In 20 years' time, as she contemplates having children of her own, what will she think of the education system we built? Did it prepare her for the future or for the past? Has she learned how to live a rich and satisfying life with less energy and natural resources than her parents' generation?
Is she saddled with a huge student debt she may never payoff?
Did the health system invest in keeping her well, with healthy food choices, warm dry housing, and early intervention to catch threats like diabetes and dental problems before they develop; or did it leave her alone until she got really sick, then put her on a waiting list?
The images of her with Augustine and the skateboard, and with Aotea on the swing, are how we like to think of children. It's how they have a right to be. Carefree, healthy, fit, enjoying life. But for too many children it's not like that now. Labour's policy of Working for Families has improved living standards for our second-poorest children, but not for those on the lowest incomes of all. If your parent is a low paid worker, there may now be enough money to afford decent food and the necessaries of life if you are careful. But if your parent is on an invalid or sickness benefit, you don't get that extra help. We will all live with the consequences of leaving those families in need.
There's a call for change at this election. People get tired of leaders and of political parties just as they get tired of their furniture and it seems time to rearrange the room or go out and buy some new stuff. Change is exciting - you don't know quite how it will turn out!
But no-one seems very clear what they want to change to. Let's change from&.tax cuts to maybe bigger tax cuts? From one middle-of-the-road party to another? From Mother Coke to Father Pepsi? We know how different they taste.
If you are sick of the décor and want to change the furniture, why would you change from grey to grey?
The fact is, neither of those parties has a plan for reducing our critical dependence on oil and giving us more security. Both of them say we should do something about climate change but something called "the economy" has to come first. After repeated overseas food safety scares neither of them will defend your right to know where your food comes from so you can make your own decisions. Both will take us into a Free Trade Agreement with the US that will allow transnational pharmaceutical companies to undermine our low cost system of generic medicines and vastly increase the cost of being sick. The US will also demand the right for its corporations to buy our land and to sell their GE food and their GE seeds for planting into New Zealand, unlabeled.
Both Mother Coke and Father Pepsi actively welcome and fund a future of genetically engineered food, grown here. The only differences I can detect is that Labour is more gung ho about GE than National, who prefer to just let it happen through the market; but National wants to further weaken what rules we do have, in the interests of reducing compliance costs! Neither will do anything to encourage organic growing except when the Greens have the power to push them.
The Prime Minister says this election is about trust. OK, I'll sign up to that. Who do you trust to work for real sustainability, not just greenwash? Mother Coke and Father Pepsi, or the Real Green Thing? Who do you trust to take urgent action on climate change and to prepare for rising oil prices? To get our cities moving with a functioning public transport system before they build yet more motorways? Who do you trust to give you the right to know where your food comes from? Who do you trust to keep New Zealand GE free? Who do you trust to invest in preventative health care rather than waiting till you are sick? Who do you trust to vote in accordance with the policies they have put to you, the voter?
If these are the things you care about, why would you change from grey to grey? If these are the things you care about, then the change you need is Green.
There's no doubt that 12 Green MPs - 10 even - would change any government. Even with six, we already have. And that's without even being part of Government. We are ready to play a role around the Cabinet table if we are asked, and if we are offered a policy agreement that meets the present and future needs of our children. During the coming week we'll be releasing the criteria against which we will judge the policies and programmes of other parties and deciding who we could work with in future.
But round the Cabinet table is not the only way to make change. For the last six years we have not supported any government. We have not voted confidence and supply in anyone. We have negotiated co-operation agreements with the last two governments, and voted for each piece of legislation in accordance with our policies. It's called independence, and we value it very highly.
We have used our influence with successive governments to gain funding through the budget process. Insulation of all state houses. Healthy food in schools. Environmental legal aid. Environmental education. Treaty education in schools. Conservation partnerships between communities and DOC. More money for COGS. Testing for food contaminants. Funding for Environment Centres. Quit smoking assistance. A peacekeeping centre. Community internships. All mostly small amounts of money, but the world is a different place, a better place, because of our budget initiatives.
Then there is the legislation we have introduced and passed. Our first bill in Parliament, introduced 10 years ago, set the framework for a comprehensive energy efficiency system. A first in New Zealand. Our latest bill, passed last month, did the same for Waste Minimisation. In the last three-year term, only five private members' bills passed through Parliament. All five were Green bills. Six MPs, 5% of Parliament, and 100% of the non-government bills passed.
We have removed the legal defence for assaulting children. We have ensured young workers aged 16 & 17 get paid an adult's wage for doing an adult's job. We have provided for mothers in prison to keep their babies for longer to create that vital bond that is essential for the child and the most important motivation for the mother not to reoffend. We have improved work-life balance for workers who also care for dependents, by creating a right to negotiate for flexible working hours.
New Zealand is a better place because of Green legislation.
Add to that the numerous bills we have improved thorough the select committee process - like the sustainability clause in the Biofuel Act - and the lobbying and shaming we have done to change government policy. We contributed to the pressure to raise the minimum wage and raise overseas development aid. The Government admits it is spending a lot more on public transport than it would have been without our pressure. We pushed it into reclaiming the rail system. We negotiated numerous changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme to make it fairer and more effective, not least of which is a $1 billion fund to upgrade homes, right across the country, making them warm and dry, with lower power bills.
These issues are not peculiar to New Zealand. There is a world wide movement towards green thinking and green action. The business papers are full of sustainability talk and leading businesses are getting serious about reducing their waste, using energy more efficiently, saving water, redesigning processes to demand less of the environment, and gaining market share because of it.
International movements to find better ways to measure the economy are gaining ground. The international Global Footprint Institute has just published again the date on which the world had used up this years' ecological production and is now living off its ecological capital. That date was September this year. It gets earlier every year.
The Genuine Progress Index is gaining ground as a more sensible way of measuring our true wealth, by excluding negative expenditure like pollution and crime and including uncosted voluntary work with real economic significance. Here in New Zealand Landcare Research has for some years now had a robust tool for calculating a person or a firm's carbon footprint and is challenging leaders to use it and publish the results.
The New Zealand Herald has green pages every issue. We read the daily blog of the couple who are trying to live without creating any waste - and enjoying it. We have new magazines like Good providing the information people need to green their lives and have fun at the same time.
Robyn, who approached me some months ago about energy efficiency, has told you about her journey in understanding and changing her life, and there are thousands like her. We have Transition Towns movements in many NZ communities, working out how to live with less oil, less impact on the climate, growing more of their food organically, riding a bike and sharing transport.
It is exhilarating to find you cam solve some of your own problems in your own life. It is empowering stuff. But my message to those who have recently discovered this empowering way of life, is that if you are thinking green and acting green, it also matters deeply how you vote. You can grow your vegies and insulate your house and ride a bike, but you can't build your own public transport system. We are all in this together. Individual action can go a long way, but we also need to act collectively if we want our country to prepare for a future that will not be like the past. If you are thinking green and acting green, now is the time to make your party vote Green.
Russel Norman's campaign launch speech - 'Vote for the Future'
The real question we need to ask at this election is who will be the voice for those who have no voice.
Who will be the voice for children?
900,000 children and young people can't vote at this election - 900,000 children and young people who have a deep interest in the future of this country and this planet.
They have more at stake than anyone else - it's them that will inherit the world we leave.
Who will be their voice in parliament?
The Green Party will be the voice for those who will inherit the earth.
Who will speak out for parents' right to know where their kids' food comes from?
At a time when Labour and National gang up together, united against the right of a parent to know the true source of their children's food, which party has the basic human decency to say people have a basic human right to know where their food comes from?
Only the Green Party.
We will speak out for people's right to know, while Labour and National protect agribusiness' right to make money.
And who will tell Fonterra and the rest that it's not good enough to sit on your hands while the authoritarian Chinese Government suppresses the truth about poison milk; it's not good enough to look the other way while the Chinese Government spies on anyone using the words 'milk powder' on Skype.
Only the Green Party has the courage to speak out.
Helen Clark belatedly complained that Fonterra took too long to go public while her government didn't go public either after they found out about poisoned milk, and it wasn't recalled for 20 days after the New Zealand government was officially notified by Fonterra.
If you can't trust Labour and National to go public about poisoned baby milk then what on earth can you trust them on. Surely staying quiet about poisoned baby milk is some kind of moral Rubicon which we would never expect a New Zealand government to cross, and then they did.
Who will be the voice who speaks out about poisoned baby food, only the Greens.
Who can you trust to take a precautionary approach to food safety? Who will support sustainable organic food production and protect kids and our clean, green reputation.
The Green Party.
Who will be the voice for the children of the future who will miss out on swimming in a New Zealand river because it's so polluted it's dangerous?
Kiwi parents who had a baby ten years ago might have expected that their child, now ten, would today be able to swim in the rivers and streams where they themselves swam as children.
Yet now that ten year old child can't safely swim in most of our rivers because they are so polluted with effluent from agribusiness.
Who will be the voice for the children of today and tomorrow who will never have a chance to swim in a clean river while Labour and National are in total control?
The Green Party will be that voice.
Who will be the voice for the 111 Maui dolphins that remain? Who will say it is simply unacceptable that the next dolphin to become extinct in the world will be a New Zealand dolphin?
Who will speak up to protect the last 36 New Zealand Fairy Terns whose habitat is threatened by coastal development encouraged by a district council that thinks progress means sub-divisions?
The Green Party will speak up.
Who will speak out to protect the future water supply of Aucklanders threatened by dairy conversions in the Waikato river catchment?
Who has the courage to stand up to the giant dairy companies who want to convert pine plantations to industrial dairy farms across the central north island and then demand that the taxpayer picks up their billion dollar bill for greenhouse pollution?
The Green Party has that courage.
Who will speak out for that threatened species the family farmer under assault from industrial agribusiness; who will speak out for the farmer who is kaitiaki of the land and the rivers;
The Green Party will speak out.
And who has the courage to stand up against the death threats of the fundamentalists who demand the right to beat their children?
Who will stand up for the child living in fear of a hiding from a water pipe or a piece of four by two?
The Green Party will stand up for children and we will stand up against violence.
Who will be the voice for the children and adults growing up and living in poverty? Poverty which denies them the chance to grasp all that this beautiful country has to offer.
The Green Party is a voice against poverty even when it's not trendy. The Greens believe in a fair go for everyone, no matter what side of the tracks you're from.
Who has the guts to say to the roading lobby 'we're sick of subsidising your trucking companies; we're sick of your roads wrecking our cities; we're sick of your pollution; we're sick of all the giant trucks making our roads unsafe.
Who has the guts to say it's not good enough that people can't afford to get around our cities and towns because of rising petrol prices and we need affordable reliable public transport to get to work and home again?
The Green Party has the guts to fight for decent reliable public transport and we'll get you home cheaper and faster.
In a time when Labour and National are competing as to who has the longest motorway, who has the audacity to call out 'the emperor has no clothes' - oil will never be cheap again?
In a time when Labour and National are competing as to who can waste more billions on motorways; who has the audacity to say to the Road Transport Forum we don't care that you're funding the Labour and National party election campaigns, we need better public transport.
Only the Green Party has the audacity to say the emperor has no clothes, that building an empire on oil is like building an empire on sand.
Only the Green Party will build a decent public transport system now. We will make it safe to bike or walk to work and school.
Labour and National are running from the real debate.
They don't want to have the real debate because they'll be revealed for the sellouts that they are - selling out our children's future - leaving a legacy of social, environmental and economic debt which will have to be repaid. The leadership of Labour and National know that when the repo man comes calling they'll be long gone.
Who will be the voice for the generations to come who will ask how could we possibly have suspended disbelief, how we could possibly have bought the argument that we had to destroy the planet to save the economy. At this election Labour and National are asking New Zealanders to buy this argument.
Surely the lesson from the current financial crisis is that you cannot keep borrowing from the future forever.
Only the Green Party recognises this simple truth.
Who will stand beside Ngati Tara in their attempt to save stunning Doubtless Bay in the far north from a council that wants to fill the water with sewerage and fill the land with suburbs and subdivisions?
The Green Party stands beside tangata whenua and all those who fight to protect this country.
Who will be the voice for the heart and soul of Aotearoa New Zealand?
There are plenty of voices in parliament for the greedy of this country. We have a Parliament full of wallets, a Parliament full of stock options, a parliament full of politicians with investment properties; a parliament which gives voice day in and day out to the interests of the developer, the polluter, the speculator.
But who will be the voice in parliament for the land of this country, the people of this country, and for the very earth itself?
The Green Party.
We are a nation led by politicians who are racing towards a future that they cannot see or understand because they have their faces turned towards the past. Every year they run faster, using more resources producing more pollution, running ever faster while looking where they have been instead of where they are going. Hoping that magic will save them from the reality that there is only one planet and resources are limited.
Who will have the courage to turn around and actually face the future?
The Greens will face up to the future and won't live in the past.
We know that we must urgently reduce our greenhouse emissions.
We know that we must urgently prepare for rising oil prices.
We know that protecting safe healthy food is fundamental to all that is important to us and our children.
In a world made uncertain by out of control financial speculation on Wall Street, we need to learn to value what is important.
In Aotearoa New Zealand we are blessed with a fantastic natural environment. It is the foundation of our economy, we must treasure it and look after it.
And in Aotearoa New Zealand we are a fantastic people. We have potential for greatness. Michael Joseph Savage showed that we can lead the world in looking after people; the nuclear ban showed that we can lead the world in looking after the world. Now we can once again lead the world by making clean and green a reality instead of a slogan.
At this election don't waste your vote on the old grey parties, don't vote for the past.
At this election vote for a strong green voice in parliament, vote for the future.
Party vote Green.
