page_title: Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand
section_title: Foundations
hierarchical_section_title: Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand / History / Foundations
caption_attribution_description: English: Jeanette Fitzsimons; former Green Party MP OTRS request pending
context_page_description: The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is a green, left-wing political party in New Zealand. Like many green parties around the world it has four organisational pillars: ecology, social responsibility, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence.
  The party's ideology combines environmentalism with left-wing, social democratic economic policies, including well-funded, locally controlled public services within the confines of a steady-state economy. Internationally, it is affiliated to the Global Greens.
  The Green Party has co-leaders: one male and one female. James Shaw has been the male co-leader since 2015, and Marama Davidson has been the party's female co-leader since 2018.
  It is the fourth largest political party in the House of Representatives, and has agreed to support the Sixth Labour Government. In the 2017 general election, the Green Party secured 6.3% of the party vote and returned eight MPs. This was down from 10.7% and 14 seats in the 2014 general election.
  The Green Party contests local government elections throughout New Zealand. In 2019, Aaron Hawkins was elected mayor of Dunedin. In Auckland it campaigns with the Labour Party under the City Vision banner.
context_section_description: The Green Party traces its origins to the Values Party, the world's first national-level environmentalist party. The Values Party originated in 1972 at Victoria University of Wellington. While it gained a measure of public support in several elections, the then first-past-the-post electoral system meant that the party did not win any seats in the House of Representatives. Some of the founding members of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, notably Jeanette Fitzsimons, Rod Donald and Mike Ward, had been active members of the Values Party at the outset of the Green movement in the 1970s.
  In May 1990, remnants of the Values Party merged with a number of other environmentalist organizations to form the modern Green Party. This sparked a resurgence of support, with the new group winning 6.85% of the vote (but no seats) in the 1990 election.
caption: Former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons
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