Green Party AGM - day three

Jeanette
Originally uploaded by kakariki.

Was AGM day and I won't go into that cause it was either a) boring business stuff or b) none of your business ;o) Was great to re-elect Rod and Jeanette, marking 10 years of their leadership was pretty exciting. They're two of my biggest heroes and I damn glad we have them! Thanks heaps to their families. We also had the second of the Co-Leaders speeches from Jeanette titled Connecting the dots between a fairer society and a sustainable one. Personally I found Jeanette's speech the more inspiring of the two. She gave a lot of her time to issues of water and the importance of them. Not surprisingly there was no mention of this in the media. As was predicted in her speech:

This is now the main threat to rivers, and largely responsible for the next big scary number – our publicly-owned research institute NIWA tells us that 95 percent of our lowland rivers and streams do not meet water quality standards – not just for drinking, but even for swimming! That’s right – it’s no longer safe for our kids to swim in a river unless you take them way up into the mountains. Someone stole their clean water, their birthright. Does that make you angry? It makes me angry. Angry that my new grandson will be deprived of so many things I grew up taking for granted. Angry that so little is being done to turn the tide. Angry that the media, and especially the political media, always think a few Iraqi immigrants are more dangerous to New Zealand than our water quality and who Tom Cruise is in love with this week is more important than how dirty our rivers are.

Jeanette dedicated the rest of her speech towards the work of other "progressive-minded forward-thinking" movements. Firstly, the feminist movement (you all know how I feel about that other conference)
and secondly, the Maori self-determiniation movement. Jeanette went to great lengths to describe the numbers and the threats of current political environments to the gains these movements. What I don't think she clearly identified is the reasoning behind these attacks on women and Maori. It's not that these groups are gaining actual power, but the threat is there. The use of 'PC Madness' and other fun terms like this doesn't represent anything going majorly wrong in our society. Really, how much has 'PC' hurt anyone except maybe taking away some of their power? Well, if anyone has lost any power over the last century, maybe it was because there was an imblance in the first place. A thought maybe... So overall it was the best Green Party conference I've been to. Pretty tiring and some pretty good arguments, but that's what being Green is about, having diverse positions but coming to agreed consensus. Works pretty well I think. Bring on the election, Go Green!