Vernon Small: Greens save the last dance

Spend a few days at their annual conference and it strikes you all over again.

The Greens are different ... and not just in the obvious ways.

The hair, the beards, the woolly pullies, the organic food and booze are ritual parts of the media coverage now. As is the dancing.

Last year in Nelson the evening social had some faintly self-mocking folk dancing lessons. The television cameras swooped and the public image was set for the year.

This year the organisers arranged a party off-site at a city nightclub.

But less than an hour into the first full conference session, Nandor Tanczos' music track was on the PA system. A few souls couldn't resist the urge.

Within minutes the whole room was on its feet swaying to the beat, and the television crews were beaming. Another lasting image of a dotty political party dancing before brunch; more Green media managers with their heads in their hands.

The point of all this is that on one level the Greens are still as much a movement as a political party.

They do what they do because they enjoy it, believe in it and see no reason to gild the lily. Acting a part might deliver more votes but that is not why they are Green.

Which brings us to the moratorium on the commercial release of genetically modified organisms and the Greens' promise to vote against any Government that lifts it.

The conference heard a barely veiled warning from CTU president Ross Wilson that a failure to compromise could damage the prospects for centre-left Government. Politics is about compromise, not absolutes, he said.

But the Greens believe they have already compromised enough by allowing the present level of GM research and field trials. Rightly or wrongly, they think they have done all the giving and now it is time for Labour to bend on this single issue.

The conference set no other non-negotiable bottom lines and co-leader Rod Donald even conceded that on free trade the party could hope only to "soften" Labour's agenda.

But on the GM moratorium there is an implacable unanimity.

Barely a day before Wilson's advice, the 200-odd delegates had been faced with an amendment that would have maintained the "greenmail" threat to bring down the Government - but only until the party was satisfied that science had shown GM releases were safe.

It would have done no harm, and it might have blunted some of Prime Minister Helen Clark's attacks on them for "turning their backs on science". It could even have set the first bricks in place for a bridge-building with Labour.

Other parties would have looked at the political possibilities and explored them thoroughly; would have started fashioning some "wiggle room".

The Greens, sprawled on the floor of the whare at the Waipapa marae, brushed the amendment aside with hardly a glance.

They know the chance they will ever be convinced that GM organism releases are safe is close to nil, so why pretend?

You see, they don't dance for the cameras. They dance despite the cameras.