Green Party AGMs are dire affairs.
Very white – I mean blindingly so, they are stacked with ageing hippies, vicious identity politics fanatics and hip green entrepreneurs who see NZs clean green image as a marketing tool they can leverage to make their first million dollars ethically.
The one thing you can count on however is that they are all true believers in the climate crisis and they must MUST hold the Party to account for its pitiful results so far in Government.
Members over this weekends AGM in Dunedin need to start asking hard questions over the Party’s actions and the so called policy ‘wins’…
Leaders will use the AGM platform to remind members of big wins such as the Zero Carbon Bill, ETS reforms, the oil and gas ban, indexing benefits to wages, work in conservation and policies around preventing family and sexual violence.
1 – Why the hell are they still giving National their Parliamentary questions?
2 – How can Eugene Sage hold onto her job after allowing more water to be taken by China based on a dozen jobs?
3 – Carbon neutral by 2050 is an admission of defeat, not progress.
4 – The single use plastic bag ban was a joke, when is some thing meaningful coming?
5 – Letting agriculture off the hook for their pollution is not a win, it is another admission of defeat.
6 – When will there be an upper limit of cows set?
7 – The oil and gas ban is more virtue signalling in the future, what are the Greens doing to prepare NZ for the climate crisis happening NOW.
8 – Has Marama Davidson finished demanding white bros delete themselves online and has she finished championing the word ‘cunt’?
9 – Have they moved on from blaming all white people for the Christchurch terror attack?
Where the Greens can feel some level of pride is their work on domestic violence protections and time off to heal from domestic violence.
Everything else has been pretty pitiful.
As a Green Party voter, I fear their hard core middle class identity politics has made them toxic and alienating. Their inability to see outside of Twitter is a strategic blindspot and their 6% suggests they could easily slip beneath 5% as they always over poll and they have gone backwards in the last 3 elections.
The Greens need to stand strong on benefits increases, they need to demand something genuinely aspirational towards climate change (every roof in NZ with solar panels by 2030), and they need to hammer away on the economic gains for a regulated cannabis market.
By focusing on those 3 issues, they will manage to keep away from the alienating identity politics stuff and diminish the opportunity for backlash, they should steer clear of the hate speech issue because their online activists can’t be trusted to not turn it into ‘you support free speech so you are a sexist racist nazi’ narrative and all MPs need to be reminded to not wallow in the ‘people are mean to me online’ stuff as it starts looking like it’s all about them and not Green policy.
The Greens are in survival mode for this election, if all the amazing policy ‘wins’ were so amazing why haven’t they moved in the polls for 2 years and why are they still polling less than they actually gained on election night 2017???
Members need to start asking hard questions because they can’t blame the heteronormative white cis male patriarchy if they screw 2020 up and come under 5% – it will be their fault for being as alienating as the Auckland Pride Parade, no one else’s.
I hope they slip below 5% and take NZF with them. We would be far better off with an old style FPP election where it is just Labour and National head to head.
Oh yeah? Like the UK? Boris’s majority was reduced to 1 overnight. Will he make it to October or will he have to call a general election before then?
Meh. This could be the boost TOP and / or New Conservitives need. I’m not that unhappy with The Green Party’s secound stringer raplacing the first stringers. It’s that the ACT party’s replacement is rather, loony don’t you think? I’m mean have you checked out the fringey right wing Party’s? There like the bottom half of NZFirst party list.
FPP is only good if you dont like representative democracy.
We don’t have representative democracy now.
Winston says jump and Adern says how fucking high.
And then we have the greens who are certifiably insane.
Or the Conservative party which are God no knows fucking what, but if they even gain influence over the government we should be worried.
You will pardon me for thinking pure National or Labour is preferable. They both suck, but far less than the rest.
What a load of wishful waffle. After reading your waffle, I think the only certifiably insane person is the one who wrote it.
The Greens in power seem to hate/ignore the white middle class the most while not understanding, that is their support base!
The Greens are seeking an idealogical race war, that seems to be against who voted them in, while those they are wooing, have no to little interest in politics or vote for someone else who represents them better, because they generally notice that things go worse for them no matter what political party is in.
For example when you are poor and have no where to live you couldn’t care a fuck about the environment or having a fan in your kitchen and bathroom, you would be happy with a garage rather than a tent or be homeless on the street. So finding that more and more cheap housing has now been removed while having $500 p/w average rents for every house in NZ (when minimum wage is circa $600) because of all the upgrades required aint exactly giving anybody a better rental experience.
Greens lose two ways, fixated on changing a system that is only making things worse because their understanding comes from overseas paper studies and poor understanding of NZ poverty while not having anything to show for what people voted them in for, aka improving the environment.
In some instances the identity politics and move to their mythical ideas around race and desperation to be accepted into the mainstream business world is so entrenched that they go against their Green policy of reducing overseas foreign ownership, Maori sovereignty, buy NZ and environmental best practise and inexplicably allow more free water to Chinese business to be exported out of NZ and sold in plastic bottles!
Too many first world solutions to third world problems in NZ while ignoring the Green component to their parties base.
They are not bad people but the current Greens have gone down the wrong alley way and it’s not clear they even know or care about that.
People need to have the freedom to live their lives and raise their children as they see fit.
This should be obligatory watching to Greens, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BflQ39tgomE because under their new rental rules this family would not be allowed to live like this and be homeless instead. It would be illegal for anybody to allow them to live in a shed to help them out. The resource and building consents would never allow a cheap consent through but Pike river is fine because money talks and everything is now about process.
The family could not be self sufficient. It would have cost more to renovate the house to healthy standards than demolish it, but the family loved that house with all the memories. A house is more to people than a set of inflexible rules.
In modern times the family would be put into a one bedroom motel in the city without their animals and lifestyle while they wait for years to get a bigger state house, because some middle class way of living is created so that everyone has to be the same.
The overcrowding and mental issues of waiting for their WINZ cheque and filling out endless forms probably has the same negative effects as the cold, damp house!
Greens needs to have more into perspective on risks of changing a system to one that is nonexistent so far aka there aint the cheap houses out there to move into for people!
Maraes did not use to have electrically run everything and Maori managed pretty well and probably better off before they were moved into European style housing!
Greens and Labour need to back off on making everything illegal unless it is very prescribed into a narrow definition of what they feel is right for every person.
Likewise work safe is out of control on small business and government organisations like schools so that nobody can get any practical work done anymore for the amount of paper planning for every eventuality!
Nobody wants to hire anybody these days in a practical sense in particular if they have any sort of disability, because of the risks of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if anybody has an accident and the paper work is not in order.
It’s got so bad that now the kids can’t even walk to school.
Good call at least by Genter on that practise at least, by the Greens!
This is not even getting into the disaster that immigration and tourism is doing environmentally.
The greens can accept that cows shit, but not people.
They need to get off their ideological identity politics and race obsessions and get into practical of saving the environment that will help identify politics and race relations because they will have a planet of live on, not be destroyed in 20 years because somebody was more interested in a fan in a bathroom, gave away water to Chinese to stem their race guilt or managed to remove 2 dedicated Maori parties from NZ politics by going after their votes every 2 seconds.
“Remove 2 dedicated Maori parties from NZ politics by going after their votes every 2 seconds” – although this seems to be more Labour’s doing than the Greens, but the last few elections Greens also seem desperate to join in the 4 way race.
Under this government with more Maori MP’s than every before, Maori votes are more and more diluted as they become more and more of a minority in their own country and many are becoming much worse off in their own country as are the fastest growing group in poverty, Pakeha homeowners with children on wages. https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/invisible-children?rq=children%20in%20poverty
So it seems the globalist polities are not helping Maori and they are not helping most Pakeha families… who are they helping and giving power to and why are our politicians compelled to give away natural assets to foreign business?
If you look at the Natz, they prop up shitty Seymore, for their benefit, Labour destroy a natural coalition partner aka Mana and manage to create race wars that get up other ethnicities backs!
If Labour and Greens could have stood down Te Tai Tokerau then Mana would be in power and their combined left policies would be stronger.
Likewise how many electoral votes were split allowing a Natz MP in, Auckland central and Nelson for a start… they are too obsessed fighting amongst themselves for power and can’t play a strategic game.
Next time they need to only stand one electoral candidate one for Greens in Nelson and one for Labour in Auckland central.
I know several Green party members and I see a common theme in them all. The’re all nice people who have good intentions but they’re scientifically & technically illiterate: Easily lead by simplistic appeals to emotion.
Take energy policy as a classic example. A rational approach to energy provision, assuming climate change is a ‘thing’, would be to first add more renewable energy generation to the grid so that we are 100% renewable with spare renewable generation capacity coming online as electric vehicle numbers rise. But no, instead we have the Greens encouraging people to buy EVs, thus requiring Huntly to burn more coal to meet the additional load. It may make the owners feel virtuous but it’s bad for both the environment and the economy.
Now they’re talking about adding 2,000 wind turbines. Apart from being a visual and noise blight on the landscape, they will kill birds and bats by the million. Dry years in NZ are often accompanied with less wind in which case we’d have a shortage of hydro and wind power, leading to black outs. However, Greens like wind turbines because they think they understand how they work (they don’t) but they’re anti nuclear because to them it’s like witchcraft. Meanwhile the French have operated a carbon neutral electric grid since the 60’s thanks to a combination of nuclear and hydro.
Exactly the same argument can be made for GMO: It’s a safe technology that can increase global food production whilst reducing carbon emissions.
Andrew – you ignore our screwed up profit-driven system. “Add more renewable energy” – yet your profit-driven electricity companies are are paying less to people who install solar panels (renewable energy, in case you hadn’t noticed) and feed energy back into the system when possible. This kind of behaviour should be promoted, not penalised. But what do your profit-driven-shareholder-cosseting energy companies do?
They think, “God forbid that more solar panels should be installed, thereby reducing our sacred profits!”
So they reduce the payback price, making solar panels less economic. Thereby reducing renewable energy, not “adding more”.
Your mates, Andrew.
I think you are full of it.
Andrew, totally agree re renewable generation. It’s not cheaper to build renewable power than any other technology. It’s a fucking crime that Huntly is still even open! BTW, the scare stories about wind turbines killing birds etc are not correct – likely likes created buy the army of liars for hire used by coal companies, Exon mobile, the scum Koch brothers etc.
Also, electric vehicles are so much more efficient than gas vehicles that even in a grid system with lots of coal power generation, a large electric vehicle fleet is still ahead in terms of CO2 than gas cars. In NZ, any new electric vehicle will overwhelmingly be an efficiency gain even while we have the Genesis Energy Huntly abomination still running.
The best thing now for our grid would be massive build out of solar and wind, replacing all shitty coal, wholesale conversion of industry heat processes to electricity, and shifting e.g. Motonui to be hydrogen instead of methane based. Unfortunately we have a totally screwed up power pricing system whereby there is no incentive to build the next most efficient generation plant because the greatest financial return is on the system that gives the most expensive generation cost that can be sold in the spot market. Renewables are now so low cost that they can push down the top of fake power markets like ours to the point where companies have stranded generation assets like coal or gas that they just don’t want to retire because they want to milk artificially high returns for as long as possible.
The big issue is that we need to use less energy and adapt our community and lifestyle to local food supply and cooperative local ventures to meet community needs.
All the waffle about renewable power generation is wishful thinking if it includes energy .consumption at present levels. It would take a lot of oil to set up enough generating plant using PV and wind turbine and then more to maintain it.
Milk doesn’t really come into it.
We waste a lot of energy with unnecessary activities. Who the hell needs heated towel rails.
While the words and sentiments may sound OK, the practicalities are not possible without using a lot more oil.
Cars are a major problem, gas or electric. It takes several tons of GHG to make a car that in a few years recycle the obsolete vehicle. Also the natural resources being used up in the process are finite.
Shaping our community around cars is plain stupidity.
Listen to the 2 leaders on the radio they have convinced themselves they are doing the lords work and have achieved so much.
The truth is they have strangled NZ roads by stopping any developement helped stop gas exploration which we need to replace coal stopped any research on GE or GM which could help solve global warming and feed the world’s hungry. Sage delayed theW est Coast clean up making the job so much harder and refuses to help stop another ecological disaster at the Hector mine .
They need to become the voice for the enviroment again not just social warriors
Rubbish. GM has done absolutely nothing for the poor, the climate or farmers. It’s a tool of mega corps like Monsanto to broaden and deepen their control over the food chain and essentially enslave farmers into low value commodities. Oh, and it’s creating super weeds too, while also leading to massive litigation against farmers when GM seeds blow into their paddocks and can’t be eradicated due to their resistance to all common weedkillers.
As for the roads, get real! The 24 odd Roads of National(party) significance that the Natz wanted to build all had a business case return of less than 1 which means that for every dollar spent on the road, the country lost money in terms of benefits. What a sick joke. Just a way for the corrupt Natz to funnel profits to their friends/donors in the roading business.
GM is for fools who just don’t see the bigger picture.
Trevor :”They need to become the voice for the environment again not just social warriors” – I agree, but I am not sure if I’d say “just” social warriors. They’re worse than that, because they have chosen to be socially divisive and racist – which NZ doesn’t need. Their post ChCh anti-white people rhetoric was disgraceful, and if this is what they believe, then to what extent they should be in positions of power or influence is a moot point.
As a Pakeha NZ’er I find their racism scary, and obviously won’t vote Green again. Davidson’s over- reaction to being called a c**t suggested someone who has had a fairly sheltered life, but expecting the public to participate with her social engineering around that, seems unrealistic and arrogant, but importantly, they were voted into power to represent all of us, not to use us to enable their own pet foibles while out in the real world the planet faces life-threatening problems.
I don’t think they are capable of change.
The woke simply know better than anyone else and are coming from a place of pure moral certainty.
Bit by bit they chip off support with their identity politics.
Yup, that pretty much sums it up.
History is full of people who committed atrocities because they were “right”.
Pol Pot, Hitler, both the Russians and Americans in the Vietnam War.
You can’t reason with a zealot because they are right and anything they do is justified because they are right. Even if they have to dance all over their own principles.
James Shaw snookered his party into the budget responisiblity rules – they’re now another neoliberal party and I hope they are forced out of parliament at this election.
And I voted for them last time.
Question 10: Should we as Green Party members nominate for Nobel peace prize, Vogue cover model and world authority on society, ecology and economy, the guy who has been hanging around Parliament for weeks with his climate emergency sign, ala Greta Thunberg
The Greens would have stayed outside the government supporting on some issues and not others had Rod Donald , Fitzsimons , Sue and others had been in positions of let’s say influence.
The waning signs were Winston and signing up to an agreement that let’s face it wipes out the Greens as an environmental conscience party not willing to trade that for a minor government position and neo liberal policy framwork.
The will be no grilling of course and just like at a vegan BBQ no tearing of the flesh just real delicious coleslaw and quit reflection.
Delicious Whole foods plant based is a start. Think it through.
Apologies that should have said quiet reflection.
Typing way too fast.
Lots of thoughtful critique on Green Policy. A toxic MSM doesn’t help either.
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