The Greens plan for a Green Budget

The Green Party gave their annual State of the Planet speech yesterday. The video replay is on RNZ or Facebook. Text of the speech is on the GP website.

Speaking are the co-leaders, first Chloe Swarbrick and then Marama Davidson. It feels like a more succinct, streamlined speech this year (coming in at 26 minutes)

Swarbrick goes hard against the government’s trickle-down economics and austerity politics, and outlines NACT’s current strategy of overwhelm and hopelessness,

Trickle-down politicians and their donors have spent at least forty years coming after our public services, our media and our democracy, but it’s clear now more than ever that their real target has been our hope.

The hope that better is possible.

These guys want you exhausted and angry and disillusioned. It means you’re disempowered.

Too exhausted to think at the end of the work day.

Too angry to see the problem clearly.

Too disempowered to look around and see all the other exhausted and angry people, and to understand that if we all spent a moment to find our common problems and common solutions, everything could change.

So, conveniently, all across the world, after decades of privatising and underfunding the public services people need to live healthy lives and participate in society, after decades of creating the conditions of poverty and extreme vulnerability and isolation and mental ill health… After creating this exhaustion and anger and despair, the right wing knows those feelings have to go somewhere.

Swarbrick also announced their plans for a Green Budget to be released in May. This is the budget they would present if they were in government. Very good to see this bold move, I expect both vision and details.

Our budget will not be a defence of the status quo.

Our budget will show you how we already have everything we need to ensure everyone enjoys our basic rights to a clean environment and stable climate. Everyone is housed, everyone gets healthcare, everyone gets education. Everyone gets the genuine opportunity for a good life.

That’s because we believe in the public good. And we’re sick of this Government’s pathetic pandering to privatisation.

At the start of Davidson’s speech, there was this potent Grandmother moment where Davidson shares about her recovery from breast cancer last year and how spending time with her mokopuna each afternoon was healing,

My mokopuna are rongoā. My mokopuna, just by being the embodiment of my ancestors – are a reminder of all that we love. Of all that we must protect.

Over the many months of cancer treatment, one of the most profound experiences of healing was daytime nana naps with my moko babies. Where I had any assortment of my three babies, asleep and at peace with the shared vibrations of our heartbeats and gentle breathing. Getting to enjoy this has been a precious blessing.

This is what I would wish for all our MPs, even when they are well. I say Grandmother moment because it is the antithesis of the hard man political culture we have in New Zealand (on the left and the right), which reinforces pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality.

Not that Davidson doesn’t also have this kind of strength and purpose, right? But what is missing from our mainstream politics is the ability to tend to the parts of ourselves and our society that need care and attention. That’s all of us. Parliamentary politics is brutal, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

This value on care is inherent in what Swarbrick is saying as well. If we start with the proposition that government and the economy exists for the wellbeing of people (and planet), then we can design good policy, economics and governance that flows from that. This is miles from what National, ACT and NZ First are doing, it’s like they’re on another planet altogether.