Chlöe Swarbrick opens up on life, family, politics, Sir Ian Taylor and wealth taxes, abuse and why she’s not in Parliament forever

Chlöe Swarbrick has today been confirmed as the new Greens co-leader. In this interview, resurfaced from last year, she sits down for lunch with Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie to discuss life, family, Sir Ian Taylor and
wealth taxes, the ‘time-warp’ of Parliament – and why she’s not in politics forever.

Blood is much thicker than radio talkback lines. Chlöe Swarbrick’s father – a key figure who instilled in her the power of argument and debate – is, she says, right-leaning but these political ideologies take a backseat if his daughter is in the firing line.

She remembers being at the centre of vitriol after attending a protest soon after being elected to Parliament.

“My dad, who listens to Newstalk ZB – or used to listen to ZB – called me, freaking out: ‘they’re going at you on talkback radio’.

“I was like, ‘I think this is it forever now, dad, as long as I’m doing this gig. I’m a Green, I’m young, I’m a woman, I’m gay. I’ve got all the things – whichever part of the platter of stuff you want’.”

I return to her throwaway comment a few minutes later. Why does her dad no longer listen to ZB?

She laughs: “He finds it really hard to hear me being slagged off all the time.”

She quickly points out that she’s never turned down an invitation to appear with Mike Hosking on ZB’s Breakfast show. “He did hang up on me during the debate on the cannabis referendum. He told me something along the lines of he was right, I was wrong, and they were going to win. Anyway, it is what it is, he’s in control – that’s his prerogative.”

The loyalty of Swarbrick’s father Paul – who works in the finance industry – extends both ways, and beyond.

Before we sit down for lunch at Auckland city eatery Ima – “I’ve had a lot of good times here” – Swarbrick warned she would be reluctant to go into too many details of her family life.

“Part of the reason that I’ve always been a little bit reticent to talk about my family is much in line with that stuff we’ve been talking about – around politics being individualised and the stories and concepts that politicians create for themselves,” she says. “I don’t want my family or my partner in the firing line.”

She is happy to say a few words about her partner, strategic communications expert and former Greens director of communications Nadine Walker, to whom it was revealed she was engaged in 2020.

“I can tell you that I am very, very lucky to have somebody who puts up with me. She’s great. She’s been really fundamental to helping me navigate, and personally build a robust community that is supporting me to do the stuff that I do publicly.”

The pair have discussed children – Swarbrick describes the joy she has whenever she’s around her young niece and baby nephew – “but I don’t have anything to announce”, she laughs, again.

“When I think about the idea of having a family of my own … it’s a little bit harder for us to do it than you know, your average straight couple. I mean, obviously we have the privilege of kind of the resources that we do. But there’s a few more things to work through.”

Swarbrick takes charge of the menu at lunch, quickly settling on the middle eastern vegetarian platter for two: falafel, hummus, labneh, salad, pickles, olives, Lebanese cauliflower and spanakopita with pita.

She also orders halloumi cheese, and we have a coffee each. Our small table is heaving.

Swarbrick is a polarising character, as evidenced by those talkback callers. She told Bob Harvey, writing for Metro magazine, that she had been verbally attacked in the street in the last six months. A man had called her a communist and a “controller of everything”.

“It was deeply unsettling. I was pretty shaken up by the experience,” she told Harvey.

Some even in her own party have been wound up by her. Former Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere called her a “crybaby” in a text message mistakenly sent to colleagues as Swarbrick spoke in Parliament over her Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill, which failed at its first reading in April.

“I’ve been called far worse,” Swarbrick says, as we pick over lunch.

She’s fast on her feet and gives as good as she gets. “OK, boomer,” she famously said as National MP Todd Muller interrupted her during a climate change speech in Parliament in 2019. The throwaway line was picked up by world media and went viral.

“I was giving a speech that I thought was pretty important … Todd Muller was heckling me so I responded to him with something my little brother had said to me, which I hadn’t quite recognised the significance of.

“Two days later I was in a meeting and Fox News was trying to call me. It was a very odd situation. I never meant to offend anyone with it – it still does come back to me sometimes.”

She seems to keep party officials on their toes. She texted in the week before our lunch: “Generally okay to talk about pretty much whatever… but media team probably keen to know what kind of risks I present, ha ha.”

I reply: “Seek forgiveness later I say”.

Swarbrick turns 29 tomorrow. She is, she says, “at the tail end of the millennial generation”.

Her rise in politics after studying law and philosophy and dabbling in media – 95bFM – has been, of course, swift.

From her sit-up-take-notice Auckland mayoral campaign in 2016 – 29,098 votes – to swooping into Parliament at the general election a year later, at number seven on the Greens list. At 23, she was the youngest MP to enter Parliament since Marilyn Waring at the same age in 1975.

Three years later, in 2020, she confounded the polls, pundits and then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern by winning the Auckland Central seat for the Greens. Almost everyone was picking a tight Labour-National battle.

Swarbrick is also sometimes ahead of her two Greens co-leaders, James Shaw and Marama Davidson, in the most-preferred Prime Minister polls – all of which leads to her being considered one of left-wing politics’ greatest hopes.

She’ll have none of that though. She detests the “celebritisation” of politicians and she views the idea of politics as a career – rather than a vehicle for change – as narcissistic. She doesn’t see herself in this game forever.

“Do you want to prioritise career progression or change? When you prioritise one of those two things, you inherently de-prioritise the other.

“I see that in play … I came in with a class of MPs across the aisle who now are on the frontbench of both Labour and National – top 10 ministers and [those] hoping to be ministers.

“I’ve seen this with them and in talking to them behind the scenes. There are many times when I’m trying to negotiate things, it’s just earnest old me – for example, drug policy or something – and, you think, to the detriment of your own career.”

She says it was one of the reasons she didn’t join a large party.

“There is a theory of change inside those larger parties, where you sit down, shut up, wait 10 years to have an opinion.

“My problem with that is that in 10 years you might not know what your opinion is anymore because you’ve conformed so much.”

She says many people “wear the mask so long that it is your face”.

“I find that a deeply narcissistic and selfish way to navigate through politics, I don’t think politics should be a career unto itself. I think that it should be a vehicle for change.”

She says she’s committed herself to another three years in politics, aiming to retain the Auckland Central seat (she is also number three on the Greens list). Beyond that she can’t say what will happen.

“People conceptualise the notion of career politicians… which I find ridiculous because I have absolutely no intention of sticking this out for decades.”

She wants to give it everything while she’s there but also set up systems and succession processes to ensure there are others following her political footsteps.

Swarbrick was born in Auckland in 1994, a decade after Rogernomics, “in the wake of neoliberalism – unionising was never a normal thing for me, and neither was political organising”.

She has said in the past she was a “weird kid” – somewhat of a loner, into reading and then video games. She lived with her mother in the UK after her parents separated, and then with her father in Papua New Guinea briefly. She turned 7 there. Her grandmother moved to Papua New Guinea to help look after her and her younger sister Grace, before they returned to Auckland. She attended Royal Oak Intermediate and Epsom Girls’ Grammar.

She believes, compared with the 90s, that there is a far greater sense of politicisation – citing the school students’ strikes over climate change – and how politics impacts our daily lives.

She’s been outspoken about New Zealand needing major economic reform.

“I don’t think at this point that anything other than economic transformation is going to be enough. Beyond the immediate challenges that we’re facing, if you look at the chronology of our political and economic history in this country, we do have a relative economic transformation every 30 to 40 years.

“I just think far too many people are aware that the cracks are showing.

“I don’t know anybody who’s not just so utterly exhausted and overwhelmed right now and we’ve just been bombarded and confronted with so many things.

“There is, particularly among young people but also increasingly [other] folk who are saying something’s got to give — ‘I’ve been working so hard for my entire life and it feels like I’ve never been able to get ahead’.”

Swarbrick has been open about her own mental health journey and her battles with clinical depression. “There are good days and bad days,” she says.

“Anybody who’s experienced mental ill health – which data says is the majority of us at some point in our lives – will know that it’s not a linear journey.

“It’s those environmental factors, and what we’re doing to try and improve it. I’m in a much better place as I’ve got older and made some very intentional kind of movements in my life.

“I feel very lucky to have the community that I do. My friends are really important to me. I think that my sister’s babies are really important to me in terms of curiosity and a perspective on life that I wouldn’t have access to.”

Live music also helps keep her balanced; a lot of her friends are musicians. She can slip to a late-night gig once work is done. One of the reasons she got into politics in the first place was her frustration fuelled by the closure of the Kings Arms venue in Auckland.

Being in Auckland makes her grounded. She feels untethered in Wellington.

“Parliament is a time warp. Particularly the chamber, it’s like poverty doesn’t seem to exist there, climate change doesn’t seem to exist there.”

Swarbrick can’t fathom Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ and the Labour government’s recent bonfire of policies.

“What’s the point of all that power … to have a historical majority after the 2020 election and the capacity to deliver on this sensible transformational change that you apparently hold so deeply within the party, with the traditions of the Labour Party and Michael Joseph Savage hanging in the offices of many of those Labour ministers?

“I think that a lot of modern-day politics – or a lot of at least what I see both up close and obviously through the lens of the media – is that you have these u-turns or even sometimes policy announcements that seem to be driven by focus grouping and polling.

“When you’re chasing your tail in a way like that, where is the room for leadership and creating the mandate to do the right thing?”

This is partly why people are cynical about politicians, she says. “I think I saw that from a mile off and that’s why I joined the party that I did.”

She adds later about her approach to politics: “I just like the fight, man.”

She was puzzled and bemused by Sir Ian Taylor’s recent column in the NZ Herald, an open letter addressed to her over the Greens’ wealth tax plans.

Was it written, she asks, before the Greens’ wealth tax policy announcement, which was fronted by co-leader James Shaw (it was – but Taylor’s letter was about Swarbrick’s comments in a Herald news article the prior week).

She said she had read Taylor’s column four times and couldn’t make out his point.

“I’m not disputing that he’s worked hard but there’s also millions of New Zealanders who work really, really hard.

“But we’re kidding ourselves if we start from the premise that hard work equals wealth.”

What about the point that a higher tax take may de-stabilise the success and businesses of successful Kiwis – and therefore impact the jobs of thousands?

She says she’s well across the theory of trickledown economics.

“I just want to see those same opportunities afforded to everyone in this country because I think that actually there are geniuses who are in lower-income households who are not able to realise that potential because they just don’t have the economic means afforded to them.

“And even if they weren’t, you know, we don’t have an IQ test to go into Parliament.”

She says we shouldn’t be asking ourselves “whether people are deserving of basic human dignity”.

“I always go back to the human rights argument. I think it’s a really important one because we’re talking about the social contract and what it is to make up a country and what it is to design systems that avoid conflict.

“You have to look no further than the institutions that were created in the wake of some of humanity’s worst atrocities. Countries came together to agree on what we thought were basic human rights necessary to ensure a stable society – guaranteed rights to housing and food and water, and democratic participation and education.

“We are failing on a lot of those metrics as a country. We have stories about ourselves that are completely inconsistent. So yeah, I think it would be remiss of me not to pull that kind of stuff out.

“But I find it really wild that whenever I do I become such a bogeyman.”

Swarbrick is in no doubt her Auckland Central constituents are among many New Zealanders who are struggling.

“The past three years have been astronomically challenging. I’ve worked alongside people who’ve been slugging their guts out to survive, let alone thrive.”

With central city Auckland crime and poverty, she has been working closely with various agencies: police, business associations, and the City Mission.

“Part of the problem is that there’s a massive and very unhelpful conflation of a lot of parts.”

The police tell her, she says, that their major issue is “drunken disorderliness” from patrons spilling out of bars and clubs late at night. That’s a different issue from mental ill health and distress, which is different again to why people are involved in gangs, or why young people are involved in ramraids.

“It’s very unhelpful the way in which all of those issues have been bundled up.”

She believes Government support in this area – support services, housing – has been working. “But if we’re just focused on moving the problem along, particularly when we’re talking about antisocial behaviour or homelessness on the streets, that problem just pops up everywhere else.”

Swarbrick lives near Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown; they get on well, and have even walked together to work.

She was opposed to the sale of Auckland Airport shares and thinks the council budget process could have been handled better. But she also has sympathy with the mayor over the issue of councillors worrying about their own wards and re-election chances rather than taking a deeper view of what’s best for the overall city and region.

She is, she says, straight up with the mayor. “I’m going to be the same person in public and in private. I’m not here to play games or whatever.”

She says the framework of local government in New Zealand is broken. Councils have become the “whipping boy” for central Government.

“It’s had so many issues laid on it – its mandate expanded but hasn’t been given the ability to generate the resources necessary to meet that mandate.”

There are also many issues, she says, on the local body electoral process and voter turnout. “The fact that it’s privatised and contracted out to companies… their incentive is to make money. It’s not necessarily to have the levels of participation.”

The postal ballot system, she says, is detrimental to the likes of younger people and renters who live a more nomadic existence.

“Crazy stuff happens at local government but the stakes are high. People died in the flooding and the cyclone… it’s not a joke.”

She says history has rewritten her victory in Auckland Central in 2020 as an “inevitability”. But the polls had her a distant third in the lead-up, she was written off by all and sundry, including the Prime Minister.

She says it wasn’t her who won it. “It was the hundreds of volunteers who we mobilised on the ground to talk to people directly where they were, about the things they cared about.”

She is, she says, “very excited by the organising potential that we’ve grown”.

Within the motorway boundaries, 45,000 people live in Auckland Central. They’re virtually impossible to doorknock in high-rises; the Greens will target them with postcards again, but not in a conventional format. They’ll be personally handwritten, or drawn, and perhaps not as easy to discard. “We’ve got a lot of cool artists.”

She’s not done any local polling; for starters, it’s expensive.

“We can do all the polling in the world we want, but unless we’re reminding people not just to watch the polls, but that they are the polls, then we’re kind of missing the point anyway.”

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