Last Straw

To keep the wheels rolling while I attempt to bal­ance work and other com­mit­ments with this blog I’ve decided to start post­ing some writ­ing I did back when I became politi­cised in the early days, which got me won­der­ing how I did become politicised…

With an apolit­ical upbring­ing, and although I do remem­ber hold­ing some pretty strong polit­ical views through­out high school, I hadn’t paid atten­tion to all that much besides get­ting into trouble and girls up until this point.

It was shortly before the 1999 gen­eral elec­tion, I had just fin­ished a highly read­able book, Eat­ing Safely in a Toxic World, by Sue Kedgley, and I was about to vote for the first time in an elec­tion. I had nar­rowed my choices down to the Greens or ACT. With a toss of the coin and luck on my side I made the right decision. When the Greens’ won a bunch of seats that year, includ­ing one for Nandor Tanczos, a South African Hun­garian Rasta­far­ian Kiwi, it spurred me on to go find out what was hap­pen­ing loc­ally and see if they wanted any help. With a new found optim­ism in polit­ics I was soon writ­ing too many let­ters to the editor of the local rag and began writ­ing and pub­lish­ing the local Green Party news­let­ter, GreenGauge, and a new but short-lived Cent­ral Province news­let­ter, Green­Vine.

It wasn’t long before I was being trained up to take over from local mem­ber Angie Denby as Exec­ut­ive Net­worker for the Cent­ral Province; it was a reward­ing exper­i­ence being on the Green Party Exec­ut­ive. Some­where around this point I stood in elec­tions for my local city coun­cil, not long after which my par­ents kicked me out of the coun­try, buy­ing me a one-way ticket to Lon­don (well two actu­ally, I missed my first flight). With Green Party ties still strong and unwaver­ing optim­ism in par­lia­ment­ary polit­ics I stood for par­lia­ment in the 2002 gen­eral elec­tion while in Lon­don, cam­paign­ing for expat votes and par­ti­cip­at­ing in my first debate since I was about 12, with Ken Shir­ley, Tim Barnett and other politi­cians. It was easier than I thought it would be; many in the audi­ence appre­ci­ated what they said was refresh­ing hon­esty in the face of seasoned politi­cians. I like to think I helped Mike Ward get into par­lia­ment, although I think I for­got to vote myself!

The world changed quite a bit around this time, with the ‘what goes around comes around’ attacks on the U.S.

I exper­i­enced my first (power­less) mass demon­stra­tion, against the inva­sion of Iraq, which partly cul­min­ated in me writ­ing why I’m off to Iraq on on 1 Janu­ary 2003.