The First Green Party

Political Party Marks 40 Year Milestone

By Isaac Davison

3:00 PM Wednesday May 30, 2012

Green Party co-leaders Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons in 2005. Photo / File

The world's first green political party will this week mark the anniversary of a movement which altered New Zealand's political landscape 40 years ago.

On May 30, 1972, politics student and former journalist Tony Brunt held a meeting at the Victoria University Students' Union, where he railed against mindless economic growth and called for a party with values-based and environmentally conscious policies.

That evening, the Values Party was formed. Though green movements were beginning to spring up overseas, including in Australia, Values was the world's first green party to run at a national level.

On Friday, former Values members will gather to remember the world-leading creation of the party. The Values Party is also the subject of a new book by columnist and conservation advocate Claire Browning, Beyond Today: a values story.

Mr Brunt told the Herald that the party's members were quickly written off as "idealistic extremists" by the ruling National Party.

"A lot of what I said in 1972 seems really simplistic and naive in retrospect - talking about zero population growth, zero economic growth, technology control."

But he believed history had proved most of their environmental concerns right: "There's also the whiff about it, looking back, of backing the right horse, of getting on board modernity's biggest bandwagon when it was just the size of a skateboard," Mr Brunt said.

The party captured 5.3 per cent of the vote in its first general election in 1972, but gained no seats under the First Past the Post system.

Despite being at the heart of the anti-nuclear movement, homosexual law reform and the campaign for MMP, it never made it into the Beehive, and folded in the late 1980s.

Peter’s Comment

The party lived on in the Green Party and entered Parliament for the first time in 1999 led by Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald.

I was a National Party candidate when the Values Party was launched in 1972. Several years later I joined the Values Party for a short time.

Tony Brunt and later leader Reg Clough were sincere crusaders but they lacked a pragmatic enough approach to capture a controlling share of the electorate.

In 1972 the country was ticking along quite nicely, even with a tired government that had been in power for 12 years. The people were not ready for zero population growth and zero economic growth. How do you tell someone that they should not have a new house, another car or start a new business that would offer new jobs?

The answer to that is that you can’t tell that to the voters. They want something for their vote and they know that zero policies are just as outrageous as the Social Credit policies of the time. Both parties were bound to fail sooner or later.

For the last four years New Zealand has been in recession with population and economic activity barely growing. The Values Party advocated something far worse than that. They wanted a permanent recession with all indicators firmly on zero.