Thursday 6 October 2016

Make Our World a Better Place: The First Step

Re-posted from now defunct WordPress Account

This weekend, Queen's Birthday Weekend, (June 2016), I have been attending our national Green Party Annual General Meeting here in Christchurch (actually at Lincoln just outside of ChCh). Our Aoraki Greens Province hosted and I was a delegate, also Accessibility Co-ordinator. We had an awesome and even historic meeting this weekend with the current leader of the NZ Labour Party invited on Saturday afternoon to speak to us, following this weeks signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Green Party of Aotearoa (that's us) and the NZ Labour Party.
This MOU means that our two parties will now be working together to Change The Government over the next 18 months to the next national election and we are very likely to form the next government together, how that will look depends on the percentage of votes each party is able to get under our MMP voting system here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
It is so important now that we do change the government. Our current government brings shame upon our country and our people. Under the current government we have witnessed a level of corruption never seen before in this country. We have witnessed our waterways contaminated to the point where it is no longer possible to swim in our rivers anymore. Dogs have died after drinking riverwater. Most of our rivers are mountain-fed and up there high in our mountains our water is pretty pure, but then as it travels down to our coasts the water becomes highly contaminated by cowshit, pesticides, and fertilisers, then industrial waste.
Down here in Canterbury, our democratically elected Environment Canterbury (ECAN) has been fired and a government appointed ECAN board has replaced them. This board fails to punish any transgressions made by rich corporate farming, so much so that when Hugh Fletcher's cows were photographed by a tourist, walking in and shitting in a conservation lake in the high country, practically no action was taken and the Fletcher dairy cow have actually been photographed again, walking and shitting in those same lakes. Sir Hugh Fletcher's company, incidentally, was appointed by our current government to drive the Christchurch Rebuild. This rebuild has many issues around it also, not necessarily connected to Fletcher's. That's another story.
This current government has also seen to be deceitful internationally. While giving lip service to reducing emissions in Paris, in fact, over the time the government has been in power New Zealand's carbon emissions have actually increased. This while companies have been encouraged to buy fake carbon credits from Russia to make it look as though we were lowering our emissions. Shameful.
And then there are the Panama Papers from which New Zealand has been shown to be enabling the very rich and rich corporations to avoid paying taxes in their own countries ( which probably includes taxes your countries should have received) and also enabling illegal and criminal groups to launder their money). Why? Because the law firms here that create those 'trusts' earn millions of dollars in fees. Oh no, says Mr Key, that would never happen here. Well it does.
One could fill books on the corruptions, lies, deceits, of this government. In fact Nicky Hager already has, starting with The Hollow Men.
During the terms of this government which is all about money, let us be very clear about that, we have also seen the ever-widening of the gaps between those that have and those that don't. It is now estimated that one in every hundred of children here are living in poverty, living in cold, damp homes. Rents have risen astronomically, especially in Auckland and in Christchurch, and now we have more and more homeless people. We have families living in cars. We have children as young as 11 living under bushes. We have children going to school hungry and not having a lunch with them. A while ago, Hone Harawira of the Mana Party introduced a bill to feed the children in the schools and this National/Act coalition voted it down. They really did. They voted against feeding kids. That is how low they are.
#Changethegovernment

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