Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Don't forget a Chippy-led Government comes with Green baggage

You know what that Labour and Green Party unity news conference at Waitangi today looked like to me? It looked like desperation.

Parties don’t generally get other parties to stand next to them and hold their hands in an election year just to convince people to vote for them.

Now, having said that, it’s obviously not the first time we’ve seen something similar from Labour and the Greens. You’ll remember that before the 2017 election, Grant Robertson and James Shaw did a similar-ish thing.

They released their Budget Responsibility Rules to try to convince us they could be trusted with the Government’s finances. That was an act of desperation, because they’d been battered by Steven Joyce’s 'fiscal hole' allegations for so long they had to do something.

And just like in 2017, this is an act of desperation, because Chippy knows his biggest problem this time around -trying to get into Government - is convincing voters that his coalition mates are not just a bunch of nut jobs, but can actually be trusted to run the country together.

Which is why he left the Māori Party out of that unity press conference - because that party is chaos on stilts.

The trouble for Chippy, though, is that the Greens aren’t exactly the picture of internal discipline, are they? What with Golriz the thief, Bussy the awkward parent, Darleen the questionable employer, the spate of staff resignations -and that’s not even mentioning the electorally toxic plans to tax us all into poverty.

Chippy is off the mark if he thinks this is going to solve things for him, because the truth is his only realistic path to Government this year is with Winston Peters. Winston has said he’s not going to go with Chippy, but that is still Chippy’s only way back into Government.

And that’s where Chippy should be putting his energy - schmoozing Winston until Winston changes his mind, because Winston changing his mind is not unheard of.

But doing a news conference with the Greens seems not only like a waste of time, but actually an unfortunate reminder to us all that a Chippy-led Government comes with Green-coloured baggage.

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