Greg Byrnes Unfiltered.
On Community, Climate, and The Green Party.

ISSUE 8 / ENVIRONMENT / POLITICS

I’ve interviewed a lot of politicians and politician-hopefuls, but no one makes you feel like you’re catching up with an old mate quite like Greg Byrnes. Part unfiltered uncle at Christmas, part wise socialist. Though, as he admits, not an erudite socialist. He’s a leftist born of lived experience, not from reading Marx, distinguishing him from many of his Alliance comrades. 

Greg is a pretty hard man to miss around the city. On the back of his push bike is a placard reading war sucks. His denim jacket is adorned in pins and patches of various movements he supports, and he’s still using his trusty iPod Shuffle with wired headphones. You might even see him riding around on his 1970 Norton Commando as a member of the The Sydenham Socialist & Motorcycle Enthusiast Society, which he helped found.

You might also remember him for his time as an Environment Canterbury councillor, which was not without its media coverage. He was unapologetic in his fight to protect freshwater and in calling out his colleagues, at one point declaring “I wouldn’t piss on him [Councillor Joe Davies] if he was on fire.” He was labeled as anti-farmer, told he wasn’t a team player, but was possibly one of the most honest environmentalists to sit on that regional council.

Running for the Christchurch Central seat in the 2026 General Election under The Alliance, Greg is back on the ballot in the city he loves, because he feels like there is still something worth fighting for. 

After a hard, and often violent, upbringing in a poor household in Eastern Christchurch, Greg married into a politically active family. His politics came from the streets, from protest, and from watching others get hurt. 

Part of why he’s running for the Christchurch Central electorate is about family, “it’s the smallest thing in the world, but my granddaughter, great granddaughter would be able to say, my grandfather, great grandfather stood in the same area as [former PM] Norman Kirk.”

It’s a surprisingly tender sentiment from a man whose public image is otherwise built on bluntness. He doesn’t have grandiose plans for being a Member of Parliament. He wants the possibility of leaving behind a small, tangible piece of political history for those around him in a city whose political memory feels, at times, short. For Greg, Norman Kirk represents a very different version of the Left in Aotearoa, and standing in the place he once did means something, even if possibly only symbolically. 

Peace is another big part of his story. He recounted getting arrested for protesting the Iraq war. He would demonstrate by Cathedral Square’s Chalice sculpture nearly weekly. 

“Fucking young people suffer. Like everyone suffers, but young people suffer the wars.” It’s not a sophisticated anti-war argument nor a particularly coherent statement on international relations. Rather, he simply refuses to accept the distance between those making decisions and the people living with the consequences. It informs his staunch pro-Palestinian position and his views on the militarisation of the aerospace industry, which he has publicly protested against. It makes the placard on his bike a continuation of a political practice he has carried with him across decades.

“I’d much rather be that guy, silly old Greg Byrnes or whatever. I’d rather be seen as a little eccentric by having that on my bike. And I think a lot of that was sitting at the Chalice with Brian—you know we’d get these American tourists ‘well what if you knew your neighbour had a gun and they would kill your family!’ Or you’d get idiot New Zealanders ‘they’re all fucking towelheads,’ and it’s appalling.”

In September, he attended a multi-party panel on disarmament at UC where he confidently reiterated his anti-military industrial complex position. As he says time and time again, “people may change but values don’t.”

He is similarly unapologetic when it comes to the environment. “I’m the tree-hugger,” he tells me—I could tell from the way he said it that he’s surely been called far worse. 

Greg has a rich background in environmental management, having worked in planning across several councils in Waitaha as well as being the former GM of Tūhaitara Coastal Park—all before serving a term as an ECan councillor. He is also the Alliance’s environment spokesperson, and not two days prior they had released their full policy on environment and climate.

One of his areas of expertise, and a focus for The Alliance’s policy, is freshwater. The party is committing to strengthening regulations on water pollution, in part by giving the Environmental Protection Agency policing power, and holding polluters to account for contamination they cause, including the cost of ecological remediation.

For Greg, his passion to protect our waterways from nitrates and run-off predates his tenure in The Alliance. During his time as an ECan councillor, he was endlessly enraged by the presence of daily industry and irrigation scheme lobbyists in council meetings. “I’m not anti-farmer. What I'm anti is the myth that extracting water, fucking up our environment, our fresh water, and then taking the milk to a factory to dry it into powder and sending it overseas to feed the world. That's just the biggest crock of shit.”

For a long time he has believed there needs to be a shift in the methods of agriculture in Canterbury and that polluters must pay for their damages.

While his stance on freshwater was clear, getting an answer on oil and gas exploration, however, was less straightforward. In 2018 the Labour government passed a ban on all new licenses for offshore oil and gas exploration as part of the country’s transition to net zero—a decision that was repealed in 2025 by the National-led coalition. In the context of The Alliance’s just transition policy, where extractive and carbon-intensive industries would be brought into public ownership allowing the redeployment of the workforce, it isn’t clear whether the ban would be reintroduced. This is a tension in The Alliance’s policy platform, balancing domestic production and energy security while investing in a renewable future.

A few yeses, noes, and it depends later I was able to get a comment: The Alliance would support a ban on new offshore oil and gas. Greg agreed that the way permits were issued was incompatible with a just transition, as they are setting up exploration for decades to come. The idea of any oil and gas permits being granted to foreign companies, however, was a far clearer rejection, “New Zealand’s resources should benefit our communities, not foreign investors.” He was clear that the public should own all parts of the energy sector. 

This is where I think Greg’s environmentalism becomes recognisably more socialist. He doesn’t see Canterbury’s nitrate crisis or climate change as isolated issues which can be addressed with tighter regulation and better technology alone. He sees them as another expression of a political economy that demands the working people of society to absorb the consequences while powerful interests reap the benefits.

Other key facets of the party’s environmental policy include entrenching the right to repair to encourage a circular economy, replacing the ETS with a carbon tax and forcing polluters to pay for their damages, and banning mining on conservation land.

Greg’s commitment to his value system in his politics, on the one hand, informs his alignment with The Alliance. It also, perhaps, helps us understand part of his complicated relationship with the Green Party. Greg Byrnes is perhaps the type of candidate the Green Party would need to win over the low-income and working class electorate without abandoning their base of middle class environmentalists.  So where does he stand on the only other party offering anything close to a left-wing programme? 

At a central city candidate panel the week prior, Greg shared common ground with his friends over in the Green Party, citing their similarities on tax policy, and even evoked the good old days when the Greens were a founding member of the Alliance. When speaking to the parties’ differences, however, he said “our only real difference is we don’t believe in identity politics.” 

It was a point I questioned him on: what are the identity politics in the Green Party? It brings him to one of his biggest grievances of the Left. “Its always been divide and conquer.” 

The Green’s focus on identity, he argues, is a position they were forced into by the rightward shift of the Labour Party, pushing the Greens into the fringes of politics. Greg left the Green Party last year. Despite loving the people, he felt disillusioned with the party’s culture—an environmentalist with skepticisms of the country’s only environmentalist party.

“I had a person who’s pretty high up in the Greens come around to my house she asked me ‘why are you leaving?’ And I said, ‘look I’ve got to be really honest. I don’t see myself represented in the Party anymore.’ And her response was, other than, well, tell me about it, was yes, we have a problem with cis-males.”

He made clear that cis-males are not at threat of underrepresentation in politics, nor does he feel that his identity is under attack. Greg says he stands by “values-based”, as opposed to identity-based political alignment. He suggested that political projects that emphasise a focus on identity are not without their place, but that they lack the breadth needed to realise system-wide change.

Though, in a misunderstanding worthy of a TV sit-com, Greg erroneously heard this at first as “Sith”-male, confusedly thinking they were making a Star Wars reference. “This is how dumb I am. I’m a huge sci-fi fan and I was sitting there thinking they have a problem with Sith-males? Am I seen as like a baddie?” 

I asked him if The Alliance was an example of the opposite, that there was a marked lack of diversity in their ranks. “You’re absolutely right,” he told me. With such a small membership base and few electorates being contested, its hard to build a diverse caucus, he argues. He said he would love more young people from diverse backgrounds in the party. It’s why, he says, he doesn’t want to be high on the party’s list, “you don’t need another person that looks like me.” 

There is a contradiction in Greg’s position. He is critical of the Greens for what he sees as an overemphasis on identity, while acknowledging that The Alliance lacks the diversity that the identity politics seeks to amend.   For him, the Left should be broad enough to contain different identities, but united by something beyond them. The difficulty, of course, is deciding what that shared political horizon should look like—and who gets to define it. 

That is the question that has followed him from his harsh upbringing, across protests, through ECan’s chambers, and to The Alliance. Greg is a man with a million stories, no facet of his life can be easily distilled for print. While we might not see him in the House of Representatives any time soon, we will surely see him around the streets of the city he loves.