Fact and Fiction

by frog

Would somebody please send Act Leader Rodney Hide a dictionary so he can look up the difference between fact and fiction.

In a speech today he said:

The Green Party will sorely miss Rod Donald. As Jeanette Fitzsimons admitted last week the Green Party has failed to deliver MPs to Parliament capable of leadership. She’s told party members to vote Green campaign manager and non-MP Russel Norman her co-leader.

She also admitted that the Green Party could be wiped out. They will rue the day they lost the seat of Coromandel.

What Jeanette actually said was:

I hope you are all emerging from the summer break refreshed, healed and re-inspired. We need to be all those things, to face the challenges 2006 presents us with.

It challenges us to work effectively for sustainability, peace and justice with just 6 MPs where we had 9; with fewer staff and less resource; and without the energy Rod used to contribute. The election was a reminder that 5% is never guaranteed and the party has to be in a condition that it can carry on and fight another campaign even if at some time we lose all our MPs.

Sometimes I think we have forgotten what it was like to be a political party that had to rely 100% on our members. We did it for 25 years, counting the Values experience, with leaders, spokespeople, press releases, travel, conferences, and campaigns. We achieved 5.2% of the vote in 1975 with no MPs to help, and almost 9% of the vote in the seventy seats where we stood in 1990, still relying on volunteers. But after nine years of political representation we have come to rely too heavily on the MPs – our full time work, our staff, our tithes, our access to information and to the media that being in Parliament brings.

I hope and believe we will never have to go back to doing without that, but it is healthy to remember how we did it, and plan to be less reliant on the six MPs we have now. Sue, Sue, Keith, Metiria, Nandor and I will continue to give our all to the cause, recognising the enormous privilege it is to be paid to work at what we believe in, but we cannot do it alone.

And about the new Co-Leader she said this:

It is useful after 10 years to review what leadership means in the Greens before we elect our second ever male co-leader.

Greens have always both been suspicious of leadership and had enormously high expectations of it. In 1995 we made a decision to elect leaders – before that we had four spokespeople, which mightily confused the media and everyone else. We have never gone as far as the UK Greens who at one stage had three co-chairs who rotated every six months – just as everyone had found out who the new one was.

The German Greens required their MPs to step down after two terms so they didn’t become corrupted by the power system and to keep bringing new faces in. As a result no one ever got much experience in the job and they forced people as brilliant as Petra Kelly to step down in case she got too powerful.

We have never gone to these excesses but when we first elected co-leaders we were conscious of the need to avoid the cult of personality driven, presidential style leadership and foster consensus style decision-making. Many thought we were excessively politically correct and would hopelessly confuse the media and the public. Yet from the beginning journalists had no difficulty in understanding there were two of us; that either of us could respond to questions normally put to leaders, and that we played complementary roles on issues. The system is now so accepted that the Maori Party has copied us, effectively I believe, as Tariana and Pita seem to be complementary too.

We are different from most parties in that our leaders are more than just leaders of the parliamentary team, and so are elected by the party at conference, not by the caucus. I hope we never change that. It is part of a raft of things we do that prevents the parliamentary team becoming too separate from the party and developing its own agenda, as happened in the Labour party in the eighties.

We are wary of power, and of giving power to leaders, but I think the party has become more comfortable with the idea that politics is about the use of power, and the key is to elect people who will use power responsibly for the collective good and then let them do it, while continuing to demand accountability.

We expect our leaders to be “one of us�?, and not to fly into a Green conference to speak and fly out again. We expect them to exemplify in their own lives the principles of the Green Party –riding a bicycle and growing a garden as Rod did or using public transport, using energy and resources responsibly, buying kiwi-made, caring for children and animals, eating healthy food, reusing and recycling waste. Quite a tall order given the peculiar demands of the job. The one principle we don’t seem to demand from them is work-life balance!

We expect them to think ahead and see things coming at us and to have ideas but to consult fully before they do anything about them.

We expect them to be able to take criticism but not to be derailed by it. We expect them to answer every letter and return every phone call. I hesitate to give you my list of the qualities I think we should be looking for in a new co-leader. That’s because I know I never quite measure up to them myself. But in that spirit I will venture some suggestions.

We are looking for someone who will be the new face of the Green Party. He needs to be able to articulate concisely the Green Party vision in a way the public will understand and warm to.

He needs to be able to inspire and motivate members and voters. He needs to see the big picture and help other people, trapped in their special issues, see it too. He needs to be able to accept responsibility – the buck stops here – but also be a team builder, who will help the caucus be the best they are capable of.

He needs the capacity and stamina for very hard work, and the determination to see it through when things get tough. Because what most people see of the co-leaders’ lives is only the tip of the iceberg.

For this reason he needs a great sense of humour and a supportive home environment. No one will quite measure up to this – I know Rod and I often didn’t – but we grew into the job and our new leader will too.

In return he should be able to expect your total support and love as well as your challenges and debate.

From April 3 members will be able to nominate their preferred choice for co-leader. When this nomination process ends on April 28 we are expecting to have a large number of candidates. There is no doubt – the competition will be tough, but at the end of this, I am sure we will have the right man for the job.

Clearly Rodney has muddled up the two “f” words, because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of fact in his statement!