Beyond Today: a values story is the Green party’s story. On the Greens’ fortieth birthday, it says Values is a history of which the party should be very proud, and values are the new politics
We need the quants, and the poets, both. We need the activists and the Members of Parliament, the individuals, and the collectivists.
We need Green values. We need us all.
Let us begin.
So ends Beyond Today: a values story, to be launched at the Greens’ AGM on June 1, 2012.
In which the government invites anyone who can pay enough into our offshore marine environment. The Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill does not "protect and preserve" the environment. It states its price
TAG Oil is very excited. It wants to turn the East Coast of the North Island – “literally leaking oil and gas”!! – into the “Texas of the south”, hosting thousands of oil wells.
On December 30 I wrote a draft of this for myself. I was not going to post it. This changed my mind: The Joy of Quiet, published the same day in the New York Times
Today, 38 years too late, I grasped an important fact. I seem to be living on some sort of a different planet. I am here in body (more or less, depending) but somewhere else, in my soul.
All of the government’s signs are pointing the same way: relocating conservation and the Department of Conservation within the “natural resources” sector, the better to “streamline and simplify” its activities
Last year we learned that the Conservation Minister and the Energy and Resources Minister would both decide about giving access to conservation land for mining. One has an interest in the minerals beneath, the other in the land and the creatures who live there, on behalf of us: the public, the land holders.
In preference to weeping, I try to count conservation blessings, and plan my new career as a lobbyist
Although a National government has been returned, in a way Kiwis did “vote for Nature” as Forest & Bird's election campaign asked. The prospects for Nature in the next three years are bleak, but all is not lost. A battle or two might be won by lobbying.
The global green change needed is desperately urgent. Paradoxically, the fastest and best way to achieve it locally might be more tortoise than hare
The Greens have made a feature out of slow, but steady, organic growth.
Having entered Parliament in the Alliance, gained independence in 1999 with an electorate win in Coromandel, maintained (sometimes precariously) a core vote above the 5 percent threshold, the party has now elected two new co-leaders and sworn in a whole second generation of MPs.
In which I try explaining why the Greens are neither left nor right, why they never have been, and why that is important to their future and ours
The Greens will never be an environment party, and have never been a left-wing party. The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is neither left nor right because that is what their charter says, what their policy shows, and what the existential global challenge, that is their raison d’etre, requires.
The Greens’ vibe has changed, but have they lost grip on values with a small and large V? For all the strengths and wins of the 2011 election campaign, it also failed
My new theory of the Greens is recycled. The new thing is the old thing, really.
In 2011 we changed some things, and won some votes: not a world-changing number of votes, but a historic number, enough for some more Green growth.
As black waves wash in to the Mount today from Rena, and political gods laugh in the face of adversity, has the tide turned for our PM and risen for the Greens?
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer man at a better time.
Is this, finally, the hairline crack in the impregnable hull? - will the Rena oil spill be the thing that exposes what lies beneath Mr Key, and swamps whatever public appetite there was for his government's offshore oil policy, little enough at the best of times?
The fight over the different kinds of wealth on the “impoverished” Denniston plateau is about more than just Denniston. Chances are, it could finish in the Supreme Court
Last week the West Coast Environment Network, Forest & Bird, and others filed appeals against the resource consent granted three weeks earlier, to coal miner Bathurst Resources.
