Click to play

If you’re having problems with our Flash player, try this alternative site. This podcast series is now available on iTunes.

Click to play

If you’re having problems with our Flash player, try this alternative site.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, had this to say about her: “Jeanette is a pre-eminent national and international campaigner, politician and thinker. She’s been at the cutting edge of Green politics in a world where it’s the only answer. Besides being a good friend, she is an enduring Green warrior.”

And she came of age right here in New Zealand. Along with Rod Donald, Jeanette joined the very first green political party in the world – the NZ Values Party – in 1974. Jeanette had to wait until 1996, however, and a change to a fairer proportional electoral system (MMP), before having the privilege of being the first actual Green to speak in the New Zealand Parliament. She was acutely aware at the time that she stood on the shoulders of thousands of New Zealanders who had worked tirelessly to see green ideas and policies represented in our Parliament.

Thanks in part to Jeanette’s inspired example, there are now plenty of Green leaders emerging. Other parties often go down with their leader. The Greens represent a new force in politics which is growing around the world and which is essential if the peoples of the world are to have a future.

So what happens now? Unlike other parties, the Greens don’t change leaders with a coup in caucus; our leaders are chosen democratically by members of the party through a vote of branches at our annual conference. This will take place at the Greens’ annual conference in June this year.

So we’re about to farewell the most trusted face in New Zealand politics, someone who fought tirelessly to give a voice to those on the margins. Her own words this morning say it all: “We want more people to share the secret of real happiness and satisfaction in life, which comes not from having more but from being more, and from being part of a society that values all its members, and values the land, the water and the other species with which we share them.”

US wheat inventories have now reached a 60-year low and wheat prices have risen by 50 percent in the past month. Global wheat stocks are expected to fall to a 30-year low shortly. With global oil production relatively stagnant as the demand for more oil from Asia and the Middle East continues to grow, biofuels production has been plugging some of the gap.

Food and energy are converging so that to a considerable extent they can be used interchangeably as dictated by market forces. In the last six years, land for biofuels has increased from 12 to 80 million hectares worldwide as subsidies and national policies mandating their use are driving the biofuels substitution for oil. The US is offering subsidies of $.50 to $1 per gallon and the EU is attempting to reach a 10 percent biofuels target in the next three years.

Many knowledgeable observers are worried and are predicting that famines will break out in the underdeveloped world during the next 18 to 24 months, due to declining availability of grains for export and worsening climatic conditions. The recent snows in China are believed to have caused considerable crop damage and Beijing is becoming increasingly concerned about the prospects for feeding its 1.3 billion people.

All this suggests that policies mandating the use of biofuels and biofuel subsidies may have a very short half-life as the reality of inadequate food supplies overcomes cries of “energy independence.� The elimination of mandates and subsidies would put more pressure on petroleum products and force prices still higher.

Our government is keeping it’s head in the sand about peak oil while even members of the US government have conceded that the debate is over. Global food prices are sky-rocketing, making our agricultural industries very happy, but meantime our working poor and beneficiaries are getting squeezed financially while the government turns a blind eye. As for biofuels, mandating biofuels up to 3.4 percent, as the current legislation would require, is easily achieved in New Zealand simply from our current waste stream. It remains to be seen whether the government will put teeth into the sustainability standards for biofuels that the Greens have negotiated.