Private school debacle shows Greens might have lost their focus

THE Greens’ coleader and associate finance minister James Shaw clearly made an error in approving funding to the Green School New Zealand (ODT, 29.8.20) in that his party is opposed to funding private schools.

He’s apologised to party members, noting that ‘‘it didn’t occur to me that we had an exclusion on funding of private schools.’’

Perhaps what did occur to him were the stated aims of the Green School New Zealand: ‘‘a K12 educational approach focused on naturebased learning and sustainability . . . to create a school that nurtured green leaders — leaders who shaped not only their own future but also the future of the world around them.’’

Shaw’s confusion was understandable. The real trouble is that the Greens are only peripherally interested in green issues.

I have supported green causes and engaged in green action for 30 years and have seen the increasingly loony left take green causes into a political space in which many conservationminded people feel they cannot belong.

What exactly is not ‘‘green’’ about private schools? How is the cause of conservation helped by — or even consistent with — being proimmigration, supporting homosexual marriage, being proabortion and euthanasia, or legalising cannabis?

Conservation issues worldwide urgently need to be detached from fringe politics.

Glenn Hardesty North East Valley

TARANAKI Green School. Wow. A storm in a teacup or a serious error of judgement?

The old guard from the Green

Party are in no doubt. Government money, with the blessing of the

Green Party, being spent on private education.

What next! Political oblivion or pragmatic advancement of the green agenda?

Green schools — a private initiative to foster the green message through the curriculum and through daytoday school activities. One could be forgiven for thinking the idea comes right out of the Green Party playbook. Not so.

Spending $11.7 million in this manner wouldn’t have been my first choice. However, with the attendant publicity, it may be the catalyst, the spark, that stimulates inquiry and exposure to the public of a raft of good green initiatives that are currently not seeing the light of day. Evan Alty Lake Hawea

Cannabis

KEVIN Burke’s letter (ODT, 1.9.20) states that he knows of half a dozen people who used cannabis in their youth and now lead normal and productive lives — so why make something legal that leads to deviant behaviour? And to Jeanette Saxby (Letters, 1.9.20), why add to the existing legal drugs?

Henry Schakelaar

Abbotsford