My two cents

The longer the Darleen thing drags out, the worse it'll be for the polls. Like, now the scandal has already been stretched out by another couple of weeks, and that's following the independent legal report, which took longer than the coalition negotiations. Kiwis are taking in this turmoil inside the Green party and wondering if they can trust a party that has a former member taking them to court. Everyone thinks that they're a bit smug and up themselves, so this suggests that there's a lot of hot air, and that people are getting high on the fumes of self-righteousness as well as being smug. - It's not just Act that is having growing pains as those two parties are becoming something that's never existed in NZ before: major-minor parties that can routinely count on more than 10% of the vote and are regularly winning electorate seats as well.

Winston's done well, but I don't think he's ever captured more than 10% of the vote since 1996 ... sorry, 2002 as well: checked on Wikipedia.

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My view is that I reckon firing her should've been an executive decision. With unanimous caucus support, it was pointless to throw it out to the membership regarding enacting the Electoral Integrity Amendment Act after Ms. Tana had resigned from the Green party. (correction 31.08.2024: I thought she'd resigned, but I saw in Luke Malpass's column today that she was expelled from the party). Also, are they 'Green members' or 'Greens members' -- chuckling as an editor! Pretty sure it's 'Green members' because they're not the greens party. That sounds like a golfer's rights party.

She resigned from the Greens and was a list MP: it's pretty open-and-shut. - Chloe's acting cautiously to avoid a scandal in the Māori wing of the Greens: to hazard a guess, Darleen's their candidate; so, with Efeso dead and Darleen banished, who is going to speak for them? Hence that fairly soft interview with Moana. As I'm not a member, it's easy for me to say what they should do. There's a lot of absentee MPs in the Green caucus as well, so it's not just Te Pāti Māori that seldom have all the MPs present for Question Time.

Now, though, it looks like they're buying Darleen more time to shame them into letting her stay on. It's a bit of shock theatre, given that today wasn't the actual hearing, yet it still resulted in a press conference yesterday and headlines today.

Perhaps this could become like another Alliance moment where all the various factions split off... I keep saying that because I think there's a real appetite for those ideas. I'd rather have a coalition of 5 parties in a 10-party democracy.