Green Challenge

Nandor has confirmed that he'll be back in parliament. While it's really tragic how this has occurred, I think it's great to have him back.

A lot of people in and around the Green Party seem to disagree however, to judge from these comments on frogblog.

(As I commented on the blog) I think these people are very misguided.

To me the challenge for the Greens is to build support amongst their natural constituency - young people. Youth is very badly represented in NZ politics - I don't know if it's Māori or old-English concepts of elders being betters, but we have an extremely grey parliament. Even in the Green Party, all but Nandor and Metiria are over 50.

The Greens lost votes at the last election - next time, 6% of the voting population will be first time voters (today's 15-18 year olds). The challenge for the Green Party, IMHO, is to engage with those people. Getting even 20% of their vote would give the Greens a 1% increase overall - and I can't see this is hard - if you polled a bunch of teenagers their opinions would, I suggest, engage very closely with the Green Party's policies.

Nandor needs to be part of this - and yes, it *is* important that to many young people that they don't risk a criminal record merely through choosing to ingest certain substances.