National’s environmental focus
From a political perspective, it makes sense. Something that’s been brought up a lot recently is that while the Greens are an environmental party, they are also socialist, and that can disillusion voters.
But can National really hope to gain votes here?
I mean, as much as environmentalist voters might not want socialism with environment, if National is the alternative, what environmentalist is going to vote for the party that spent the past few weeks defending the oil industry?
If National wanted to be smart about going for the environment while hurting the left, they would help the creation of an environment-only party.
That would see a huge chunk of the Green’s vote go to the environment-only party, while giving National a proper coalition partner, something they don’t currently have.
Still, these are just my thoughts. Things could very well go quite differently.