Barack Obama cannot do it. Why? Because of people power; because people were one to the ideas. So ideas win, and they’re very very powerful. They change societies.

KATIE Do you think if that ship comes we’re going to see protests, nuclear-powered or not?

RUSSEL I think if there’s no clear indication that it is not nuclear-powered and it’s not nuclear-armed, then there will be a significant protest, obviously. But if they bring a ship to New Zealand which everybody knows is not nuclear-powered and not nuclear-armed, it’s a huge victory for ordinary New Zealanders and for the nuclear-free movement, which… Remember when they started all this and the United States said, ‘If you do that, we’ll never touch you; we’ll never have anything to do with you. You’ll be ostracised in the whole world.’ Well, that hasn’t happened. People of New Zealand and the activists who led that campaign – they won an idea, they stood up for it, and we have really been successful about standing up for nuclear-free, and it’s something to be proud of.

KATIE Do you think you will be able to have more of a voice outside Parliament in some ways than you did; you’ll have a bit more freedom?

RUSSEL Yeah, a bit more freedom. There is that. Greenpeace, you know, the great thing about Greenpeace is it’s the world’s leading campaigning environmental organisation. We’re running some global environmental campaigns out of Auckland right now. So the Sustainable Tuna campaign – running that campaign is based out of Auckland, even though it’s a global campaign. The campaign where we… Shell drilling in the arctic – part of that campaign was run out of Auckland. So we were able to stop Shell drilling in the arctic. And for me, it’s all about changing the nature of the way we think about our relationship with the natural world. Is the natural world just this vast resource which we can exploit for our own purpose, or are we part of the world, and it is our only home, and we need to look after it? And we need to make the transition, in my opinion. We need to make the transition as a society from seeing nature as this endless resource to be exploited to seeing us in a sustainable relationship as part of nature, as part of the Earth that is our only home. And Greenpeace is able to lead on those campaigns. And at times it means you can do unpopular things because you’re trying to win people to an idea that they don’t necessarily accept yet.

KATIE Are we going to see you climbing, for instance, climbing outside Parliament, taking part in some of those stunts?

RUSSEL I think the Parliament stunt’s been done a bit too recently. You don’t want to do the same thing over and over. But, I mean, direct action is really important. That idea – I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie, How To Change the World, which is all about the early history of Greenpeace – those people decided that they would put their bodies on the line to save the whales and all the rest of it. And that’s about making a statement about something that’s important. It’s about impeding something that’s bad, but it’s also about promoting a message about how we can live sustainably on the planet. And so, yeah, as my role as executive director of Greenpeace New Zealand, I’ll be part of that as well.

KATIE And what’s your advice to James Shaw? What do you want him to see? What do you want him to do with the Party?

RUSSEL My view is you’ve just got to decide what’s right and stick to it. And try to then figure out how you communicate it. So you’ve got to look at yourself and say, ‘What is the right thing to do? What are the ideas that we want to win people to? Because they’re important ideas.’ They might take a long time to get there, but how do you win people to those ideas, particularly around sustainability and living sustainably? And then figure out how to communicate it. And so don’t compromise on the fundamental values, because that’s why the Green Party is so powerful – it’s not just our numbers, which have grown very significantly, but it’s also the power of our ideas.

KATIE Do you expect to see a new Green Party?

RUSSEL You mean…?

KATIE A changed Green Party? Will their direction change?

RUSSEL I’m sure it will evolve and change, no question about it, but I don’t think it will be radically different.

KATIE And just lastly, speaking of those stunts, what do you think you will be out there doing? Will we see you outside a whaling ship?

RUSSEL (LAUGHS) We’ll keep it close to our chest for the moment. Yep. But we’re in the middle of the planning process, so we’re doing the tuna campaign internationally, and we’re doing stuff around deep-sea oil drilling, and then we’ve got to look at the other kinds of campaigns we want to run into next year. And obviously one of the options we’ve got to look at is what is happening with freshwater in New Zealand, which is a huge issue and an environmental issue. So, yeah, we’re still looking at it.

KATIE Great. Thank you for your time.

RUSSEL Pleasure.

ENDS

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