Are the Greens ten feet tall?

"Luckily someone managed to capture on video some of the speeches that high ranked Green candidates gave at the Green Party conference a month ago," boasts the Green's Frog Blog, which luckily enables us to observe the calibre of some of these newcomers who are ranked so highly by their peers. Taken together, they look like a group of people running for the job of class blackboard monitor, with all the poverty of understanding of the modern world that implies. Here's just some of the highlights from their show reels that caught my eye:

• "The Green Party may not yet have achieved total economic and environmental transformation of this country," says self-described “activist, feminist, mother, gardener, writer, teacher, mediator, advocate, and stand-up comic” Catherine Delahunty, but we have pulled down lots of government money to pay our community activists, and "we are the only party with majority pakeha membership that has stood up in Parliament for Te Tiriti O Waitangi." Easy to see why she describes herself as a "stand-up comic," even if the humour is unintentional.
  
• To "fix" Maori smoking, says health board bureaucrat Kevin Hague, "all we actually need to do is honour the Treaty of Waitangi." It's so simple, who would have thought?
  
• What really motivates me to stand for the luddites, says the really unmotivating David Clendon, is "the ability the Greens have, and I think it's unique, to be able to identify complex problems and to see solutions." David, by the way, is a consultant and lecturer in the Resource Management Act, making him very definitely part of the problem.
  
• Under a Green foreign policy, says lecturer and bureaucrat Kennedy Graham -- a subscriber to "the hand wringing school of foreign policy" -- we will not labour under "misplaced fears ... but by reaching out to all peoples, [will] banish those fears together." If only Neville Chamberlain could have had Kenny boy as his adviser when he gave away the Sudetenland for peace -- it really would have been peace for all time, eh?
  
• My motivation for standing, says the baby-faced Gareth Hughes, is my new baby son. "He deserves, when he is older, not to have to ask for the right to bring a child into this world." Whatever that means. Passing over that inanity he concludes, to canned applause, "In 2008, we're going to show that future generations are bigger than politics..." And obviously bigger, too, than things like basic logic.

These are just some of the high ranked Green candidates seeking your vote at this election -- not to mention 856 of their facile one-size fits-all solutions.

And not to mention the Greens' co-leader person Russel (with one 'l'), who told parliament in his maiden speech that "in the Auckland CBD there is a memorial to Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, it is a casino in the shape of a syringe," and who took up parliament's time last week so he could tell everyone how he caught the bus to 'work.' (I looked in vain for the former Green Party high-flyer who only missed the last election because he was sent to jail for grievous bodily harm.)

Anyway, this is the calibre of the "newcomers" to a party which maintains that the welfare of snails should be placed before human beings.

Luckily, someone's been capturing on video some candidates from another party offering something far more sane.