We are being called to the moment

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." ― Arundhati Roy

Here we are again in election season – but this isn't just politics as usual, it’s against a backdrop of intensifying economic pressures, increasing climate anxiety and corrosive information warfare.

The current term is notable for a coalition that has decided it can make a new institutional playbook based on donor requests. Its record of opaque fast-track projects, back channel processes and irregular bills passed under urgency with secret last minute changes, make it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyse any single policy and know all its long term implications. 

We are already seeing catastrophic consequences for some of our most vulnerable people from sloppy, duplicitous legislation where rigour was sacrificed to make up for Nicola Willis’s economic doom spiral or donor point scoring.

Faced with information overload and a barrage of bad faith legislation where advice and feedback is ignored, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, passive and disengaged. Realistically we are experiencing a strategic exploitation of our cognitive limits.

Growing the future we want

The antidote and pathway to better politics is to identify what we DO want as a nation.

We must feel emboldened and encouraged to talk about and connect around the core human values we widely share across all our social groups, to identify the qualities and character we want in our leaders and seek out people who have those qualities. 

We need to chat to our neighbours, be curious about our fellow citizens in the cafes and shop queues and bus stops. 

As communities we must hold a bottom line for the level of cruelty, deception and division we will tolerate from those who have been granted the honour and trust through our democratic process to serve our nation in Government.

By mobilising collective pressure we can facilitate higher expectation of scrutiny and political consequences.

Our diversity, the capacity for infinite creativity possible from the melding of all of our weird and wonderful differences, is our collective human evolutionary superpower. In short we need to reclaim fun, community, robust discourse, being tolerant to each other and recognising we are all in it together to unlock our best selves.

Seed swaps, pot lucks, kitchen table chats, knit ins, dancing for democracy, up cycling, clothes swaps - these are easy spaces to engage with other people with something already in common, a starting point for a conversation.

Some of the mutual aid type events in the US have seen candidates or door-knockers do things like concurrently collect a can for a foodbank, making campaigning a greater service and a way to connect in community meaningfully on that level of looking after each other as well as promoting the candidate through illustrating their values.

Making sure we are registered, encouraging people to vote or volunteering for a party all help make our democracy work.

The more we can keep talking to each other about the things that matter with friends, family and neighbours helps strengthen our interconnectedness and the social fabric of our communities, it helps us work together more effectively when things go wrong and supports us to thrive more when things go right.

The alt-right political playbook where lobby groups and self-interested politicians 'flood the zone' with racist attacks against minorities and shamelessly deploy disinformation to distort valid discourse creates a toxic, destabilising effect on democracy.

Political resistance to imported and locally manufactured narratives requires a range of tactics that both expose the lies and mitigate the attempts to divide the populace. Successful pushback needs to leverage collective weight to challenge systemic injustices.

Change begins with courage and solidarity.

None of us can do ‘all the things’, we need to work with and grow networks that support us to do our thing in a way that contributes to the bigger collective work.

So I invite you the reader to find your thing in this ongoing, necessary, inconvenient, messy work defending our democracy, our collective basic decency and our little slice of paradise.

Kia ora!