What on Earth is Happening?

Industrial society is destroying the planet's life-support systems. It pollutes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil needed to grow food, and the social relations needed to allow people to be healthy and happy. The world's forests are under a death sentence. Pollution has reached the summit of mountains, the depths of the oceans, and outer space.

There is a Better Way of Living

The Greens

• realise a society is sustainable only when it acts in harmony with the natural world.
• are united in their belief that ecological economics and a new political consciousness can achieve this harmony.
• take advice from experts and link it to local decision-making and personal responsibility for the results of personal action.

An Environmental Party - and More

The Green Party is more than just an environmental group. We encompass the entire political, social, and economic spectrum.

All Green Party policies and action - economics, work, social supports, transport, and agriculture - are decided in accord with two fundamental principles:

• care for the earth, and
• care for people.

'Quality of Life' indicators are preferred by the Greens when measuring our own and society's performance - not quantity of goods consumed. Planet Earth is productive enough to support the needs of all, but it can not continue to support the consumer society.

The way we live now is unsustainable, but it is hard to change the habits of a lifetime. By working together, each one of us can more easily accept, then practise, green economics and the quality life-style that nature can live with.

What is the Green Economy?

Until today economics has singled out and valued the energy of human work. Everything else has been taken and exploited as gifts of nature, and not valued. Traditional economics does not understand the real world and this is most obvious in its basic premise: "grow to survive".

The Greens' view is that the environment can not survive the continued growth of industrial economies.

What changes does The Green Party want to see?

Health and education are just as important, if not more so, than our material wealth. The Greens work for the harmonised maturing of our physical, emotional, and spiritual lives.

The Green Party

• is working for a society that values caring, co-operation, nurturing, and sharing relationships between its people.
• accords equal opportunity (and obligations) to people of all race, ages, and abilities; it does not value one sex above another; and within those constraints it respects the rights of people to act to sustain their cultural and natural heritage.
• guarantees the provision to all of the basic human needs of food, shelter, health care, and education.

Our Core Values

Ecology

• The Earth’s ability to provide materials and energy to meet human demands and to absorb our waste and pollution is limited.  Unlimited material growth is impossible. We must shift from today’s consumer society based on perpetual growth to one based on ecological and social sustainability.
•  Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive and the situation is rapidly worsening. The natural world is seen as a collection of “resources” - a planet for the taking.  Our primary responsibility is to learn to live within the ecological limits of the planet, providing for the needs of all people while not threatening the existence of other species and future generations.

Local Self-Reliance

• Communities must be in charge of their own destiny as much as possible.  Resilient, sustainable communities require economies that meet local needs and are locally controlled, minimizing dependency on external forces.
• Self-reliance and resilience is built on public assets placed in the hands of local communities.

Participatory Democracy

• Citizens must have meaningful opportunities to participate in the decisions that affect their lives.  We emphasise democratic participation and accountability by ensuring that decisions are taken at the closest practical level to those affected by them.
•  Enthusiastic participation in the democratic process requires an electoral system in which every vote counts and results in a Legislature that reflects the diversity of political viewpoints of all citizens.

Social Justice and Equality

• A caring society ensures that every person is entitled to basic material security as a right.
• A healthy society is based on voluntary co-operation between empowered individuals in a democratic society, free from discrimination whether based on race, colour, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social origin or any other prejudice.
• The success of a society cannot be measured by narrow economic indicators, but should take account of factors affecting the quality of life for all people: personal freedom, social equity, health, happiness and human fulfillment.

Non-Violence

• We look for non-violent solutionsto promote a culture of peace and cooperation between individuals, within communities and in relations between governments and citizens.
• We believe that local, national and global security should rest on cooperation, just economic and social structures and relations, ecological security, and vigorous protection of human rights.
• The vulnerability of women and children to violence is reduced by building caring and protective communities.