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Pessimistic: Nick dreams of wiping out The Greens, making him the closest thing to a green in government.

katie: black-greens are not left. That’s fundamental misunderstanding of anarchism. We no more support leftwing statists than rightwing ones, it’s just that generally the left democratic governments are less hostile to anarchist policies.

The association between libertarianism and anarchy goes right back to when libertarianism grew out of anarchy. Politely, their plan is to let free association be mediated by money rather than force. And in that way the free market can be considered anarchic. Holes in the idea galore, but that’s where it started.

I have a whole fund of libertarian stories thanks to having libertarian friends in the US. reading the material would be funny if it wasn’t so close to US gummit policy.

mugwump: The key difference between Socialism and The Greens is that socialism puts people ahead of the environment while the Greens see humans as part of it. Do you mean green politics, or specifically the politics of The Green Party of Aotearoa? Coz the two policies I can’t name, that doesn’t fit the way I seen green politics.

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There are a number of further suggestions at the end of The Corporation, as well as in the book (posted here before, but well worth repeating the link), Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements.

With these corrections, it would probably make sense to proceed at full steam with the suggestions from the Libertarians (and others), that government should be small. I believe it is quite possible to pull this off, without violating any of the Green mandates. Right now it’s either a Libertarian pipe dream or neo-liberal bribe, of course. But one day…

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This ‘reds under the bed’ rehash is truly ironic. Consider the nats are supposedly ‘free market capitalists’, but when their american shareholder bosses feel threatened by LLU they are the first to defend Telecom’s moneygrubbing monopoly. Who is really pulling the strings there I wonder.

I do like the idea of the Greens as a party which focuses exclusively on environmental issues, and can work with either party in power, but as other posters have said, environment and economy are often two sides of the same coin and sometimes difficult to reconcile.

The best thing about environmentalism is that it takes a stakeholder / long-term view, much the same as a small business or a traditional style business. This is the antithesis of the Nats- they have a shareholder-driven enron-style model, where the long term is someone else’s problem…

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Why no discussion of moves futher left in greendom? Eg, black-greens (eco-anarchists) – ok, so some of them don’t vote but there some great mind-opening street-theatre and DA coming out of that end of the rainbow… ;-D

lovin the way the lilypad looks lately…..
cheers, katie

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Looks like the next missions are: getting across why green politics are not simply environmentalism, and explaining why being Green does *not* infer being a Socialist.

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Let’s have some spot quizzes:

* describe the reason that Green Politics and Socialism are fundamentally different, alternatively explain the term “Green Capitalist”

* describe two major policy areas in which Green Politics has a clear perspective, yet this is not primarily motivated from an Environmentalist point of view.

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Spot quizzes:

name an aspects of Green Politics that is not related to environmentalism.

describe a way in which Socialism and Green Politics differ.

Suggestions for source material: http://www.greeneconomics.org.uk/

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More generally, a policy auction on the environment between the two major parties can only be beneficial to the green cause as a whole. After all, isn’t the goal to pull the political mainstream more in the direction of your policies?

Ben: I think any party which advocates gaming the threshold to eliminate another and effectively disenfranchise voters is pretty vile – but I think that really shows that the threshold was a bad idea and that it needs to be removed. But if the Greens want to stop this from happening, I think that all they need to do is point the finger at National’s RMA and climate change policies; they should discourage anyone from switching their vote…

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That is what Smith is cynically seeing. That if they can get a few Green voters, then the Green Party dies, and the Green cause with it, and the entire centre/left collapses.

But Labour do need to court the Green Party, a little bit. National could try to court them, if they could only move a few standard deviations closer to the centre.

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What the Greens failed to do in the last election was to make it clear to their ‘Watermelon’ supporters that a party vote for the Greens would be more likely to deliver Labour its majority coalition. Now that was a pricey oversight.

Labour competing for the Green votes simply causes confusion for everybody.

I think the more beneficial outcome from Smith’s speech would be to galvanise the Greens efforts to present ourselves as being neutral in terms of out-dated spectral politics and positive about business’s contribution.

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