Transcript located here."Prof. Chomsky went on to describe the Brazilians analysis, he said and I quote: "We know we're in a cage. We know we're trapped. We're going to expand the floor, meaning we will extend to the limits what the cage will allow. And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking the cage when we're vulnerable, so they'll murder us. You have to protect the cage when it's under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it. Unless people are willing to tolerate that level of complexity, they're going to be of no use to people who are suffering and who need help."
We too, in Aotearoa, live in a cage. We are caged by the State, a political and economic system that relegates basic human needs and ecological integrity to the fringes of our existence."
That's right, she uses her maiden speech to approvingly quote Chomsky on a method of abolishing the state. Also from her personal profile:
"My personal political journey has led me to the reasonable conclusion that the
present state has no legitimacy..."
Now I am no statist, and I think a healthy degree of scepticism towards state expansion should be a requisite of any sensible political philosophy. And I think that you will find it present in some form or other in most modern thinkers. However (and this is characteristic of left-anarchists) Turei (via Chomsky and some South Americans) sees this scepticism as consumated in first an expansion of the state (ie through massive restructuring of the market-based system) and then its abolition. So the scepticism towards the role of the state is an 'I could do it better' scepticism. In that sense it is no scepticism at all, merely a distrust of the current administrators.
I think that the powerful parties in New Zealand (and the developed world) have a shameful record of environmental degradation. But if the Greens keep finding people like this who are more about nostalgia for 60's-era political radicalism than saving the environment, they can count on me not touching them with a barge pole. I prefer coherency in the political beliefs of my elected officials, insofar as I can get it.
Through their support for inititiaves like the Buy New Zealand Made campaigns and their bafflingly rabid opposition to giving poor Chinese workers jobs through trade deals, the Greens are already one of the most (perhaps, to be fair, inadvertently) racist parties in parliament. They are already smuggling in radical political views on the back of people's genuine concern for the enviroment. If the retirement of the highly respectable Jeanette Fitzsimmons causes them to further venture down this road, they should be repudiated by any voter with an ounce of empathy and sense.