Posted on 7-8-2002

Green Party Natural Outsider
by Alan Marston

Everyone with an interest and involvement in politics is sooner or later,
usually sooner, faced with a forked path on the road to power and
influence. Being social animals, we all face a choice of how to cope with
social existence. Along the insider path lies (sic) the Confucian
philosophy of obedience and place. The outsider path is the way of Lao Tzu,
author of the `Dao De Ching'. These two supposed contempories were already
reflecting 2500 years ago in the East the same division that in the West
split the Ancient Greeks between support for Heraclitis or Aristotle, two
philosophers who were not contempories. There is no escaping this fundament
of life, it is simply more obvious in politics. We all have to choose, the
choice should be made according to one's nature for I believe we are born
either insiders or outsiders, both perfectly natural with the tension
between them providing energy for movement, change, evolution and balance.

To elevate one path to absolute truth status and attempt to destroy the
other is to invite disaster, as history attests. However, history has never
been given much street cred in the West, especially in politics where it is
re-spun, re-written and denied in the interests of those holding immediate
power. We suffer history's repetition as a consequence, and may well do
again if the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand does not stick to its
nature as the outsider that counter-balances the insiders and prevents the
latter's excesses.

I hope the Greens do not sign and enter into any formal relationship with
the Labour Party in New Zealand, now, or in any forseeable future. The
Greens may only represent 6 to 8 percent of New Zealand's voting public,
but their balancing influence is far more important that that percentage
implies.

Keep them straight Greens, that's your role and though humbling, decisive.