Graham Kennedy: General Debate 
Graham Kennedy: General Debate 
[Volume:653;Page:2552] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 I rise to initiate a series of four statements to be advanced by the Green Party over the next month. It is our intention to put forward for public consideration a general statement addressing four themes: the problems we face in today’s world the inadequacy of traditional politics to meet the challenge the Green political philosophy for the 21st century and the Green economic programme for the next decade. 
Humankind is entering the age of reckoning. In earlier times Earth’s erratic climate precluded sedentary agriculture and thus any ordered society. For the past 10 millennia a stable climate has allowed us to tame nature in a relatively empty world where resources were abundant and our numbers sparse. Through technological ingenuity we went forth and multiplied in the belief we were inheriting the Earth. Over the past two centuries the human population has grown from 1 billion to 7 billion and our terrestrial inn is full. In the past half-century the global population has doubled yet global GDP has grown fivefold in global trade and twentyfold in volume. The world economy driven by the classical economic precepts of resource exploitation and unlimited growth has overheated. In the past century each human’s Earth share has shrunk to less than half what it was—from 5 hectares to 2. Yet as our Earth share has shrunk our ecological footprint has expanded recorded now at 2.7 hectares per person. With greater numbers and a larger footprint we now record an ecological overshoot of 25 percent beyond the planet’s carrying capacity. We are today colliding with the limits of Earth’s finite resources—limits that are elastic but that can snap. Economic hubris precedes ecological collapse. 
As part of that overshoot this generation is bequeathing severe global environmental problems to the next leaving behind us an impoverished planet. We have engaged in extensive deforestation and desertification of the land surface and have damaged some 20 percent of the coral reefs. We have created an ozone hole in the atmosphere that is injurious both to agriculture and to human health. We are causing climate change of unprecedented magnitude and we face the catastrophic potential of global warming with storms and droughts ensuing crop failure and debilitating sea level rise. We are on the way to a human-induced mass extinction of Earth’s species—at our own hands. In the worst-case scenario over the next century human civilisation itself will be under severe strain. 
To compound matters in the past two decades we have engaged in a frenzy of unlicensed financial adventurism giving vent to individual and corporate greed of shameful immorality. The resulting financial meltdown has caused a global recession of proportions not experienced for many generations. Last century repressive communism imploded and a necrotic mindset withered away. This decade predatory capitalism has exploded and that voracious mindset is undergoing death throes of a character all its own. 
From the wreckage of such ideological excesses we search for a rational and balanced way of life but the short-term financial emergency obscures a clear view of the long-term ecological crisis. We in New Zealand believe ourselves to be insulated from the worst of both crises. Our banking system has been more responsible than elsewhere. Because of our rich national resource base and sparse population we run an ecological surplus. Yet we are an integral part of the rest of the world. The global fate is our fate. Any nation that believes it can survive the global ecological crisis and prosper with positive good fortune is not only self-centred but self-deluded. 
There is no choice. We must change our mindset our way of life our governmental management and our political direction or we shall experience ecological collapse. This goes for New Zealand as assuredly as it does for the rest of the global community. Traditional politics of the kind embraced by National and Labour in this country will fail us in our time of need. The Green Party with its new and positive philosophy offers the answer to these problems as my colleagues will explain in subsequent statements. 
I seek leave to table a document called  
Prosperity Without Growth? The transition to a sustainable economy 
. It is by the Sustainable Development Commission of the United Kingdom. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: The member is seeking leave to table that document. Is there anyone opposed to that course of action? There appears not. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.