Are you going to the Save Live Music rally on February 23?

If you saw The Age on Sunday, you might be wondering what the Greens position is. It’s simple - we know there is no link between live music and violence, and we want liquor licences to reflect this. Today’s letter for Greens MP Sue Pennicuik explains more about this below.

See you on the 23rd.

Letter from Sue Pennicuik MLC

To all Melbourne musicians and music fans,

Make no mistake: the Australian Greens are tremendously proud of Melbourne’s famous live music culture and we lend our full support to the upcoming Save Live Australian Music (SLAM) rally on 23 February.

That’s why we are sending out an email to all our members in Victoria, encouraging them to come to the SLAM rally, where I will be speaking on behalf of the Victorian Greens.

An article in the Sunday Age (7/2) inaccurately reported that The Greens voted against a Liberal motion in Parliament regarding live music. In fact, The Greens abstained from voting on the motion, because, as often happens, there were parts of their motion we couldn’t agree with.

During the debate we made very clear our opposition to the requirement that venues must provide security guards when live or amplified music is played, even where there is no history of violence. This senseless requirement is crushing Melbourne’s live music culture and it’s making it very hard for musicians to find venues with live audiences. The closure of The Tote shone a light on this issue, which has forced other small venues to simply stop holding live music.

Certainly, preventing harm from alcohol-related violence is crucial, and The Greens will continue to support evidence-based, positive approaches for reducing such violence. However, music doesn’t cause violence.

The Greens are your genuine supporters of live music inside Parliament and out on the Melbourne streets. We will do whatever we can to ensure that Melbourne’s live music scene continues to thrive. Have a look at our four point plan that outlines how we will make sure that live music remains viable.

On a personal note, I have been going to live gigs around Melbourne for years and years. It is one of my great pleasures in life. I have many friends who play in bands, so I know the issues facing our musicians and Melbourne’s live music culture.

Thank you,

Sue Pennicuik, Greens MLC and Spokesperson for The Arts

In the first real week of January, when most people are still on holidays, and those of us who aren’t are pretending we are, the state Minister for Roads has made a decision on clearways.

Bridge Road trader Herschel Landes’ great letter to The Age yesterday explained what it was about:

Conflict of interest

LAST week the Minister for Roads announced a determination of a ”dispute” between VicRoads and the cities of Yarra and Stonnington (”Clearway tussle”, The Age, 7/1).

For whatever reason, Mr Pallas himself determined the dispute, about the ”process” VicRoads followed in its policy on clearways. The trouble is that Mr Pallas is an involved party and therefore subject to a conflict of interest.

The minister was advised in 2008 that a consultation process with all stakeholders was essential before a final decision and implementation plan was adopted. But the minister jumped the gun by declaring, on April 29 of that year, that a standardised clearway decision was non-negotiable, claiming that the legislative provisions did not apply to his decision.

He was later advised by VicRoads the process had to be as close as practicable to the code of practice.

Mr Pallas approved what we believe was a non-compliant consultation process and asked for it to be accelerated.

It is interesting that new clearway signs were being arranged by VicRoads well before the completion of the consultation process.

In August 2008, Minister Pallas announced the commencement of morning clearways and that afternoon clearways would be rolled out at the start of 2009. However, VicRoads had only recommended implementation of morning clearways. Mr Pallas has yet to explain on what basis he made his decision.

For the minister to now make a determination about a process in which he was heavily involved is unacceptable on any level of governance.

Herschel Landes, Bridge Road Traders ”No Clearways” committee, Richmond

Clearways are supposed to speed up tram time. I say supposed to, because the government is yet to provide evidence that they do. The PTUA has had a look for them, and found that clearways save 14 seconds. Which hardly seems the justification for turning streets into traffic sewers and strangling business on local streets.

The Yarra Greens Councillors explain clearly what the problems are here

http://greensonyarracouncil.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/.

It comes on the back of the state government’s announcement that it will build what The Age describes as ‘massive underpasses’ under Hoddle St, at a cost of ‘at least $750’.

The roads lobby clearly has the state government firmly in its grip.

In contrast, Greens are getting real results for sustainable public transport, as the Yarra Green Councillors blog describes, with council adopting a bike strategy that will “deliveery five major separated on-road bicycle routes over the course of five years, five on-road (car park space) parking facilities for bikes each year and numerous infrastructure works that will build upon the current bicycle network”, all of which will lead to doubling the number of people riding to work by 2015. As well, as the councillors’ blog explains, “a major advantage of having a strategy is that Council will be able to respond quickly to external funding opportunities as our infrastructure priorities are documented within the strategy”.

The bike strategy was one of my initiatives when I chaired the council Bicycle Advisory Committtee, and it’s great to see it come to fruition.

On Friday, just about the time the world’s leaders were waiting in Copenhagen for US President Obama to speak, I was standing in front of a world they seem unable to imagine. In my case, however, no imagination was necessary – I just had to look. In front of me, the snow-clad roofs of the council houses were covered in solar panels, a striking picture of a near-perfect policy.

Huddersfield - the unlikely solar capital of the UK

If climate change is, as Professor Garnaut says, a ‘diabolical’ policy problem, here in Huddersfield, Kirklees Council seems to have found perfect policy solutions. Or, more accurately, Green Party Councillor Andrew Cooper and his three Greens councillor colleagues have.

'Snowlar' panels in Huddersfield

Half an hour out of Manchester by train, snowy Huddersfield seems an unlikely spot for the solar capital of the UK, especially to Australian eyes used to connecting solar and sun. But, with a tiny minority of Kirklees’ 69 councillors, the Green Party has transformed this town, and, in perfect, ‘virtuous circle’ policy, combined environmental good with social and economic good. It’s an interesting lesson in minority governance, and the potential gains of a well-used balance of power. It’s been years since any party has had an absolute majority on council, and the Greens have used this ‘instability’ to get a wide range of parties to fund people-focused, environmentally friendly programs.

Take the insulation program. Starting as an area-specific project to insulate the homes of over-60 year olds, it is now close to winding up, having offered free insulation to anyone in the whole council area. The Greens successfully pushed for this expansion, and amended the Council’s 2007 budget to make the scheme free to all households . Door-to-door assessors have canvassed the whole municipality, offering the free service. For the many pensioners and other Kirklees citizens, it means an extra 200 to 300 pounds in their pockets each year, no small thing when heating bills are so high.

Cllr Cooper tells me the program has created around 100-200 permanent jobs. ‘Permanent?’, I query, ‘didn’t you say the program is about to end?’. It’s true, he explains, that the program is winding up, as they’ve finished insulating homes in the Kirklees Council area, but the council’s commitment to the program meant that Kirklees now has a base for a national insulation company with a training facility

Andrew estimates that the free program has had three times the take up an ‘able-to-pay’ version would have had, and when you take into account the savings to low-income households, the health impacts of warmer homes, the 55,000 tonnes of carbon saved, and the jobs created, it seems like a significant return on the money spent.

The many solar photovoltaic installations in the area have been funded from Kirklees’ renewable energy fund, which began with 140,000 pounds from savings because of a legislative change, and which Kirklees has used to lever millions of pounds, including from utility companies. Importantly, the UK national government has set carbon reduction targets for utility companies, which are then in turn looking for emission reduction programs to invest in. In the absence of either our state or federal governments doing something similar at home, a huge potential source of renewable energy investment is being wasted.

Standing on the icy street looking at the ‘snowlar panels’, as Andrew calls them, (it works better with a Huddersfield accent than an Australian one), you can feel why bringing heating costs down matters so much. Heating bills are huge (and with rising heat in Australia, you can imagine that cooling bills will increasingly be similarly onerous in Victoria, particularly for people on low incomes). Which is where one of Andrew’s other programs comes in.

Cllr Andrew Cooper (photo courtesy Cllr Cooper)

From street to snowy street, in both council-owned homes and private ones, houses are covered in solar panels, for both hot water and electricity. The private housing is funded through Kirklees RE-Charge scheme, which provides an interest free loan to pay for solar panels. The beauty of the program is that the loan doesn’t need to be paid until your house changes ownership. The panels don’t meet all people’s energy needs, but they cover a fair chunk. And once the government’s gross feed-in tariff program comes in, it will be a money-maker, again, a real boost for people on fixed incomes.

The promise of the gross feed-in tariff has been an important policy enabler. Because the council knows it will make money from the tariff, it can borrow to invest in the solar panels confident it will be able to pay the debt off through the income from the electricity generated. Again, it’s a missed opportunity in Victoria, where our government voted down Greens MPs’ amendments that would have made the Victorian feed-in tariff program gross, rather than net. (Under a gross system, people are paid for all the electricity they generate, creating a significant incentive for installing renewable energy infrastructure such as solar panels; under the Brumby Government’s version, we will only be paid for the excess power generated. In the ACT, where the Greens also have balance of power, there is a gross feed-in system. This approach is modeled on Germany, which has used gross feed-in to drive significant take-up of renewables.)

Andrew is hoping to take it further. He’s exploring, with council, the possibility of borrowing against the projected income from the feed-in tariff payments to roll out solar electricity everywhere in the municipality, starting by extending solar in council homes. Under that scheme, householders and council would split the income from the electricity – council would take enough to cover its investment, and, without any outlay, residents would have an income stream as well. As with insulation, it’s a great policy – good for individuals economically and in terms of health, and good for the environment.

On top of that, Andrew says it’s changing communities. Previously the areas we’re visiting had significant problems; since the panels have gone in, life has improved, with fewer social problems. He doesn’t know why, he says, and then half-jokes about the ‘civilising effects of solar panels’. Perhaps in a world where we’re so defined by our consuming, he ponders, it’s about the shift from consuming to producing. People are proud of the electricity they generate, he adds; armed with their smart meters, old people compare notes with their neighbours about how much they have generated that day. I wonder whether it is in part because disenfranchised communities are seeing their elected representatives paying them serious attention, or if contributing to solving our environmental problems makes people feel better about themselves. Regardless, as with the insulation program, it’s delivering social, economic and environmental benefits. Another virtuous policy circle.

Primrose Hill for air (photo courtesy Cllr Andrew Cooper)

There’s lots more happening. The mayor, Green Julie Stewart-Turner, is championing a local food focus which is taking off, they’ve won a ten-fold increase in spending on allotments (up from 30,000 pounds to 300,000 per year), the council has a 30% renewable energy requirement for all of its buildings, and there’s a wind turbine on the civic centre. Importantly, council has developed the capacity to deliver many of these programs in-house. Some areas have solar street lights; others have new LED lights that use dramatically less electricity than conventional lights, and which, in the future, could be programmed to be dimmer at different times (for example pre-dawn, when fewer people are out and there is less need for lighting). Greens Councillors have set up a pilot program to give people free ‘water butts’, small plastic tanks. In contrast to home, where tanks are part of our response to drought, here they are needed because of heavy rain, to take the strain off the drainage system and help minimise flash flooding. Once again, it also cuts bills, in this case for water.

Solar lights in a Huddersfield park

On a different note, Greens councillors have successfully fought for more police cars in rural areas (where police previously had to catch the bus or walk!).

And over New Year, when the local bus company stops running, the Greens councillors will be among other volunteers driving the buses, so people can still get around, something they’ve been doing for 17 years. ‘It all began as a protest against bus services being withdrawn over the Christmas period’, Andrew explains in the Kirklees Green Party news. ‘We now have Boxing Day services back in our area but now we need to get a return of the New Year Day’s service. We will continue to campaign for their return until we win!’.

As well as being on Kirklees Council (plus working full-time), Andrew is on the Green-dominated Kirkburton Parish Council (a more local elected body), which has a 10,000 pound renewable energy fund. The Parish Council recently put solar panels on the Burton Village Hall, anticipating that they would save 500 pounds off their electricity bill. Now that the feed-in tariff is coming in, this could be doubled – a real saving to rate payers. For this and other initiatives, Kirkburton Parish Council last year won the British Renewable Energy Award for the best project of a public body. The judges said, ‘this small parish council appears to be doing more than our national government to promote renewable energy’.

As my tour with Andrew is about to finish, we pull up at the lights behind a white truck. It’s one of Kirklees’ electric waste trucks, and, almost as an afterthought to the rest of the tour, Andrew explains that waste collected is incinerated (as is common in Europe). Less typically, the heat generated is converted to electricity, he explains, in effect fuelling the truck that collected the waste in the first place. Another virtuous circle.

Kirklees electric truck

After a day with Andrew Cooper, it doesn’t surprise me to learn that he was named by The Independent newspaper as one of the 100 most influential environmentalists in the UK (59^th) in 2008, the only councillor included.

Just across the North Sea, on that same day, two different approaches to climate change were on stark display. In Copenhagen, the greatest leaders of our age staggered and stalled, seemingly unable to see, let along make, a path to a just future with a safe climate. In the cold Northern town of Huddersfield, I saw a postcard from the future, where rational, economically viable solutions to climate change are working for people and the planet.

Hear Councillor Andrew Cooper talk about Greens initiatives in Kirklees, or follow what they are doing at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Newsome-Green-Party/98801773714?ref=mf.

If you read yesterday’s blog, you’ll know I talked about what Green Party councillors across the UK are doing about social justice and poverty. I talked about Lewisham Council, which I incorrectly said was a proposing real London Living Wage. As you’ll see from the comment at the end of the post, that needed updating (which I’ve done). This is what the person who kindly wrote to correct the record said:

The LLW was already paid to direct employees of the council, but the council now includes the London Living Wage as a consideration when inviting contractors to bid for tenders.  The most recent group to benefit are gardeners / groundskeepers.  Lewisham is the first borough in London - and possibly the country - to have implemented such a policy.

Thanks for letting me know!

I was reminded what an issue poverty is in Edinburgh this morning, although the number of people begging in the streets already had me wondering. There are many signs along the main road near where I was staying telling people what to do when the debt collectors come. Having a living wage makes a lot of sense.

It takes me a few days of worrying about my wallet being stolen to realise that I’ve read too much Dickens. It’s not that I don’t seem any crime – a young Korean woman comes distraught towards me on one my first few days in London – £200 has been stolen from her hand, straight from the ATM, in sedate Bloomsbury. It’s just that my wallet is safely sitting in the bottom of my backpack, and there’s no sensible reason for the anxiety I feel about it, save exposure to Dicken’s fabulously evocative stories.

Despite seeing homeless people sleeping rough, it’s Dicken’s London that I’d expected and so somehow, poverty doesn’t seem as widespread as I’d subconsciously expected. No nineteenth century street urchins here, it seems, at least not in the tourist areas I’m visiting.

I’m wrong, of course. Forty per cent of London’s children live in poverty, I learn from Jenny Jones, Green Party Member of the London Assembly. It’s a fact Lewisham Green Party Councillor, Ute Michel, knows too well – Dickens’ London hasn’t gone, she tells me. In Lewisham alone, nearly 10,000 people are out of work.

I start to see what she means a few days later. I’m visiting a drop-in centre for women in street prostitution in Kings Cross. A woman comes in, having just won a run in with the police. She’s clearly had a rough life, and the police aren’t making it any easier. She was heading into the drop-in centre when the police picked her up. She breached her ‘ASBO’, they tell her, using the nasty acronym of a nasty weapon against the poor, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Using an ASBO, police can ban someone from entering an area, and they are convinced she’s breached the ban on her coming into this area.

In fact, she hasn’t. The original ASBO would have stopped her coming to the drop-in centre where she could get support – the people who ran it helped her get it amended, so she wouldn’t be even more isolated than she already is. Her explanation didn’t satisfy the police, so they locked her up. She managed to let the drop-in centre know, they got pro bono lawyers down, and, as evidenced by her presence at the drop-in centre a few hours later, she won and they released her. But what if she hadn’t been able to contact the drop-in centre? What if the drop-in centre didn’t have links to lawyers? What is the lawyers hadn’t been free?

Breaching an ASBO is no small thing – a breach can lead to five years in jail. And an ASBO is not the product of a criminal trial – you can get one, reportedly, for noisiness, begging, fare dodging and loitering. They sound like ‘crimes’ of poverty to me.

The person who brought me to the centre is a researcher on violence against women who specialises in sexual slavery and prostitution. They’re using ASBOs to ‘clean up’ London in the lead up to the Olympics, she tells me.

Suddenly London feels a lot more Dickensian. It takes me back to being 22, newly arrived in the Philippines, and standing looking at a monument to Marcos’ Manila, a huge wall built to hide the poor during a papal visit. Of course, my companions then told me, the resources used to build the wall could simply have been used to house the poor.

Poverty reduction is high on the agenda of the Green Party of England and Wales, and it’s one of many reasons that the Green Party of England and Wales is talking about fairness.

Its slogan in the general elections, expected to be March or May of next year, is ‘Fair is worth fighting for’.

At a time when the UK economy is shot to pieces and thousands are losing their jobs, social justice is an important issue.

One of the key policy positions the Greens will take to the election is what they describe as a ‘real’ living wage, in contrast to the official minimum wages that don’t keep people out of poverty.

Adrian Ramsay is Deputy Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and the first Green Party Councillor to become the Leader of the Opposition on a local authority, in Norwich, where the Greens have 13 seats, just two less than Labour.

He talks about poverty in this way:

The fact is that the minimum wage is in fact a poverty wage in most areas of the UK. Of children living in poverty across the country, 57% have one or both of their parents in work, but their wages are not enough to support their families because the minimum wage has not kept up with the soaring costs of their household bills, housing and transport.

Greens nationally have made campaigning for a Living Wage a key priority for action. The London Living Wage is now £7.45 per hour. It is now paid to thousands of workers who were previously receiving the minimum wage, which is just £5.73, thanks to the research work of the London Living Wage Unit, which was brought in by Green Assembly Members four years ago, and the campaigning work of citizens’ groups and Greens across the city.

This is just one of the many policies the Greens are pursuing as part of their fairness agenda.

Fair is worth fighting for.

'Recycled water is used in the toilet flush'

Recycled water for toilets. That’d be in Victoria, right, where we have an ongoing drought?

Oh, London…

City Hall toilets

I’ve been dreaming of a white (pre) Christmas in London, and here it is.

Hallelujah.

I soak in the sun as the snow drifts towards me, while inside a wire-fenced enclosure a woman in a purple Santa hat is singing Leonard Cohen, Idol-style, which seems, in this case, to mean minus about half of the song. It is in fact X-Factor-style, if I’d known enough about the UK talent show to realise.

Bystanders watching the show from outside the wire fence

Alexandra Burke is the singer, winner of X-Factor, reason for today’s snow machine, and no great fan of the song she’s singing, if she’s been quoted correctly. ‘It just didn’t do anything for me,’ she reportedly said, although maybe that was before her version became 2008’s biggest selling single of the year.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

A few metres away, I’ve had another not-quite-brush with fame, although in this case I know who I’m seeing. I’m visiting London’s City Hall, home of the Greater London Authority, made up of the London Assembly and London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, who famously ousted ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone at the last election. I’m with Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the London Assembly, and as I puff up the stairs to the magical top floor, I see the mayoral back. It’s the view of the river that grabs my attention though – City Hall is new and shiny, a glistening bee hive of spiraling glass and metal, and today, in the sun, it looks out on a river that outshines it as it flows under Tower Bridge, just out in front of us. There’s no need for fake snow – the view is breathtaking, even without the walk up.

City Hall, London

Jenny is one of two Greens members of the London Assembly – the other is Darren Johnson (no relation to Boris), current Chair of the Assembly. Both Jenny and Darren are councillors on London councils, Jenny on Southwark Council, Darren at Lewisham.

A former archeologist, Jenny has been excavating the concept of sustainability, trying to expose what it means at a time when greenwash is alive and well, and, perhaps more significantly, with a mayor who doesn’t appear to have a strong grasp of the concept.

She gives me a print out of the message she prepared for the new mayor a few months after his election.

There are three questions to test sustainability, her message says, ‘to ensure our survival, the answers should all be “no”.’

The first question is, ‘Does it ask only some people to act?’

‘Although we should never underestimate the power of the small and continuous’, her message says, ‘everyone must do something on every topic… Never mind saying that if all the cows in China farted at once all our efforts are for nothing – we all have to do what we can to green our lifestyles. Also, carrot and stick is useful, but more carrot than stick.’

The second question is, ‘Does it cause any sort of problem downstream?’.

‘Avoid the law of unintended consequences. That is, no messes downstream,’ she explains. ‘Understand the consequences of what you do – a classic example is the growing of biofuels [which] is destroying land for food, or nuclear power with its millennia of pollution.’

And finally, ‘Does it claim to be “the” answer to a problem?’.

‘It can’t be…,’ she writes. ‘The future is diverse, and it is complex. We need as many solutions as we can dream up, social, artistic, technological, whatever.’

The fake snow has melted, the fans have gone home, and before me this great city stands. Looking across at a city that has recreated itself a thousand ways, and survived a thousand years, it doesn’t seem an impossible test to pass, when you consider the rewards of success.

Tower Bridge

The missing Cohen lines are in my head:

I did my best, it wasn’t much.

I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.

I’ve told the truth,

I didn’t come all this way to fool you.

Hallelujah.

Bogan House, Totnes

“The uncertainty of our times is no reason to be certain about hopelessness” - Vandana Shiva

Totnes, Saturday November 29, Buy Nothing Day

There are lots of reasons to like Totnes. Discovering it has its own ‘Bogan House’ in pride of place opposite the civic hall has to be high on the list. No room for bogan-bashing here, Mr Doyle.

That’s not all it’s got going for it though. It’s quaint, the cabbie says, but the word hardly does the job. Totnes is the sort of picture postcard town in England that you can’t quite believe really exists. A medieval town with a high street that meanders down to the river, so narrow cars seem out of place, changing name three times on the way, a photo waiting to be taken every few feet. There’s a Norman fort up the road, and a few clicks out of town, I spent the week in a Thirteen Century building, complete with wireless and a sustainability school. It is quaint, if quaint means human-scale, beautiful, liveable.

Totnes is also at the heart of southwest England’s sustainability movement, and the southwest is known across the country for leading the nation on green issues.

Totnes' main street

The Daylesford of Devon, Totnes became a hippy haven a couple of decades ago, and in 2007, Wikipedia tells me, was declared ‘the capital of new age chic’ by Time Magazine. (According to The Guardian, new generation Totnesians ‘identify more with surfers than hippies’, which perhaps explains Bogan House.)

It’s more than that though – Totnes is the home of the world’s first Transition Town, a concept that’s starting to take off in Australia. My first reaction to hearing about Transition Towns was ‘transitioning to what?’. The answer is simple. Transition Town Totnes (TTT), their website says, aims:

1) “To explore and then follow pathways of practical actions that will reduce our carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.

2) To build the town’s resilience, that is, its ability to withstand shocks from the outside, through being more self reliant in areas such as food, energy, health care, jobs and economics.”

TTT is about a low carbon, post-peak oil future, but, importantly, it’s about more than giving things up and doing without. Here’s the website again:

“Our future has the potential to be more rewarding, abundant and enjoyable than today, and by working together we can unleash the collective enthusiasm and genius of our community (that means you!) to make this transition.”

Totnes Civic Hall, Buy Nothing Day

On Saturday morning at the Civic Hall, it’s hard not to believe them. The hall is packed. Kids are playing on hay bales in the centre of the room, there’s a steady stream of people sifting the free-to-take no-need-to-pay jumble (not) sale stall, and there are people talking about the Totnes Renewable Energy Supply Company they’ve established, how to get a tax break on a new bike, looking after worm farms, and where to get Totnes pounds. Zigzagging across the hall, partitions with drawings of Totnes in 2030, and post-it notes with people’s hopes for the future are a reminder of the scale of community involvement in all of this.

It’s a fair

indication of the energy in TTT. After three years, it has developed 38 projects, sustained ten ongoing working groups, engaged around 3270 residents, and, they say, generated at least 236,000 pounds. Totnes even has its own currency, the Totnes Pound, which is about to launch its own interest-free loan scheme. Localisation is a key buzzword, and the Totnes Pound is both a very concrete symbol of localising, and also a real way of keeping money, literally, in the community.

Totnes shows that ugly words like decarbonising don’t have to mean a bleak and ugly future.

As Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins says, “Rebuilding local agriculture and food

production, localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an extraordinary renaissance – economic, cultural and spiritual.”