Why the Green Party?
I come from an anarchist background, politically. The idea of being involved in parliamentary politics was a total anathema to me for a long time. But when I was in England I met this guy called Shane Collins, who's a Green over there. I met him through the anti-roads movement where he was involved in direct action. When I went back to London, he was running for Council as a Green Party candidate. That really blew me away. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone combining representative politics with direct action politics. It was the first time I saw you can enter that arena and keep your commitment to grassroots direct action.
When I moved back to Aotearoa, I didn't join the Greens right away because they were a part of the Alliance, which to me represented a very old-school form of left-wing politics. A very patriarchal type of left-wing politics. When the Greens left the Alliance to become an independent Green Party in 1997, I joined that day. Because I felt the Greens were able to articulate a different kind of vision of what politics is and a different vision of what the future of this country and this world could be.
