Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Closing plenary - Working together to build an alternative
Sunday 31st July 2005

Back to conference program

Rod Donald MP

Co-Leader, New Zealand Greens

He mihi aroha, kia kotou katoa

Thank you for inviting me to your conference. As a representative of your down under kiwi cousins I would like to start by saying that we are all in this together.

The same corporations already own and control both of our economies. Your four big banks are our four big banks. Qantas and Air New Zealand want to merge. Toll Holdings runs our trains (but doesn’t own our rail track). Our Minister of Finance wants a common monetary policy, and I suspect a common currency. There is already a Trans-Tasman so-called Food Safety Agency – read Protect the Interests of Food Corporates Agency, where New Zealand has the same status as an Australian state, and, despite overwhelming opposition, plans for a joint therapeutics authority too.

Australia is New Zealand’s largest trading partner. It’s been a one-sided affair with our trade deficit reaching a new record of $1.4 Billion for the year to June – the 18th deficit in the last 20 years – thanks to you exporting more Arnotts biscuits to us than you import Griffins biscuits from us – ditto Streets ice-creams versus Tip Top ice-cream, wine, meat, milk, oats, soap, and a whole lot of other basic products that we used to make for ourselves, using local raw materials and keeping local people in jobs.

The end of cheap oil may spell the end of such nonsense but I suspect that for as long as corporations are allowed to continue rationalizing production in pursuit of profits, we will continue to pay for the privilege through higher prices and more job losses.

And, while our government didn’t invade Iraq, it sent frigates to the Gulf, it has just sent more SAS troops to Afghanistan and it continues to host US military and “intelligence” agencies on our soil.

The ANZAC memorial in Canberra says “Our history, our hearts and our homelands are richly intertwined, yet strikingly distinctive. Our futures will be together as two strong and independent nation states."

It will be a challenge to keep it that way as corporations continue their relentless drive to not only dominate our economies but also our respective societies, by subverting and supplanting democratic institutions through the co-option of our political leaders and the centralization of power in institutions that they seek to control, such as the WTO.

We – the people - are the alternative to corporate globalization. We are the antidote to McCafes, McMansions, McMindControl. We, the people, celebrate diversity. We recognize that, as with ecology, diversity is society’s strength, and that, as with nature, monoculture is destructive and unsustainable.

As Phyllis Bennis said on Friday night, “another world is possible, but we have to build it!”

So our challenge is not just to fight free trade agreements and foreign control and every other retrograde assault by the right on what we hold dear. It’s to build self-reliant economies – at both the local and national levels, where we, the people, own the means of production, distribution and exchange.

It’s to strive for social justice – locally and internationally. It’s to repair and strengthen our social fabric. It’s to reclaim our political sovereignty so that we determine our own destiny. And it’s to do all of the above in an ecologically sustainable and peaceful way, so that this planet is still worth living on and we still want to live with each other.

Sounds daunting? It is but, as Margaret Mead wrote: “Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”.

So how do we change the world? By making our passions our causes, and by working together to turn our dreams into reality.

We all have different passions. That’s important because we need to work on multiple fronts to be successful. We’ve got to put our money where our mouth is – buy fair trade and locally made, save with local institutions, set up and work in co-operatives, live simply so that others can simply live.

We also have to find the right balance between fighting bushfires and focusing on foundation issues, such as your flawed, unfair electoral system, which excludes good people from being elected to positions of political power. Proportional representation for all your parliaments is the crucial prerequisite and a broad-based campaign is needed to achieve it.

Yesterday I saw a brochure advertising a conference which posed the question “parliament or people power?” The answer must surely be “parliament is people power!” All too often the wrong people get into power and these politicians and their parties fail to live up to their principles and our expectations, but is that sufficient reason to give up on representative democracy?

As much as I love community based activism – and I’ve spent more time doing it, including setting up a co-operative business and a housing trust that are both still going strong 25 years on, than I’ve spent as a Green MP in parliament - I don’t see it as being strong enough alone to counter corporate control.

We need to reclaim our democratic institutions. We need to get our people elected to positions of power.

That means mobilising people to not only vote for the right people but to also get more of them to stand for positions on the local council as well as for the state and federal parliaments. And it means endorsing and supporting and getting active in the right parties.

The conference provides a blue print, or should I say a green print for a better world – a charter to link us all together. This conference has certainly provided me with lots of stimulating brain food, something we don’t experience via the mass media. There is no substitute for the human relationships that develop from exchanges such as this.

But enough talk. Now it’s time to get our hands on the ball instead of shouting advice from the sidelines. We may not like some of the rules of the game but we have a much better chance of changing them once we are on the team. And it’s the only way we get to convert tries into goals – our collective goals of sustainability, justice and peace. Sanity will prevail in the end.

New Zealand Greens website

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to conference program