Greens accept price of being in government
In many ways, this weekend’s Green Party conference felt like a return to normal.
Two hundred or so members – mostly white-haired older folk, with a sprinkling of the millennial Left – packed into a high school hall in Palmerston North to talk about waste minimisation, the problems of capitalism, and the party’s complicated internal infrastructure.
The stage was covered with pot plants, the walls covered with posters reminding members of the party’s achievements in Government, and just before the final announcement of the weekend, MP Julie Anne Genter posted on Instagram that she had just cycled to the hospital to have her overdue baby.
This was the Green Party’s first annual meeting in Government. It was a chance for the party to wrestle with the fact that the cost of actually doing things was likely doing some things you aren’t proud of.
That reckoning mostly happened in a room not open to news media. We know that the party is reviewing all of its ‘‘documents’’ – basically its constitution and an agreement between the membership-elected executive and the party’s MPs.
The party has three interlocking ‘‘petals’’ – the caucus, the executive, and the policy committee – and before this Government there was never really a time where they couldn’t at least all talk about the same stuff, and instruct MPs to do what the membership wanted. Now the Greens have ministers of the Crown, there are several things it can’t talk to its wider membership base about, and decisions that have to be made on New Zealand constitutional terms, not Green Party constitutional terms.
The review will likely give MPs a little bit more freedom to act without consulting members on every decision. A rare dog is back in Timaru after a traumatic move to Wellington that went wrong and sparked a nine-hour dash around the capital – which not even a car hitting the canine could stop.
Dog -lover Christine Small felt helpless in Timaru as news came in that Peaches, her 1-year-old ibizan hound, was dodging Wellington traffic and at risk of being shot while the pet zipped across the city from the Mt Victoria and Terrace tunnels through to Molesworth St.
‘‘I was beginning to lose hope we’d get her back alive,’’ Small said. ‘‘I got a text saying the police were on their way, and that’s when my heart sank.’’
While Peaches was eventually cornered on Molesworth St, Small had no idea where she suffered a broken leg when hit by a car.
‘‘People had been posting on Facebook, spotting her all over the place.’’
Small, who owns four of the six ibizan hounds in New Zealand, decided to give Peaches to a friend who wanted to put her on show in Wellington, where the breed is not often seen. The plan was that she would return to Timaru in three years for breeding.
But the plane trip from Christchurch left Peaches distressed. ‘‘She struggled like mad and got out of her collar.’’
The July 10 ordeal lasted from 4pm to 1am, and when Peaches was finally caught, she was found to have a compound fracture, meaning bones had pierced her skin. ‘‘I didn’t care that she had a broken leg because at least she was alive,’’ Small said.
Peaches is now close to a full recovery but has racked up more than $5000 in veterinary bills, prompting a fellow ibizan hound owner in Christchurch to set up a Givealittle page.
‘‘Once she was home, she was her usual Peaches,’’ Small said. ‘‘She’s made it quite obvious she wants to stay here.’’