We received 10.62% of the vote, which means that we can bring at least 13 Green MPs into Parliament.

So a big welcome to Eugenie Sage, Jan Logie, Steffan Browning, Denise Roche, Holly Walker, and Julie Anne Genter.

There is also a possibility, depending on the special vote, that we could have one more Green MP join us—Mojo Mathers—we’ll let you know as soon as the overseas votes have been counted.

Importantly, we couldn’t have done it without you!

This election result means more voices in our Parliament calling for stronger environmental protections, a fairer society, and a clean green economy that works for everyone.

10.62% is the highest proportion of the vote we’ve received since Green MPs first entered Parliament in 1996. We’re proud of this result and you should be too.

Our success is due to the tireless effort of thousands of supporters like yourself. Thank you for every event you attended, petition you signed, or email you forwarded from us to a friend.

And, finally, thanks more than anything for Party Voting Green.

Over the next three years we will continue working as hard as we can to be a strong voice in Parliament for our environment, our children, and our future.

But for now it is time for us all to have a lovely Christmas break and enjoy a well-deserved holiday – we’ve all earned it!

This is why we at the Green Party take social media seriously. It’s an opportunity for us to make ourselves available to you and show that we’re real people caring about our country. This isn’t just about being hip; it’s about being good public representatives.

We’re not alone in thinking we do a pretty good job. This morning on TV ONE’s Breakfast, Matty McLean did a story about the Greens having the most Klout — social media impact. I’m proud to say I was ranked in top place, ahead of John Key and Phil Goff. Despite being a smaller party than National or Labour, we have three politicians in the top ten — Kevin Hague (tied for 4th) and Russel Norman (9).

But our high rankings don’t mean we’re doing everything right. Parliament can be a bit of an Ivory Tower at times, so to help us engage even better with the community, I’d love to hear from you about what you think we could do better. And it’d be good to also know what you think we are doing right.

If you’re not yet friends with us on Facebook or following us on Twitter, you’ll find links to all our MPs’ pages and accounts here. And here you’ll find our official Green Party Facebook page, which btw, has the most fans per capita for a political party in OECD English speaking countries.

But it’s not just about FB and Twitter. We’ve also launched various successful online campaigns including Hey Kiwi and Aroha NZ. To connect with people that usually wouldn’t realise MPs are interested in hearing from them, I’ve also done a few AMAs (ask me anything chat forums) on Reddit and Game Planet.

What matters more than what we do online, is that you get out and vote tomorrow. And, of course, Party Vote Green!

There have been eight prosecutions in the past year in the Bay of Plenty regarding breaches of dairy effluent disposal rules and conditions. This is eight too many.

Meanwhile in the Waikato, an Otorohanga farmer has been fined almost $50,000 for two deliberate breaches of effluent rules in March and November 2010.

The Green Party has a plan to clean up our lakes and rivers. We would provide better support to regional councils to work with farmers to ensure that they have all the tools they need to comply with rules and regulations. We would also enable and encourage dairy companies to impose harsher financial penalties upon operators who break the rules.

We need to send the message loudly and clearly: No one has the right to gain personal profit by destroying the common good, that is our precious rivers and lakes.

Dear Mayor and Councillors,

I have to say that I was a little bemused by the Chairperson’s actions with regards to the peaceful presence of the Te Arai crew at the Town hall meeting yesterday. In a democratic society it is appropriate that everyone should be polite and take in to account the democratic right of others. However, that cuts both ways. There are a much more significant number of people who support Te Arai the way it is than those who want sub division The placards were private property and you could have asked the group to move to the back to allow others still seated to be able to see.

The “polite” thing for council to have done was to acknowledge the protest and show respect for the community at large via a “due process” that culminates in what is appropriate for Te Arai. Just to remind you of the beauty of Te Arai I took this photo last Saturday while I was there. A photo taken at Mangawhai or Black Swamp looking south is just as breathtaking. It is as close to paradise as one would find anywhere in the Auckland area. Don’t spoil it. Please read on.

I don’t think any of you would have seen the Te Arai supporters and their families outside the meeting yesterday so here are a couple of pix of them. Many of them travelled from the area to show you their passion for it and all of it’s current inhabitants (rare birds included).

The word ‘development’ is used most widely today (ironically) to describe real estate ventures. The strongest definition for the word is about progress and growth. I don’t believe that we as a society are making progress anymore. All we are doing is killing the earth and making many of it’s inhabitants extinct – what a legacy!

Te Arai could be a natural place where can we can say we have helped to address natural balance. At the moment we are just smothering nature with our capitalist style blitzkriegs. Omaha started as a happy little place with a few baches. Look at it now! it’s just another suburb of Auckland with a black SUV uniform. A small sub division at Te Arai is just the thin end of the wedge. Smart lawyers will argue precedent for future expansion.

Make the decision for nature and the huge public amenity value Te Arai has now, not the profit wants of a few.

Finally, to those of you who support Te Arai as is, thank you for your visionary position.

Yours sincerely

John Shaw, Aucklander and surfer.

Lake Rotorua is seriously degraded and a huge reduction in the amount of nitrogen going into the lake is needed into order to clean it up. While land management practices such as fencing waterways and planting riparian margins play their part in cleaning up our lakes and rivers, the elephant in the room is the diffuse pollution that comes from inappropriate land use and high stocking rates. Much of the farmland in the Lake Rotorua catchment sits on porous pumice soils, and nutrients from fertilizer use and animal effluent drain through the soils rapidly making their way into waterways. Some of this land should never have been allowed to be converted to intensive agriculture in the first place.

A key part of the Green Party’s Clean Rivers Plan is to adopt a minimum standard for intensive agriculture that would give regional councils better tools to regulate intensive agriculture. It is great to see regional councils such as the Bay of Plenty taking the initiative themselves to recognize that we cannot achieve continued land use intensification and growth, whilst improving water quality.

Key elements of the policy position includes:
• Recognition that land management changes alone will not achieve water quality targets for Lake Rotorua
• Acceptance that the Council has an obligation to consider land use changes to reduce nitrogen loads to the lake long-term
• Prioritising of Council resources towards making land use change over actions to make land management changes in the catchment.

His findings across OECD countries reveal that policies have generally fallen short of what is required to meet water quality goals in agriculture, including in New Zealand. Dr Parris warns of the “time-bomb” effect of intensive agricultural expansion, noting the time lags of 30 – 40 years in some catchments before the effects of current farming practices are seen.

These sort of stark warnings highlight the need for immediate action to clean up our waterways, as already over half our monitored rivers are unsafe for swimming, one-third of our lakes are unhealthy, and two-thirds of our native freshwater fish species are at risk or threatened with extinction.

The Green Party has a plan to clean up our rivers by setting standards, encouraging efficient use of water by introducing a fair charge on irrigation water and providing better support to the agricultural industry to improve practices. These measures are outlined in the our Clean Rivers Plan, available here.

You can read the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s press release on the OECD report here.

Murray made some very good points regarding the snail-like pace at which improved water management is happening. After many years of what he describes as the “gentle approach” of education and persuasion which has failed to improve water quality, Murray paints a picture of Canterbury as a “no-mans land” of water governance.  This situation is brought about by the lack of unequivocal commitment from both farmers and the central Government to do what is necessary to clean up the region. Sadly, this story is echoed in other parts of New Zealand where intensive agriculture has been left to expand without adequate regulation.

Murray’s speech can be read here:

Murray’s speech covers many of the points made by the Green Party in our plan to clean up New Zealand’s lakes and rivers to make them swimmable once more, including a levy on the use of water by irrigators. You can read our Clean Rivers plan here

As recently as January 18, the regional council warned people to keep their dogs out of the river, otherwise they could eat the toxic slimy black sludge algal bloom and die.

Getting vomiting and diarrhoea in a bikini might look glamorous but it’s still vomiting and diarrhoea.

The Mangatainoka has its headwaters in the eastern slopes of the Tararua Ranges Forest park where the water is clean and full of life. But as it travels east onto the farmland of the Wairarapa it collects pollution from agriculture, sewerage and industry.

The degraded river then turns northward to join the Manawatu for the journey through the gorge that cuts a mountain range in two, creating the Tararuas to the south and the Ruahines to the north, before flowing through Palmerston North and out to sea on the west coast.

Old man Manawatu is older than the mountains themselves but his sickness is palpable.

We started just downstream from the Pahiatua bridge, not far from the Fonterra processing plant.

There were some of the crew from the Ruamahanga trip, including Mike Birch from Whitewater NZ and Dave Woodcock from Wairapapa Outdoor, Vicky and Heike from Massey Uni ecological economics who have been working with the community on solutions, and others who just cared about the state of the river including the Wai Not Go Green crew. Special mention to Stella McQueen who has self-published a book on looking after native fish in an aquarium and is now doing a masters in freshwater ecology at Massey – awesome.

The Greens have been battling with Fonterra because of their application to get a 22 year extension for their resource consent to dump untreated condensate from their Pahiatua plant (below) straight into the Mangatainoka.

The condensate is what comes off the milk when it’s boiled to create milk powder – it has elevated levels of nutrients and is hot.

I had gone to look at the discharge point for the Fonterra plant in October last year. Steaming milky smelling fluid, visible through an open manhole cover, could be seen pouring into the Brechnin stream which then drained into the Mangatainoka.

There were huge algal blooms in the stream.

Fonterra say that by changing the discharge point, from the Brechnin Stream to the Mangatainoka itself, they will improve the stream, which is probably true. But they will still dump into the river.

Fonterra argues that the nutrient-rich steaming water will make little difference to the Mangatainoka because it is already so polluted, which is also true to a point, but also quite shocking. Remarkably, in their application they even concede that agricultural runoff is one of the main sources of pollution of the Mangtainoka. But they argue that because of the existing pollution they should be allowed to keep polluting the river.

That which makes this grass green will also make the river green

It is deeply hypocritical that Fonterra downplays agricultural pollution when we try to get them to clean up dairy farms, but then they play up agricultural pollution when applying for a point source discharge for their processing plant.

In Victoria, Australia, where Fonterra pay for their water and there are stronger regulations, Fonterra have invested in reverse osmosis technology which turns condensate into clean water that can be reused in the processing plant. In NZ the water is free and there are few regulations so they figure ‘why spend the money to clean and reuse the water when you can get more bore water for free and dump the polluted water in the nearest river’? Of course this goes completely against the Manawatu Accord that they signed last year in which they promised to be part of the solution for cleaning up the river – if everyone took the approach that it’s already polluted so a bit more pollution won’t matter then the river will only ever get dirtier.

The flow in the river was pretty low so we had to carry the rafts over many of the little rapids. The river bottom was covered in sediment and algal growth. There were very few fish visible. I lifted up the rocks in the riffles to find invertebrates but there were precious few. Fish and Game’s drift dive results have shown a dramatic drop in the number of trout in the river from about 96 trout per km in 1987 to 7 trout per km in 2009.

Fonterra are right that agricultural pollution has left the river in a dreadful state. We also drifted past the discharge point for the Pahiatua town sewerage; charming.

The river was full of navigation hazards left over from previous pointless flood mitigation attempts – large railway irons poking out of the river bed (like the Ruamahanga), wire mesh and other crap.

Finally we rounded the bend and there was the Tui brewery.

I nearly stripped off and frolicked, but then the large blue plastic pipe discharging god-knows-what put me off.

Thanks to Mike for his organising role, Dave for the rafts, and everyone for coming along.

There is more and more evidence that we are an increasingly unequal society and that inequality negatively affects everyone. We support a fair and robust system for debt collection but we need to be careful it does not push people who are already struggling over the edge.

We need a justice system that keeps communities safe and addresses the causes of crimes.

While we can see the value in streamlining processes for collecting fines et al, we have not supported this bill and the Government’s proposed amendment.

One of our key concerns is that there has been no analysis or evidence provided of the impact of this bill on deprived socio-economic groups.

Introducing stricter provisions for when people default on their fines or debt will clearly have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities and people with limited financial means.

There needs to be mechanisms (such as potentially a case management system) to identify and work with people who do not have the financial means to meet fine or civil debt obligations. Putting people in jail, crushing their cars, taking their driver’s license, automatically taking money out of minimum wages and benefits – when they are struggling financially could have considerable negative flow on the people involved, their families, communities and ultimately New Zealand society as a whole.

The bill’s proposal to extend the amount of time that people can spend in jail for failing to pay fines and sending people to jail for failure to pay reparation orders are a clear case in point.

Putting people in jail, generally makes them worse and more likely to commit further crime. It is no solution for our fines system and at around $90,000 per annum for each prisoner it is very expensive.

We believe that keeping communities safe and addressing the causes of crimes need to be the focus of our justice system

We feel the punitive aspects of the bill do not reach this standard which is why we oppose it and the Government’s SOPs’.

Chief Judge of the 2010 awards Christine Dann  and her team of supporting judges awarded first place to the utterly deserving Warners Bros for their interference in both the political system and the rights of workers.

The accomplice award was given to John Key and his Government for their complicity in the sorry debacle around The Hobbit which included a $100 million subsidy to keep Warners happy.

Equally serious was the law change designed by Warners which removes the choice of film workers to be an employee with employee rights. Contractors are of course easier to divide and rule in terms of pay and conditions.

Sir Peter Jackson received the “quisling” award for his facilitation of overseas interests at the expense of New Zealand workers. A giant Bugs Bunny received the award on behalf of Warners waving a carrot and crying “That’s All Folks” in true Hollywood style.

Runners up BUPA (a UK rest home consortium) and Imperial Tobacco were not represented but at the event but were seen as  well deserving of their status, BUPA for treatment of the elderly and staff and Imperial Tobacco for their unethical use of fake  community groups in their endless promoting of this killer product.

At the Roger Awards we had the chance to catch up with some of this country’s finest critics of multinational exploitation and free trade including Murray Horton from CAFCA who lead the Roger Awards process, Professor Jane Kelsey, John Minto, Sue Bradford, Joce Jesson, Maire Leadbetter  and many more.

Murray Horton is starting his nation wide tour on overseas ownership of our country tonight. He has a unique style and a depth of knowledge on this vital issue so catch him him if you can. I am hosting him in Thames this Friday night where overseas mining companies continue to be unwelcome and unnecessary.

The Roger Awards are a national icon and reminds us that the legacy of  Roger Douglas and the ideology of the free market needs constant and resolute challenge!

Outside the Green office

It is one of life’s ironies to pillage your own office.  But that is what the gods of wrath have done to us. I trust we do not do time for our discretionary executive action yesterday.

The cordon around the Christchurch CBD has shrunk, and my office now sits just outside it, one building north of the Durham/Armagh intersection.  Thursday we were given approval to approach and enter.

We walk over the remaining liquefaction at the entrance and go into the main room.   It is totally trashed

Our Green MPs have not come crashing down but they remain frozen in contorted relationships on the wall.

My office is reasonably OK but its internal wall has bowed menacingly towards my desk and chair. Things lie in pieces on the floor, with Living within Limits calmly surveying the carnage.

Army personnel move the fencing and we bring our cars through the barrier to the office.  The USAR team come by and instruct us to park in the road away from the building.  We go in, unplug everything with a prayer to the god of all things electric, and remove our electronic equipment.  We may be in for the long haul – literally in our camper-van – dubbed yesterday the Green-mobile – temporarily resplendent outside my home in Ilam.

In for the long haul for our office intersection is a compromised piece of real estate.  On the northeast, effectively opposite us, are the law courts and we all know how important they are.  The courts seem intact and might be expected to be functioning before long.

But, on the southeast are the Provincial Chambers , which resemble Dresden after a bad night.

On the southwest the Amuri Court car-park audibly groans through aftershocks, and is, we understand, likely to be demolished.  And on the northwest, adjacent to our office, the Contours gymnasium has a dejected lean, not against us but the neighbour down the side-street. It is, we are told, also likely to be demolished.  None of this, of course, is official.

Two doors up the street lies the tragic Methodist Mission Church.

Methodist church

It is just a matter of clearing away the rubble.  Two doors further up lies the Copthorne Hotel, up for demolition, it appears.  Across from it lies the massive Crown Plaza – rumours swirl whether it is salvageable or will be condemned.

Notwithstanding considerable enquiry, I have no clear idea when we might re-enter our office which is green-stickered.  It is not only an engineering matter but also legal-financial.  We wish to go back, but not in the midst of demolition.

In the midst of reconstruction, perhaps?  Perhaps.  Maybe we can lobby for a green-space, professional and personal interests merging to a point of singularity.

I pick up a handful of moon-dust – Liquefaction Grade D – and let it sift through my fingers .  I pour it into a glass and take it home.   It can adorn the Green-mobile. As I take it out of the car, it slips and smashes on the driveway.  I consider salvage but then just sweep it vigorously into the garden.

If I should flee,

Think only this of me;

That there is some corner of a foreign garden, that is forever the CBD.

Environment Southland Chairwoman Ali Timms said it was at high risk of irreversible damage because of intensification of land use in the surrounding catchment, and that steps might be taken by the regional council to try to halt further development in Waituna catchment.

Waituna is a popular brown-trout fishing destination, drawing over 2,000 angling visits per year. The lagoon is part of the Waituna Wetlands which was one of the first sites in the world to be named “a wetland of international significance” under the RAMSAR Convention, an intergovernmental treaty that was signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971. The area is an important habitat for birds, being home to seventy six species including international migratory waders. It is also home to some very unusual plants, such as the cushion plant Donatia which normally grows in sub-alpine areas. Increased nutrient levels from intensive dairy farming are now threatening to “flip” the lagoon from an ecosystem with clear water featuring aquatic plants and fish species to one with murky, turbid water dominated by algae.

When water quality scientist Kirsten Meijer visited the lagoon with the Southland Times this month, she pointed out black mud on the edges of a tributary to the lagoon.

“There’s a lot of sediment going into the lagoon and the mud goes black (instead of being brown). It smells like sulphur, no oxygen, nothing can live in it,” she said. This in a stream that flows into an area of international significance!

One of the ideas being put forward by Environment Southland to combat this pressing problem is to not allow any more dairy farms in the area in the interim. In response to this, Federated Farmers Southland dairy chairman Vaughan Templeton has stated  ”We would rather see people who are (farming) there do so under certain conditions that don’t have runoff. We have to put things in place to try to minimise it.”

But just what will be put in place? Several agencies, including the Waituna Landcare Group, have been working to try to improve land management practices in the Waituna Catchment but their efforts have not been enough to halt and reverse the decline in water quality. Environment Southland is under immense pressure from Federated Farmers and the dairying industry to allow continuation of dairy development in the region.

What is needed here is clear guidance from the government and clean water rules NOW. It just so happens that Environment Minister Nick Smith is sitting on a Draft National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management that would provide this much needed guidance to regional and district councils on protecting our waterways, but he won’t sign it as it may just upset the polluting industries. Russel Norman will be in the region in April rafting the Oreti River as part of his Dirty and Threatened Rivers Tour and will speak with local people about the issues, drawing attention to the threats posed by the dairy industry in Southland.

http://www.greens.org.nz/dirtyrivers

Greens’ vigilance on Gillard merits praise – John Armstrong

The Greens have got some unwarranted stick for blocking Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard from addressing Parliament while it is officially in session. They were right to do so.

Their intervention has produced a compromise which most people will struggle to see as much different from what John Key had originally proposed. That saves face for him.

The compromise is significant, however, in the huge symbolic difference between what will happen tomorrow and what Key had hoped for.

The Australian Premier will be speaking to a meeting of MPs which coincidentally is being held in the parliamentary chamber outside sitting hours with the permission of the Speaker. The meeting will not become part of the official record, normal rules will not apply and the meeting will carry no special status.

The Greens’ objection to Key’s plan was made clear to MPs during closed-door meetings some months ago. Had it been ignored, there was a strong possibility they would have refused leave for Gillard to speak – only one MP’s refusal is required to halt proceedings. That would have been humiliating for her and acutely embarrassing for Key.

So what, after all, was wrong with the original plan? The Greens had two reasons for blocking Gillard.

The first follows the British constitutional line that the floor of the House remain sacrosanct and only the people’s elected representatives should tread it. This flows from English history; that MPs should not be threatened or unduly influenced by “strangers” – such as the King’s soldiers.

The second reason is that giving Gillard the full honours would have set a worrying and dangerous precedent. As Green Party co-leader Russel Norman says, no Government could avoid the Chinese President officially addressing Parliament if there was such a precedent.

The Chinese would take refusal as a massive diplomatic snub. But going ahead would provoke a huge uproar if, in Norman’s words, “the No 1 enemy of democracy” was allowed to lecture a chamber filled with democratically elected MPs.

What message would that send? Key may yet have reason to thank the Greens for their vigilance.

The background to this is the following. Her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, was visiting last year and had specifically requested to address the NZ Parliament, in session. I was involved in this discussion in my role as the Green Party musterer, our representative on the House Business Committee. 

After considerable discussion the Green Party opposed this proposal. We did so for the following reasons:

The NZ House of Representatives, sitting in session with the mace, is the symbol of national sovereignty. No one apart from New Zealand MPs has ever been allowed to address a sitting session of Parliament, not even our own Governor-General. The reason for this is that sitting sessions of Parliaments are for New Zealand law makers to exercise their democratic powers.

The idea that we would only invite our ‘closest friends’ to address Parliament in session is problematic.  Who might they be, and where might the line be drawn?  Australia might be seen as no. 1.  Perhaps the US would be no. 2, and the UK no. 3.  Which other countries might fit in the top ten?  What would be the criteria?  Where could the line be drawn? Such decisions are intrinsically political, and therefore subjectively influenced by the colours of a particular Government of the day – whereas the issue must be seen as having constitutional implications independent of politics.

The Green Party position, however, pertained only to having a foreign leader address the Parliament in session.  We made it clear at the time that we welcomed the proposed visit as we had with previous visits.

The US Congress formally moves out of session when they receive addresses from overseas dignitaries; our position is consistent with this.
 
The PM, who is effectively acting as host of a state occasion, has decided that Ms Gillard may address MPs (not the Parliament) in the debating chamber, out of session (with no Mace present, and with Dr Lockwood Smith acting as chairman of the meeting and not as Speaker).  While the Legislative Council Chamber would probably have been a better choice of venue, the choice is for the PM to make, and we respect that decision.

We are looking forward to listening to the Australian PM’s address to us.

We think it is healthy to have a debate about this issue but believe such a change should not be made at the whim of a sitting government.

The situation in West Papua continues to be of deep concern to the Green Party and we were pleased to host a recent international guest Budi Hernawan who was touring our country with Pax Christi support to talk about the need for leadership by our Government to help achieve peace and justice in West Papua.

The cross party group of MPs heard from Budi about the ongoing challenges in Papua where human rights and torture are a fact of life. This situation reflects the long term disaster for West Papua since the 1963 takeover of their country by Indonesia. The rich resources in forestry and mining have been appropriated by the Indonesian Government and the use of military force and mass migration of Indonesian citizens to Papua has reduced the rights and safety of West Papuan communities.

However many Papuans are calling for peaceful negotiations similar to the positive solutions to the problems in te Aceh region and are very keen for our Government to play a positive role in finding a just peace.

The Green Party also calls on our Government to help as right now foreign journalists cannot enter West päpua and local journalists who speak out have been killed. The poverty, HIV rates, violence and environmental damage can only be stopped by Indonesia negotiating with the indigenous leadership rather than dividing and ruling them. Our Government is yet to show support for West Papua and we are asking questions about the role of our police force in training Indonesian police given the ongoing state sanctioned abuse of Papuan people. 

May the “Morning Star” fly peacefully from today and may justice be done.

Anyone thinking about buying a vehicle has up to now had a handy free service available through www.carjam.co.nz  The site apparently gets about 1.5 million hits a month, so is obviously providing a service that is very much in demand.

By going to the site and entering the registration number of any vehicle, you can find out whether it is warranted and registered; how many kilometres it has travelled, and also whether there is anything strange about the odometer, for example has it even gone backwards i.e. been ‘clocked’.

If you want a more comprehensive report about the vehicle, as you might want to do if you were getting serious about buying it, you can pay a few dollars and get lots more information, including its fuel efficiency and emission information, and whether it has been reported stolen, or has money owing on it.

In its wisdom the NZTA has announced that from January next year they will charge for every access to the Motor Vehicle Register for basic information.

The NZTA claims that these proposed new charges are necessary for cost recovery. I would have thought that the information had already been paid for by the public in the form of licensing fees, registration fees, WOF and COF costs.  It is an electronic database, and it’s hard to see how giving open access to it imposes any significant cost on the agency.

There are other ways to access the same information, but a free, online service makes it very easy for people to do a quick check and potentially save themselves a lot of grief later when they discover they have been defrauded in some way, with all the costs that imposes on individuals and the community.

The Greens do have some issues about the number of private cars on the road, and our sometimes enforced dependence on them due to inadequate investment in public transport.  But it’s not helpful to take away a useful tool for consumer protection, under the pretext of reducing costs that in the scheme of things can’t amount to more than peanuts.

To quote from the introduction on the site:

“Rethinking Crime and Punishment” is a strategic initiative to increase public debate about the use of prison and alternative forms of punishment in New Zealand.

In the western world, New Zealand is second only to the United States in the rate at which it locks people up. Whatever your view of prison, we think there is a need for fresh thinking and a much wider public discussion.”

We are spending an awful lot of money on Corrections, to the extent that it fast becoming one of the largest single items on the country’s budget.

Most of it goes on building and maintaining prisons and keeping more people locked up for longer.  This is a really dumb way to spend money – wasteful of capital, wasteful of resources, and worst of all wasteful and destructive of human potential.

We in the Greens are believers in evidence-based decision making and practice, and this government often claims to be equally committed to an evidence based approach to policy. 

Actions speak louder than words however, and their drive to spend more and more on containment and a hopelessly inadequate amount on rehabilitation, drug and alcohol treatment, reintegration services, and other real solutions, reflects their confusion. 

‘Rethinking’ is a project committed to presenting well researched and clearly presented information that points to how we can keep people out of prison, make our communities safer and more equitable, save a great deal of money over time, and make a lot of peoples’ lives much better.

For anyone wanting to be better informed to advocate for change, or for those who think the current system is working but are willing to engage with evidence and arguments to the contrary, I encourage you to subscribe to the newsletter accessible on the website.

I hope our minister of finance has a look too.  He said in a speech recently:

 “The politicians’ task is to turn the objective of community safety into some high level outcomes, like reduced prison numbers, or reduced youth offending rates. The public service needs to think about the governance and accountability structure that can drive decisions to achieve these outcomes.

We have any amount of policy analysis and any amount of public support for success. But there is very little accumulated wisdom on what governance and accountability will deliver the desired policy result.”

I think that is a cop out.  There is any amount of information, research, analysis, and examples of how to achieve those ‘high level outcomes’, and a lot of it will appear on this new site.

What is missing is the political will, the courage to ignore the populist rantings of the ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ brigade, and to invest in some long term solutions rather than spending on short sighted responses that will continue to fail.

The council has a lot on its plate in the coming year, not least of all because general tree protection rules that were typically put in place as a defence against the more rapacious forms of urban development in the 90’s fell victim to the Government’s first round  of ‘streamlining’ of the Resource Management Act (RMA).

The reform of the RMA  makes it illegal, as of Jan 1^st 2012, for councils to use general tree protection rules as a management tool for our urban forest, and means trees on private land may be pruned or cut down with no approval required, unless they are scheduled.

Scheduling individual trees is a time consuming and expensive process, and we need a much more comprehensive set of tools to allow councils and the public to manage and protect trees, which are of course crucial to the city’s amenity, biodiversity, and are an essential part of our ‘green infrastructure’.

The general tree protection regime was imperfect, as acknowledged by the Council, the Arboricultural Association and others, but its removal has left our urban forest hugely exposed to the predations of those who take a very short term view of ‘development’ and could drastically affect the quality of our urban environments.

We are currently waiting for a statutory declaration from the Environment Court’s on the interpretation of the legislation, which was called for by the Waitakere, North Shore and Auckland Regional Councils

The Greens will be doing what we can to support the Tree Council and other groups as they lobby local and central government to take a more intelligent and creative approach to the issue.  Watch this space…

The event has certainly come in under the radar, having been announced scarcely four weeks out from the event date, whereas in past years there has been quite a long lead in time that has enabled organisers to build awareness, get a pool of volunteers, and complete all the other necessary tasks to make the day a success.

The short notice reflects two things – the Minister’s recalcitrance in refusing to deal properly with waste issues, and the ambivalence of the waste sector generally, who know that while E-Day has been a useful measure, we should by now have much more robust and long term measures in place to deal with the growing mountain of discarded or unwanted electronics.

The organiser of the event, Laurence Zwimpfer, Chairperson of eDay New Zealand,  has summed up the situation quite succinctly – while acknowledging that the Minister has agreed to allocate some provisional funding towards a more sustainable solution, he also notes that :

“The eDay events are a good stop-gap measure, but compulsory product stewardship needs to be put into place, to ensure that hazardous and scarce materials are not buried in our landfills, or exported to parts of the world where processing is unregulated and likely to result in harm to human and environmental health.”

Minister Smith has chosen not to exploit the opportunities he has in the Waste Minimisation Act, or to really utilise the talents and willingness of the community sector in particular  to realise the intention and the potential of the Act.  

The Minister has belatedly published his so-called ‘Waste Strategy’.  I say so-called because it is one of the most inadequate, directionless documents I have ever seen coming from any ministerial office. This is particularly disappointing given that the publication of the document (that Councils have been waiting on to inform their waste plans) was more than a year overdue.  If one of my second year resource management students had offered this as an example of a strategic plan, I would have graded it a C+ at best and given them a refresher about what the word ‘strategy’ means!

The non-strategy offers two goals – reducing harm from waste and increasing efficiency in resource use.  So far so good, but then the rest of the paper tells us a lot of things we already know; lists what has been done, tells us a little of what would be nice to do, but leaves it to the councils and others to wonder what is intended for them.

The good news is that the non-strategy will allow councils who are coming to grips with waste minimisation issues to get on with it unencumbered,  the downside is that less motivated councils will be able to do very little very slowly and not fear any retribution from central government.

 I’m looking forward to attending the Community Recycling Network’s hui in Wellington next week, as that is where much of the real innovation and energy resides around waste issues, and is likely to be the source of many of the real solutions.

This unidentified billboard has appeared in Cable Street: ugly, inaccurate and incomprehensible.  Perhaps that’s why no one was prepared to put their name to it. 

I can only guess that it is has been paid for by the First-Past-the-Post lobby that is pushing to get rid of proportional electoral systems.

It seems to lament the fact that a fair electoral system delivered a candidate with genuine majority support.  Or is it just using Kerry’s name as an oblique attack on MMP.

Its very hard to tell.  “Vote losers: get two votes’, “vote for a winner: get 1” makes no sense at all. 

It appears that some FPP supporter out there has more money than sense. You would think that if you are going to spend that kind of money on a billboard you would at least make it intelligible.