Questioning the Greens

There’s an election on Saturday.

And despite NZ facing the most challenging economic times since records began, and government being both responsible for it and also responsible for making it worse, most people I speak to couldn’t give a shit about it.

And that includes those I speak to in the mirror. (Fear not, folks, they don’t yet speak back. Not all of them anyway.)

Why so little interest?

Perhaps because the differences between two main parties don’t amount to a hill of beans. Not even a small plateful.  (Which is not how you could describe the mountain of debt the government has been racking up “fighting” the economic depression.)

There is so little interest in the contest because you could not slide a ten-year government bond certificate between the two main parties.

One says government debt is way too big and has to come down, yet last year they added to it by an extra nineteen billion dollars, in just one year alone!  The other says government debt is too big, and they want to grow it by only sixteen billion dollars. Or thereabouts. (To which the first party replies that while their adversaries want to spend like drunken sailors, they on the other hand want to grow it by only fourteen—give or take a Treasury paper or two.)

With “differences” like this, no wonder few people give a shit. Except about the trivia.

And no wonder the Greens are emerging as a political force, because whatever else you say about them, they do represent a different point of view.  They do actually make a fundamental challenge to “business as usual” politics. (Where the other parties at least give lip service to worrying about the debt, for example, the Greens don’t bother. They just say we should pour billions more down similar holes, just as long as those holes look like Solyndra. And Spain.)

Yes, they’re still mad as hatters, But no wonder they are allowed to speak utter nonsense and get away with it, because most of the media who should be challenging them on their madness and delusions have been indoctrinated since birth in the same warm, soggy mush that is smeared across all the party’s policy positions.

So to help out the few voters (or journalists) who do want to challenge the Greens (or who know they should have), Liberty Scott has done some spade work for you:

• Why do the Greens get such an easy ride? Part One, and
• Why do the Greens get such an easy ride? Part Two
  - 50 questions that should have been asked of the Greens

The latter  is

a long list of questions journalists should ask, and YOU should ask if you are thinking about voting Green.   They might make you wonder if the Greens are quite so cuddly and inoffensive as the media makes them out to be.

You can thank Scott later.