The campaign thus far

It's been an exciting campaign this election for the Greens, especially to see us climb up and up in the polls! Now we're well into the final two weeks, and we'll be pushing really hard to make sure that translates to many more new Green MPs on polling day.

Today I helped launch the Wellington transport policy, with a press conference on a trolley bus. Then I did some doorknocking in the afternoon.

As the Green Party's list candidate stationed at Victoria University, that was the main focus of my campaign - though with exams over, and everyone dispersing, the campaign has all but wrapped up there. Of course I want all students to remember to vote, and know that they can vote early too!

At Vic we handed out lots of fliers, and spoke to heaps of people; participated in We Are the University demonstrations to ensure education is made a priority at Vic; put on a successful gig; signed up lots of volunteers (I'd like to say it's the most successful year for Greens@Vic ever!); had a sausage sizzle.

And of course we ran the Wellington's Crappiest Flat competition. I recently did an energy audit on the winner's place, and found the unsealed, damp ground the flat was built on was making the floorboards rot, and everything in the house mouldy. As shown in their photos, their drawers needed to be cleaned of mould every month or two, and so their clothes constantly smelt of mould (one of the flatmates saying their friends at uni pointed this out to them one day).

With the subsidy of 60 percent for insulation for landlords with low income tenants (students!) that the Greens got National to fund through our Memorandum of Understanding (and the further 200 000 homes we'd like to see insulated in the next term of Government), I hope landlords like this one see the light and insulate! The mould issues were damaging the landlord's investment, as well as the students' health (with issues like eczema flaring up). Of course, if landlords don't insulate, the Green Party will be introducing minimum standards for rental housing if we get the chance, as no one should be able to rent out unsafe, substandard housing. At least many landlords are convinced by the subsidy, but not all are for some strange reason.

Last week end, before kicking off the final two weeks at a lovely BBQ at Wellington Central Candidate James Shaw's place, we had the Young Greens' online launch which saw us using a Google+ hangout, which was lots of fun. And we also got the many young candidates videoed, talking about why we are standing for such an awesome Party.

My speech from a debate on the Emissions Trading Scheme

Here is my speech I gave last night in a debate at Vic University about the Emissions Trading Scheme. I like to think I won, so below are my convincing arguments so you can judge for yourself!

Tena koutou katoa.

My name is Zachary Dorner, and I'm proud to be standing before you as the Green@Vic candidate, campaigning for the Party Vote for the Green Party this election year. It's great to see Environment Week rolled out for another year – something I had the pleasure of doing last year when I was Environmental Officer. It’s great to see what an excellent job Haley's done this year. Thanks to VUWSA for organising this important debate about an issue close to my heart.

Emissions trading schemes are a bit like Weetbix. Many people find them bland, they have a complicated structure with many layers, and unless you sweeten them up (and add some milk) they are hard to swallow.
If you add too many sweeteners to Weetbix, and too much milk, you get a sickening mess, and you lose all nutritional value of the Weetbix. And that’s what John Key did as soon as he got into power. He added billions of dollars worth of subsidies (sweetners) to our biggest polluters, put too much milk on the New Zealand economy and environment, and left tax payers to foot most of the bill. No nutritional value, no environmental or economic benefit, just a big, sickening, soggy mess. John Key’s ETS was a failure from the start.

The Green Party has a plan for a smart green economy that works for everyone – the people, the environment and our future.

Although the evidence is all around us, and there’s a near consensus of climate scientist on climate change, that it is real and caused by humans, some people still need convincing. Last year was the warmest year on record – roughly equal to 2005 and 1998. And record temperatures continue. If that’s not enough for year, here’s what the NZ Herald said last Saturday (16 July):

It began with the China floods in May last year, coinciding, in June, with widespread fires and drought in Russia, coinciding with record breaking monsoon flooding in Pakistan that killed 1,500 people and left 20 million homeless. That was followed by a "once-in-a- century" drought in the Amazon - except that the last once-in-a-century event in the region happened just five years before.

In December a million hectares of Colombia was underwater. Sri Lanka had its heaviest rains for 100 years. The Philippines had four weeks of sustained rain in January, Brazil had catastrophic mudslides killing 600 people and then Queensland was inundated - the flood waters covering an area larger than Germany and France combined.

In April the mighty Mississippi and Missouri rivers swelled to record levels causing spillways to be opened and mass evacuations, followed by one of the largest tornado outbreaks in American history. Meanwhile a nine-month drought continues to parch Texas and Oklahoma and China evacuated some 500,000 people in June from floods along the Yangtze River following the worst drought in 50 years.

New Zealand meanwhile has experienced record temperatures, record flooding in Whakatane, and a host of unusual weather conditions, including two tornados – one deadly one in Auckland, and one on the Kapiti coast.

As predicted, climate change is bringing unstable weather, and a climate in which it is harder to grow our food - already raising global food prices - and harder to plan for the future. A future our generation is meant to inherit.

In order to deal with this issue, a research levy on agriculture emissions was proposed in 2003, later ditched due to lobbying from farmers against what they called the “fart tax” (though everyone knows most emissions come from cow’s burps). Then a carbon tax was proposed, and ditched around 2006. This was followed by the release of Al Gore's movie about climate change, which promptly convinced the then Labour Government that something needed to be done – so they constructed a hideously complex ETS instead, which was passed in 2008, with the help of the Greens and NZ First.

We had strong reservations about it, but with just 6 MPs, we had limited sway and felt it was important to get a price on carbon – though not without improving the scheme as much as we could before supporting it, including a billion dollars into a home insulation scheme. It was a start.

Enter John Key's National Government. Ignoring old bowls of soggy Weetbix laying around the Ministry for the Environment, as soon as he got into power, he trashed the ETS. He halved the price on carbon, took the cap out of the “cap and trade” system, and added in billions of dollars of subsidies to our largest polluters, which are allocated via a non-transparent process. Polluters will not pay their full and fair share for their pollution until around 2084 under the scheme. Not very smart when you’re borrowing $300 million a week.

Any emissions reductions achieved in the short run will be negligible – possibly around only 0.7% below business as usual by the end of next year, by which time we should have done a lot more. What the science tells us, is that developing countries need to cut emissions by 25 to 40%, below 1990 levels, by 2020 - which we are already over 20% above in NZ. Arguing with the science of environmental limits is like arguing with an oncoming bus – the laws of physic will win every time.

Meanwhile, an ETS, especially one as weak as the current one we have in place, needs other measures to be in place to ensure emission reductions. John Key instead has decided to commit nearly $10 billion to build just seven new motorways over the next three years, increase our mining on conservation land (yes, he's still planning to do that, just not as bad as originally planned), drill for oil in our deep oceans with little or no regulation to prepare us for an oil spill, and allow some of our best farmland in Southland to be mined for lignite, the most dirty form of dirty coal.

So clearly John Key does not care about the environment, does not care about our generation, and he certainly does not care about our most valuable asset – our clean green brand in our beautiful country.
Luckily we have the Green Party in Parliament – the Party with the best understanding of the economic and environmental situation we find ourselves in. Whether we care or we don't, New Zealand's clean green brand is worth a lot of money. Further, the global economy is going green, with or without us.

The green economic wave is coming, could be worth $6 trillion annually globally already and we can either let it swamp us, or ride it from our prime position. As the new business group Pure Advantage points out, we risk loosing this prime position – slipping from number one in the international Environmental Performance Index, to number 15 last year in the space of just 5 years. The Green Party has a plan for a smart green economy that works for everyone, that will reverse this decline.

In terms of climate change, the Green Party’s current policy is to improve the ETS, though our first preference has always been a carbon charge, recycled into income tax reductions. This goes along with our plan for ecological tax reform – to tax bads, like carbon emissions, and reduce taxes on goods, like income.

We would improve the ETS by putting a cap on emissions, and make sure we cover taxpayer liabilities under international agreements like Kyoto as fast as possible. We will also put a cap on how many international credits can be purchased, so emissions reductions are at home, like Australia is planning. This is important to ensure we move towards a smart, green economy here in New Zealand, rather than paying others to do it for us in their countries.

And of course we need to look at the resilience of our entire economy, to make sure we are the full package – the real deal. So the Green Party will transfer money from motorways into better, faster and smarter public transport, to make sure New Zealanders have choice in how they get around, and that they don’t bear the brunt of rising petrol prices. We will protect our most treasured places, and ensure any mining done is not going to wreck our beautiful country, or our climate. We would clean up our waterways. And we would use our public assets (rather than selling them) to partner with private industry, to develop clean tech and green tech, such as Whispertech’s current partnership with publicly owned Meridian Energy.

By taking these important steps, and having an economic vision for New Zealand, we will transform our economy into a smart green economy. We will be playing to our Pure Advantage and we will be setting ourselves up for future prosperity with a quality of life that we can be proud of.

John Key’s ETS was a failure from the start, and so is his lack of economic vision. Only a Party Vote for the Green Party will ensure a we create smart green economy that works for everyone, so we have a future worth looking forward to.

Greens@Vic launch our campaign!

 

About a month ago, Greens@Vic had our campaign launch. Yes, the rumours are true, I am running for Parliament. A great time was had by all, and we raised over $200 on the night, and at the bake stall earlier in the day.

First Green MP Dave Clendon spoke about the importance of being enrolled to vote, and voting yes to MMP in the referendum (second pic).

Then we heard from James Shaw, the Wellington Central candidate (first pic), about how important Greens@Vic are to the campaign for at least 30 percent of the Wellington vote.

Then I spoke about the election, and our campaign at Vic (which you can now donate directly to online!). It will be a great year - an awesome time to be involved.

I will post my speech here next week when I can get access to it (am in Christchurch at the moment). There are more pics from the launch here. I'll also post any updates about the ridiculous ban on "political activity" at Vic - not sure what its meant to mean for clubs, but so far we plan on doing what we were always planning!

So stay tuned to zackarateisland for what will be an exciting campaign.

Kindle me books

I got me a new Kindle in the mail yesterday from Amazon, one of the first of a slowly growing selection of ebook readers. They use E Ink screens, which don't use any battery power until the screen has to change, and are easier on the eyes as they are not backlit like the LCD screens we know and use all the time.

I got one because of the amount of screen time I have at the moment, especially with many of my readings for University being in PDF format to save paper (which is fair enough, especially given some of my courses). I'm also a bit of a techno geek.

So, what's the deal with the Kindle? Well, it's not ideal in many ways, and not necessarily A1 with the Green Party's Information Technology Policy (pictured on my Kindle). That's because Amazon has made every effort to sell their Kindle's to make money of selling ebooks off their website, where you can choose from over half a million digitised books, along with some magazine and newspaper subscriptions. They make it clear they own the software on your Kindle in the terms and conditions, and have programmed the Kindle not to accept the widely used, open source format ePub. This is the format of Google's free books, many of which are free because they are no longer under copyright. As far as I can tell, most of these types of books on Amazon, when available, cost US$0.99, though some are free.

The Green Party's IT policy is all about promoting open source software as a collaborative and sharing alternative to the relatively monopoly of Microsoft's software, which you have to buy a license to use. (For the record I use Ubuntu).

Then there is the infamous (in the US at least) time that Amazon ironically removed copies of 1984 from everyone's Kindle who bought one when it became clear that it shouldn't have been sold by Amazon in the first place. This made many question what owning a Kindle and an ebook really meant when it came to Amazon.

The good news is, that there are converters you can download online, to convert ePub and other formats to Kindle-friendly formats, and upload them to you device from your computer.

So why did I go with the Kindle, when all other main ebook readers available, including the ones for retail sale in NZ (from Whitcoulls), are open source friendly? Cause it's a good deal, one of the best, and has a browser (and I wanted to be able to read the news online for free. I'm a poor student, OK?). It cost me NZ$250, including shipping and an NZ adapter plug for the basic, Wifi model.

And there are always ways around their software trickery...

From economics to harsh reality: my last week

So I finally have a chance to post - would love to show you my pictures, but will have to leave it till another time. I write from northern India, Dharamshala, where I find myself and my girlfriend Raven, after a week of travelling.

Since my last post I finished exams (just found I got an A+ in one of them, which is awesome), went to a Ecological Economics conference run by the Green Party of Aotearoa, and then shipped off to India (OK, flew. Sorry future generations.)

The Ecological Economics conference was an interesting way to spend time the day after my last exam (on more conventional macroeconomics) but I couldn't pass up the chance of seeing David Suzuki speak. He's an inspirational speaker, and started the conference with putting us within a bio-centric perspective. Instead of the economy, society and the environment being three interlocking, equally-sized circles, a more accurate model, he suggested, was one big circle, signifying the biosphere, and thirty million circles within it - one for each species. The human one though, takes up 40% of the area, and is rapidly expanding. Population and consumption of resources by humans has sky-rocketed almost vertically and many times in just 200 years - a tiny blip of time in the 150 000 or so years of modern humans. Although lost on some other speakers in the conference unfortunately, Suzuki also pointed out that 80% of resource-use is by the wealthiest 20% of the worlds population - a fact no leader of a wealthy country will freely admit. And so a few days later I was off to where the rubber meets the road in this reality - India.

India is one of the great emerging economies, with a high economic growth rate, a poor population overall, around one billion inhabitants, and an emerging wealthy class, taking more than their fare share. I arrived late at night in Delhi, after a day tour around Singapore, which also has a high growth rate, but is more wealthy overall. Four million people situated on a tiny island, with 90% housed apartments in the sky through a government scheme. It's a very clean and wealthy city, with a mind-bogglingly busy port, and an ironically interventionist, single-part government; ironic given it's incredibly high rate of economic growth. It was a great juxtaposition from the city we were about to find ourselves in.

We had heard Delhi was a horrible place from many different people before we got there, and we arrived a quite Indian man from our hotel to pick us up and take us there. The ride from the airport felt like a destruction derby - with less destruction, and more derby, but the car with the front bumper hanging on by a couple of screws, squealing around beside us, certainly increased the destruction side of things. They are incredibly skilled drivers, as we were to discover, weaving in and out of optimistically-painted lane dividers, fitting in as many vehicles into a small space as possible, and beeping to say "I'm coming through!" rather than relying on the silent and leisurely indicators we use in the West. Our room was nice - three star, and we quickly fell asleep.

Our first day was a bit of a walk to get orientated, around Conaught Place, near our hotel. Dogs, dirt, and toilet smell all through the street. Many an eager rickshaw driver, tout and salesman tried to sell us something, or convince us to use a "Government" tourist bureau. Lots of people complimented my beard before trying their tricks - the next day it was Raven's Indian dress she bought the day before to fit in more appropriately with the culture. Despite our best efforts we were screwed over a couple of times - something that gets easier to avoid the more time you spend in a place. I thought this was free market capitalism at its best - game theory of each person trying to screw over the other, especially as they don't think they will ever see you again in the vast city of millions. Needless to say it was quite horrible.

We got to the Red Fort and a Muslim temple on day two. It was also the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, where they sacrifice animals (best to read the link to get a less simple an naive account...). Coincidentally there were lots of goats being traded that day, and lead around the city to people's homes or wherever. We ate some spicy food and gave ourselves horrible stomach pains, and the next day got the hell out of there, to our relief.

Yesterday we flew into Dharamshala, and got a taxi to just north of it, Mcleodganj. Here the Dalai Lama resides, we're at the foot of the Himalayas, and everything is Free Tibet. It's a nice quiet place - slightly spoiled by all the rubbish and fast traffic through its narrow one-way roads - but it's great to be here. We're here for at least the next week, and the internet is surprisingly good, so you'll hear from me soon!