Greens should put snails, whales before socialism
enjoy their sport and the people on the sideline or the people involved in running teams have a different opinion.
‘‘Sometimes, to be perfectly honest, they express it in particularly unsavoury manners.’’
Walsh denounced what he calls a ‘‘pack mentality’’ among some fans.
‘‘One of the problems is when someone has something to say, everyone else seems to think it’s acceptable and joins in,’’ Walsh said.
‘‘It was only a couple ago I actually removed of weeks someone from the playing field. This person was screaming about things happening on the field.
‘‘I just stopped the game and said ‘right, you’ve got to leave. Otherwise, the game won’t carry on. He wasn’t particularly keen on going, but there were two choices — him going or no rugby.’’’
Walsh has received a sympathetic ear from 11-year-old Jack Riley.
The first XV forward crafted a letter about the booing of referees as part of a writing exercise at Wellington’s Wellesley College.
‘‘Professional referees have been booed too much, really,’’ his read. ‘‘It’s got to stop.’’
‘‘Referees are booed massively when they make a call going against the home team. These referees are professionals. They know what they are doing, so just let them ref the game,’’ he wrote.
Jack reckoned booing officials would increase pressure on them and could lead to them making mistakes, particularly if the referee lacked experience.
He felt booing and jeering from adults set a poor example for young people.
‘‘It’s bad for everyone.’’ letter
Iwas once stopped by an earnest young Greenpeace collector soliciting donations. I declined and sought to move on but she was persistent and full of youthful enthusiasm.
Why not, she enquired optimistically. Don’t you want to save the planet?
The problem, as I patiently mansplained to this future hippie, was that I didn’t mind the Green, it was the Peace I objected to. Greenpeace’s agenda has moved well beyond saving whales and even co-founder and past president Patrick Moore denounced the organisation as having taken a dramatic turn to the political left.
There has always been a tension in our own Green Party between those who want to focus on saving endangered West Coast snails and former Alliance members wanting to embrace Hugo Chavez-style socialism.
Wanting to save the planet isn’t the preserve of the left. Even rabidly anti-government extremists like myself are aware that there is a market failure when it comes to pollution; if it costs nothing to dump industrial waste and fresh corpses in a river then you are going to end up with the Ganges. A role for the state in preventing the fouling of waterways and protecting West Coast snails isn’t unreasonable.
However, this week’s memoryholing of two long-standing Green MPs confirms the drift from an environmental to a socialist party.
Kennedy Graham has a Phd in nuclear disarmament and he brought some intellectual heft to the Greens’ environmental agenda. I’m not sure what David Clendon brought to the party, and given his relegation down the list neither was anyone else. But, still, their ejection signals the last nail in the recycled, untreated timber coffin of the Green Party’s environmental agenda.
The new crop of earnest young candidates is focused on saving the last working mother from the indignity of paid employment and wouldn’t know an endangered snail if they slipped over one on the dance floor.
This is a shame because protecting the environment is something that most of us agree with but the economic incentives to pollute make it difficult for industry to be both environmentally friendly and profitable.
A role for the State here can cross party lines. However, given a choice between losing the occasional breed of snail and living under a government run by the collection of malcontents and publicity hounds that will form the next Green’s caucus it seems likely that the snails will have to fend for themselves.