It’s a wonderful debate, with some coming out with unconditional support and others more guarded, worrying about her Christian beliefs.  All signs point towards a political shift in Brazil if she stands.

The choices thus far lay among an old fashioned and tough Rousseff, blessed by Lula; an intelligent and diplomatic Serra, supported by Fernando Henrique; and a bright green active Silva, with the Green Party.

Brazil represents immense natural wealth – both extrinsic and intrinsic. It is estimated that 13% of the world’s fresh water is in Brazil, and than there is the Amazon.

Worth protecting? Worth fighting for? I think so.

The Primary Election season was highlighted by the first contested Green primary for a non-presidential race in Illinois history, as Matt Reichel ran against Deb Gordils, Mark Frederickson and Simon Ribeiro for the privilege of being the Green Party nominee in this high profile election. All four Green candidates were invited to the vast majority of the forums and debates, and made the most of it: in general, they received the most raucous applause and the most visible expression of interest from attendees.

Matt won the primary based largely on his populist Green message:

Let us also draw a clear, thick line between us progressives and Democrat Mike Quigley, the “reformer.” With our country in crisis, we don’t have time for reforming the machine of Chicago politics. We must organize to defeat the Machine.

We can’t afford to compromise on the most pressing issues: the ongoing wars of Empire in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the overspending on bailouts of this nation’s criminal Wall Street class, and the lack of comprehensive universal single payer health care.

To learn more about Matt, watch  his YouTube video here.

Well, Matt, I cannot speak for the US Greens or the specific issues that you are running on, but from our windy city of Wellington to yours, we wish you all the success in the world in your battle against the old parties and their entrenched ideologies.

Ken teaches (taught?)  international politics and international law at the School of Law, Canterbury and Victoria University, and has previously worked for NGOs, the UN and as a diplomat. He was involved in negotiating the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, defending the policy as a NZ diplomat before the UN in Geneva and New York and was also Director of a UN programme in the Middle East. Having returned to New Zealand he will now contribute his experience and perspectives to helping the country tackle the global problems we face.

Over the years Ken has developed a conviction about the need for Green principles in political action at a global & national level as well as in individual lifestyles. Ken has worked in ‘and survived’ ten countries, and loves them all. Having returned to New Zealand he now aspires to contribute his experience and perspectives to helping the country tackle the global problems we face through action in the Green Party and, now, through his parliamentary service.

Ken is (was?) Adjunct Senior Fellow at the School of Law, Canterbury, Christchurch; Senior Lecturer at Victoria University, Wellington; and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Belgium. He teaches international politics and international law. Ken holds a B.Com from Auckland University, a BA Hons in Political Science from Victoria; an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Boston (Fulbright); and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Victoria University. He was also a Fellow at Cambridge University, studying in the Global Security Programme. Ken has authored and edited five books including ‘The Planetary Interest – A New Concept for the Global Age’ – which looks at issues of climate change, sustainability and nuclear weapons from a global perspective.

For the rest of Ken’s fascinating biography, click here. I am very excited by the experience and perspective that Kennedy will bring to the Green caucus. We now have 50% extra MPs, bringing us back to our level of 9 after the 2002 election. If you still consider Russel as a fresh new face in parliament, the Greens have managed a welcome balance of new talent and steady hands.

The Green’s tally now stands at 6.72% for the 2008 election. I’m still waiting for more detailed numbers from the elections website. Time to publish. Time to celebrate! Welcome Home Ken!

The only question remaining is whether or not our number 9, Kennedy Graham, will make it into parliament. With special votes and the magnifying effect of the NZ First throw away party votes, it is highly likely. This would mark a return to full strength for the Greens after the minor party bloodbath of 2005.

I am hoping that I have got the comments working properly again for new posts, and that we can take up our post election discussion here… So much for normal transmission resuming!

As for me, both my ticks on Saturday will go to National. Thus do I vote against both Labour and MMP.

Ok, so no surprise he’s not fond of MMP, except that he notes earlier:

The Greens have earned a presence in Parliament…

And:

Act, too, under the irrepressible Rodney Hide, deserves a couple of seats…

But that’s not all:

Of the rats and mice, Peter Dunne is an honest and useful administrator, as is the veteran Jim Anderton. Both have a place in the House.

Then there’s the Maori Party, which, because of its raison d’etre, is unique. It would be nice to see its MPs with a share of real political power.

So despite being a two-tick National man he wants seven of the eight parties in parliament to remain, representing their constituencies and ideas. It reads like what he wants is all these parties to have a voice in proportion to the support they have from the population, otherwise known as proportional representation? Seems to me like he’s a bigger fan of MMP than he realises.

Even if your vote helps swing Florida, Florida might not swing the election. But if the electoral vote is sufficiently close, many states could be in a position to affect the national outcome. You know that if 538 fewer Bush votes had been counted in Florida, Al Gore would be president. But did you know that only 1,231,944 more Bob Dole voters, carefully apportioned among Nevada, Kentucky, Arizona, Tennessee, New Mexico, Florida, New Hampshire, Delaware, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, would have given their man the election, despite Clinton’s lead of 8 million in the popular vote?

All of which is a timely reminder of what a simple and clean voting system we have here in New Zealand.  Nearly everyone’s party vote here counts in the exact same proportion to everyone else’s.  (The exceptions being parties that either don’t make the 5% threshold and don’t win an electorate seat, or do win an electorate seat but whose party vote tally is low enough puts their electorate seat/s in overhang.) Last election here in New Zealand only about 2 percent of votes had no impact on the end result (either from voting from small parties like Destiny New Zealand for from the Maori Party’s overhang).  In the United States this election that number will be closer to 40 percent.

However, the unprecedented oil price rises of the last four years, and the spike of the last eight months have already worked their magic and spooked the markets into precipitous decline.  The spike that burst the housing/credit bubble was made of oil.

Everyone knows intuitively that there has been something fundamentally wrong in the oil market over the last few years, but few were willing to call it what it is – the first shocks of the advent of peak oil.

Whether the peak is here already or will not come untill 2012, as is the average of opinions among oil experts, is irrelevant.The Hirsch report spells out in clear financial terms that it will take a crash course of at least twenty years to respond, so it is already too late for a smooth transition. Hence the economic upheavals have begun.

What the leaked IEA report says, according to the Financial Times, is that oil production is likely to decline by 9.1% per annum, which means we need to do one hell of a lot of drilling in order to keep production constant, let alone grow it.

Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent, the International Energy Agency says in its annual report, the World Energy Outlook, a draft of which has been obtained by the Financial Times.

The findings suggest the world will struggle to produce enough oil to make up for steep declines in existing fields, such as those in the North Sea, Russia and Alaska, and meet long-term de­mand. The effort will become even more acute as prices fall and investment decisions are delayed.

The IEA, the oil watchdog, forecasts that China, India and other developing countries’ demand will require investments of $360bn each year until 2030.

The agency says even with investment, the annual rate of output decline is 6.4 per cent.

The decline will not necessarily be felt in the next few years because demand is slowing down, but with the expected slowdown in investment the eventual effect will be magnified, oil executives say.

The battle to replace mature oilfields’ output could even offset the decline in demand growth, which has given the industry – already struggling to find enough supply to meet needs, especially from China – a reprieve in the past few months.

The IEA predicted in its draft report, due to be published next month, that demand would be damped, “reflecting the impact of much higher oil prices and slightly slower economic growth”.

Rumours are flying around the internet that the draft report was leaked because the authors had come under pressure to tone it down before publication. I suspect that the authors just want the market to be aware of the realities of peak oil. While it will be many decades before oil itself is a scarce resource, our inability to grow production means that we have a future of ever escalating prices ahead of us.

If I get out my crystal ball, I would forecast oil to bounce around in the $60 -$100 range until the financial crisis settles down, as the marginal cost of a new barrel of production is currently between $70 – $90 per barrel. Once the global economy is perceived to be back onto it´s exponential growth path, prices will spike once again before dropping back to the marginal barrel range as the growth bubble is burst once again by high oil prices. Each time this happens, the marginal barrel priced will ratchet up, taking the overall average price up with it. In short, I predict a wild roller coaster ride.

Bank on one thing – volatility.

The sniping about MMP is a smokescreen for the critics’ inability to adjust to the new rules. They’re talking horse racing when the game is now chess.

I would have said it’s a bit more like Twister actually.  Lots of different colours on the board and it’s fairly hard to avoid ending up entangled with the other parties, but the goal is to find something that is balanced and supported enough that it can stand up and doesn’t look too depraved.

On the same topic I have to say that I am enjoying policy.net’s bloggers Chris Trotter and Matthew Hooten.  What a combo – a left winger that says such offence and disagreeable things that left wingers can’t agree with him, and a right winger who peddles the sort of conspiracy theories and scandalised gossip that fuel the right wing blogosphere but, I have to assume, most right wingers also dislike.

Yesterday we had Trotter trying to address this topic of should the biggest party be entitled to govern but then also drifting off and accusing TVNZ of treason for running a badly worded poll.  Then today Matthew Hooten responds by accusing the left of planning to abolish the free press. It’s not as though we don’t have real issues to debate this election without needing to create imaginary ones to totally obscure things.

Meanwhile I think Kahikatea summed up things nicely yesterday:

I’m sure there are some Labor (sic) supporters in Australia who would share John Key’s view. After all, Labor is the biggest party there in EVERY election.

It’s funny how democracy can look different from different vantage points.

This week’s guest judge was Alan Russell, Chief Creative Officer, DDB Canada, Vancouver,who said:

First Choice goes to Green Party. It’s so damn simple I ask myself, as with all the best work, why didn’t someone think of that before? Few words, striking photography, emotional appeal, clever, yep it’s got my vote.

Kudos to photographer Alistair Guthrie and the creative team at Special in Auckland.

I know it is petty, but while others are getting prosecuted for posting videos of themselves doing stupid, illegal things on the net, shouldn´t John at least be getting a ticket for driving without his seat belt? 

I wonder if the segment was filmed in his Crown Limousine? While I have no qualms with party leaders having drivers, I do question the need for posh gas guzzlers to get to and from the airport. When John is getting chauffeured, does he always sit up front? Or is this just a vain attempt to avoid looking pampered and appear to be one of us ordinary folk? Don´t ordinary people have to buckle up, by law?

I wonder if he would need to be chauffeured and/or behave the same way while driving the economy?

In contrast, “The Block” which only garnered 9.97% of the nationwide vote scored 50 seats. The NDP, who got almost twice the vote at 18.7% only garnered 37 seats. So much for First Past the Post.

It is just this sort of skewed result that convinces me that despite its flaws, our MMP system is delivering the better democratic result. Pop over to the CBC for all the results.

Green Party Fisheries spokesperson Metiria Turei put up an amendment to the Bill to ensure that in the face of stock uncertainty, the TAC should not be increased. If they were, it would breach the precautionary principle and would obviously be unsustainable.

Preventing increases would also incentivise the research to get quantitative estimates so we can be certain the catch is sustainable. We invest less today on stock assessment research than we did 15 years ago. In real terms, it is under half what was spent in the early 1990s.

Unfortunately, most parties in Parliament are quite happy to see our fisheries continue to be exploited, despite their rhetorical commitments to sustainability. The only party to support Metiria’s amendment was the Maori Party, and they deserve credit for that.

Very soon the Minister must set a TAC for bluenose, which has woefully inadequate information on fish stocks. At least he can now set the TAC, but the fact that the law allows him to increase the TAC in this situation is outrageous.
Fortunately, the Fisheries Act is up for a review next year, and the Greens will be in flippers and all. The EU has realised its QMS is flawed is also undertaking a full review at the moment.

At least the Greens made sure that Pike has to pay for its local methane emissions under the ETS from 2010 (the coal is exported so won’t be liable), and got $4m for DoC research into the impacts of climate change on our conservation land.

If the Greens were Government, we would stop permitting new coal mines and allow the existing ones, such as Pike, to run their course. More importantly, we would re-energise DoC from being the Department of Gold Stars and turn it into an agency that can truly protect what little is left of our natural inheritance. Details of what we would do can be found here.

At a time when the Department of Conservation is coping with higher costs, more land to manage and increased pressure from development, they were forced to axe 56 jobs. So the Department of Conservation needs a significant funding boost, and strong Government backing.

The package draws a line in the sand on wetland protection, mining and hydro dams on conservation land, the threat of native forest being cleared for pines.

It reiterates the Green Party’s stance on renewable energy proposals, including wind farms: that they need to be appropriate, and use sites with least footprint.

And not to forget marine conservation: the Greens will deal to the weak laws that allow our marine environment to be over-exploited.

Meanwhile, Harper’s conservatives continue their ongoing stouche with Elections Canada, reluctantly promising to abide by the rules on campaign financing.

He says the Conservatives will “operate within the law as we understand it in consultation with Elections Canada.”

The agency alleges the Tories transferred national funds in and out of campaign accounts for 67 candidates during the last federal election to skirt the party’s national spending limit.

It says the practice allowed the party to exceed its national campaign spending limit by $1.1 million and enabled local candidates to claim rebates on expenses they hadn’t actually incurred.

Harper is expected to call a mid-October election next week.

It all sounds hauntingly familiar, with the names changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike. And who said that we don’t need more transparency on how campaign monies are handled?