RODNEY HIDE: I asked AI to find Chlöe Swarbrick's worldview

I previously asked my AI research assistant to dig out Christopher Luxon's worldview. It found a man who keeps his faith in one room and his management manual in another, and calls the result "not ideological".

So I gave AI the same job on Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick. Read her maiden speech, her columns, her interviews. Work out what she believes about truth, human nature, purpose, government and markets. Tell me where it comes from. Quote her exactly. Keep what she said separate from what you think it means.

Here's what it wrote:

Yup. Critical Theorist

Chlöe Swarbrick is unusual among politicians: she has named her own philosophy. She studied philosophy and law at the University of Auckland, and in 2017 she told the Herald: "I'm particularly interested in critical theory which is looking at the structures of society, figuring out if they're unjust and seeking to recalibrate them." She studied law, she said, because "if I was going to critique the systems in society it was necessary to properly understand them."

Almost everything she says follows from that. Her maiden speech in November 2017 asked people to "look critically at the reality around you… ask yourself if these systems are just and fair. If they're not, who profits from unfairness, and who pays the price for injustice?"

In her view, systems explain behaviour, not people. "Choice, and its sibling individual responsibility, are scapegoats for systemic political action," she wrote in 2018. And because systems are made, they can be remade: "This system wasn't divined by the gods… They're man-made, as is the system that underpins them. That means we have every ability to change the system."

Her economics has grown more material over time. In 2018 business was "privatising profit and socialising cost." By this month she was saying: "Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism." She borrows Adam Smith against monopolies and asks whether her opponents are "capitalists or… feudalists?" But her programme is a wealth tax, public ownership and a state-owned supermarket.

Her drug policy looks like the exception, but it isn't. She doesn't argue for cannabis reform on grounds of liberty or self-ownership. She argues from harm reduction and evidence, and wants "legal regulation to enable intervention." It's the same structural, public-health logic as her economics.

There are tensions. She dismisses opponents' views as "dogmatic moral judgment" that is "simply not grounded in evidence", yet her own starting point, that things are "not fair", is a moral judgment too. Ordinary people's choices are put down to the system, but the rich and corporations are held fully responsible for theirs. And the Green Charter's promise that decisions be made "by those affected" sits uneasily with central taxes and state ownership.

I found no statement from her on religion, and she names no thinkers other than her law lecturer Khylee Quince. Her worldview is secular: justice is to be won in history, through politics. As she put it in her maiden speech, "Politics is water."

I didn’t understand “politics is water” so I asked for the full context:

"If I can accomplish one thing during my time here, if I can change one thing, I want to change people's awareness of what politics really is, because if we can change that, everything else can change. I want to start that work here, today, by asking people to begin to look critically at the reality around you: look at our culture and our society and our economy and ask yourself if these systems are just and fair. If they're not, who profits from unfairness, and who pays the price for injustice? Because politics is not me standing here giving this speech. Politics is all around you. Politics is water. Politics lives in our relationships, in our conversations, in what we believe and what we're willing to fight for. Mr Speaker, I stand here on the shoulders of giants – like Green pioneers Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald – and I'm here to fight, both from my privileged position inside these walls, and out protesting on the streets with the people I'm proud to represent, until nobody ever needs to fight again."

For Chlöe, politics is the hidden system all around you, and once you take the red pill and "look critically", you see the unjust structures everywhere. It's critical theory in one line: nothing is neutral, everything is power.

Unlike Luxon, she knows what she believes and says so. That makes her easier to argue with, and more dangerous. For her, there's no human nature to respect, only systems to redesign. And the people redesigning them are always people like her.  These are the modern day Philosopher Kings with the insight to see the system for what it really is.

Postscript

I asked AI to explain the two dots over the O:

The two dots are a diaeresis. In English they sit on the second of two vowels to show it is sounded separately, as in Zoë, Noël and naïve. So "Chloë" tells you to say "Klo-ee". Put the dots over the "o" as Chlöe does and they stop doing that job and look like a German umlaut, which changes the sound of the letter itself, as in Köln. Read that way, "Chlöe" comes out closer to "Klerr-ee". Ms Swarbrick told Vice in 2017 that she put the dots over the "o" as a child learning to write, and they have stayed there ever since.

PPS The day I finished this, she announced the Greens would regulate AI. "Nothing about this technology is inevitable… This is exactly why Government is supposed to exist." My AI could have written her press release.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader