I was asked to come here to talk party politics amongst other things, and I will cover party politics but I don't really want to make a politician's speech. What I want to focus on is change… change and innovation. The type of change and innovation that comes from the grassroots. And the type of change and innovation that can come from New Zealand.

Change is not always a popular word in politics. Often people are understandably uncomfortable with change and political parties that promise to change things are not always fashionable.

But things will change because they cannot stay the same.

Things will change because the planet is finite and we have exceeded the capacity of the planet to absorb our waste and supply us with resources. Human caused climate change is a manifestation of the limited ability of the planet to absorb our wastes — in this case the greenhouse gases mostly released from burning fossil fuels.

And the end of cheap oil, or peak oil, is a manifestation of the limited ability of the planet to supply us with resources. There is only so much oil in the ground and we are somewhere near half way through our reserves. Our ability to increase rates of production is near its peak, at a time when demand for oil is growing rapidly. When the supply and demand curves meet, the price of oil will spike.

We are living in an age when the limitations on the planet's ability to absorb our waste and supply us with resources are starting to bite. As Al Gore said we are entering a time of consequences. And for this reason we actually do not have the option of business as usual, we only have the option of change.

Things will change because they cannot stay the same.

But whether that change will be chosen and directed by ourselves or whether it will be imposed upon us by the planet itself in the form of runaway climate change and a sudden resource crisis, that choice is entirely up to us.

I am of course very firmly of the view that we should choose the first course — let us choose our path and purposely change our civilisation to operate within the limits of our finite planet earth and share the resources of the earth, with each other and with all the other plants and animals.

But how? How do we make the changes we need to make?

Ordinary people have a lot more power to change the world than is generally realized. This is a fairly weighty kind of statement but I believe it's a true statement. Younger people, especially educated young people in the Western World, with the type of communications tools and skills they carry, and the kind of broadmindedness we have in this country in particular, have never had as much power as they do now. You have the power to change the world for the better.

Often I read and hear media commentators and politicians from other parties saying in effect that an issue such as climate change is insurmountable. We hear the same kind of defeatism about purely New Zealand problems. The Auckland transport gridlock, the amount of violence inflicted on our children, loss of our coastline to wealthy overseas investors, the amount of waste we generate, our high imprisonment rate, are all examples.

It's almost as if there's a belief out there, an urban myth, that all these problems have natural causes. No. They were caused by the type of society our leaders have created for us. The problems were caused by old leaders of previous generations. My hope is that we develop a new kind of leadership; a leadership that hopefully will include younger people such as you, and, dare I say it, myself! A leadership that identifies the big problems of the world and of this country, and believes not that big problems are impossible to address, but that they will be addressed.

They were caused by humans. They can be solved by humans.

If any of you are thinking that I'm dreaming, dreaming about the ability of human beings to make purposeful change for the better, then let's take a look at our history.

New Zealand is one of the most innovative countries in the world, and not just at inventing farm gadgets, as important as they are. Not only are we innovative, we are also courageous. Go back more than 100 years and look at how women successfully campaigned to get the vote, back 70 years when the Labour Government of Michael Joseph Savage transformed our whole society by introducing the welfare state and the social safety net. The no fault accident compensation scheme we know now as ACC was another great kiwi invention established in the 1970s. And back 20 years exactly to June 1987 when we became nuclear-free.

These were huge changes, huge innovations. Addressing Auckland traffic congestion and coastal land loss are minor in comparison. But the key thing, the most amazing and wonderful thing about the best and most innovative changes in our history, is that none were imposed by some dictatorial government. They all came as a result of a meeting of energies, as a team effort if you like, between the government of the time and the people.

But some things were forced on the government by the people, like MMP. For proportional representation to come into existence it required the MPs elected under first past the post to vote to allow it to go to a referendum. Not an easy task to ask a turkey to vote for an early Christmas, but in the end they had no choice because of the people's campaign.

MMP was opposed vociferously by some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the country — some of whom have just paid $20 million for their activities in the 80s. They spent huge amounts of money trying to stop MMP, but failed.

Facing off against the rich and powerful and the old parties were a series of community groups and the common sense of regular voters. A whole string of people played a part in the MMP campaign. The Values Party, the predecessor of the Green Party formed in 1972, was involved in organizing a petition for electoral reform of many hundreds of thousands of signatures. The Social Credit party, a party that barely exists nowadays but that once got 20% of the vote and only two seats in parliament under the undemocratic first-past-the-post system, played an important role in keeping up pressure for reform.

And then the Electoral Reform Coalition and Rod Donald and others played the key role in the lead up to the successful referendum in 1993 when 56% of voters supported the proportional MMP system. It is worth remembering that the same 1993 election at which New Zealanders voted to replace first past the post with MMP was also the last first past the post election — and National won a one seat majority in parliament with just 35% of the vote, a final indictment of the undemocratic nature of that system.

MMP was a people's victory. People in their wisdom changed things for the better.

Changing to a more democratic system has meant that so far we have not seen a repeat of the two waves of the new right revolution - the period from 1987-93 when first Labour and then National Party governments were elected on one set of policies and then set about introducing a different set of policies. This was epitomised by Labour when they swore that they would not privatise public assets in the 1987 election campaign and then after winning the election set about selling everything that was not nailed down at bargain basement prices to overseas owners using some rather dodgy agents to organize the fire sale. We have had to buy some of them back since. National's ignominy was no less — they ran in the 1990 election under the slogan of "the decent society" and then set about cutting benefits to the poorest and most vulnerable by one third soon after winning the election.

It was these kinds of actions by Labour and National that produced what the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas would call a legitimation crisis. The democratic system itself was delegitimised by the actions of Labour and National, and it was this that created the space in which the people's campaign for MMP succeeded.

The people of New Zealand had the foresight and wisdom to vote in a system that makes the third wave of the new right revolution harder than ever. Which is not to say that they have not tried.

At the last election there was a concerted campaign by the radical right to secretly organise the third wave of the new right revolution by electing Don Brash with a clear majority. What Nicky Hager's book The Hollow Men demonstrated was that Don Brash with his backers Ruth Richardson, Rod Deane and David Richwhite and many others were quietly organising the third wave of the new right revolution. But they failed.

Before the last election the Greens made it clear that we would not work with a Don Brash led National Party government. At that stage we did not know all the details that were revealed in Nicky's book but we knew enough to know that wasn't what we wanted. What we didn't fully realise is that we managed to stop the third wave of the new right revolution.

After the election Labour chose to go with NZ First and United Future. They said they did this for stability reasons, rather than go with the Greens and the Maori Party. Of course now United Future and Labour itself have lost an MP each and the government relies for its stability on the abstention agreement with the Greens. So long as Labour fully meets the terms of our cooperation agreement we will continue to honour the agreement.

Since the election National have ditched Don Brash and we have a new look National party. They have said that our nuclear free status is safe, have stopped the worst of their Maori bashing, have accepted the reality of human induced climate change and are presenting a kindler gentler face. We welcome these developments. But we are yet to see their policy. As my colleague Jeanette Fitzsimons says, the face has changed but we are yet to see if the heart and mind has changed too. We shall see.

Labour meanwhile has lost its way. It seemed that they might embrace sustainability for a while but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. It would appear that the more conservative parts of the Cabinet have beaten those who really wanted to embrace sustainability. I hope it changes but we will have to wait and see. Even on something as basic as housing affordability, they seem unable or unwilling to take a firm position and go with it — all it takes are the magical words "nanny state" for Labour to abandon most of us to the mercies of the housing market rather than intervene to make housing affordable.

On climate change Labour has dragged the chain for seven long years as our greenhouse emissions have increased dramatically. We are now 25% over the 1990 level, the level to which we agreed to reduce our emissions by 2012. They are now doing some more work on climate change policy but we are still waiting to see whether it will be effective in actually reducing our spiralling greenhouse emissions.

So the Green approach is to build public support for green issues while working constructively with all parties on an issue by issue basis. And we will work with the Labour-led government on the basis of our agreement. We think that Labour is closer to us than National, but we know that they are closer to each other than to us. Any decisions about preferred government partners will have to wait till we see some policy closer to the election and for the party to consider how best to deal with them. But we work with the other MMP parties — the Maori Party, United Future and Act — to make progress where we can.

People created MMP so that no single party could dominate and so that multiple voices could be heard in our democracy so never again could we have a party representing a minority of voters but with a majority of the house forcing through a radical new right policy programme.

We intend to use the people's legacy to make as much progress as we can on sustainability and fairness. To make as much change as we can to prepare for the future before it hits us.

And of course climate change is one of the key issues if we are to prepare for the future. How do we change the behaviour of our society to reduce our greenhouse emissions? How do we play our part to reduce global greenhouse emissions?

You might say, well climate change is a really really big problem. The biggest one yet. Yes, but I feel that we are now in many ways in the best possible position to address it, and this is because unlike former generations, we have easier access to knowledge. Large governments and multinational companies have never put as much money into trying to spin us lies about what is going on in the world as they do now, but despite these billions spent on public relations, never have these presidents and prime ministers and corporate CEOs been less successful in keeping the truth from us.

We find it on the internet, we find it in our universities, we find it when we travel and meet people and we find it in a news media to a greater or lesser extent. Knowledge as the old saying goes is power.

Exxon Mobil, one of the favourite investments of the NZ Super Fund aside from nuclear weapons manufacturers, ran a big campaign to fund the climate denial industry. Like the tobacco industry before them. But while they may have slowed things down a bit, they failed to stop the global consensus on the need to take action. The truth is winning.

Well informed citizens are the best friend of those who seek to change things for the better. I want to use a couple of quotes that Al Gore uses (in his new book) from Thomas Jefferson, that great if flawed American revolutionary. Jefferson said, "whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right". People are starting to notice climate change.

Jefferson also said, incidentally, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it wants what never was and never will be." Which I think applies to the United States as much today as ever — their ignorance led them to believe George W Bush that Iraq was behind 9/11 and that ignorance meant that Bush was able to take away their liberties in the name of homeland security and, for more than 3000 Americans, take away their freedom to live.

In Jefferson's day the printed newspaper and pamphlet was the key medium for democratic discussion and debate. The newspaper is by its nature a medium that allows the reader the time to consider the arguments contained in it. The newspaper also has an element of two way communication in the letters page and is a relatively cheap industry to buy into. Since then the newspaper has been usurped first by radio and now by broadcast television. Television is by its nature a medium that can more easily manipulate the viewer prevent the viewer considering the arguments presented in a dispassionate way. And television is by its nature a one-way communication and is incredibly expensive to get into. The way that TV distracts, its fundamentally one-way direction and the cost of becoming a broadcaster has profoundly changed the way that information has flowed in our democracy and profoundly influenced our democracy, and not really in a positive way.

Which brings me to the internet. The internet is changing the face of our democracy and it has barely begun. The internet is two-way communication big time. It's true that there are big traditional one-way news sites on the web. But they are contested and the even they are starting to respond to the democratic vibrancy of the web by introducing feedback forums, thus combining one-way and two-way communication.

The rise of the blogosphere has and is profoundly reshaping the nature of debate in our democracy. The blogs are robust and there are many far right blogs out there but there is a deeply democratic element of a space where all and sundry can present their views and a great many people can set up their own. The opportunity is in front of us to make the most of the internet as a communication space which is much more open to communicative rationality, much more open to discursive democracy where everyone has the chance to put their views forward and be heard on the merits of their case.

We are not in the post-TV era yet, but the internet is deepening the public sphere in important ways, and in ways that will help those of us with good ideas for changing things.

Because when it comes to reducing greenhouse emissions, like any other change, we need to win people to our ideas. There is an important role for putting a price signal on greenhouse emissions to change behaviours, and there is an important role for using direct regulatory methods to reduce emissions, measures such as improving the building code. But fundamentally these will only work if people are convinced that there is a need for them.

And key to winning the argument on the need for action on climate change is fairness in the kind of measures introduced. Sustainability and fairness as innately and deeply linked in political reality. People won't accept higher energy prices if they are not provided with alternatives. If the price of petrol increases because of some kind of carbon charge then we need to make sure that people have alternatives to the private car such as much better public transport. People need support to reduce their electricity consumption such as subsidised insulation.

Likewise developing countries will not accept global climate change treaties that do not take into account their poorer situation.

The Greens approach is to recycle the revenue raised by putting a price on greenhouse emissions into measures to help people reduce their energy use — measures such as public transport and home insulation. If action on greenhouse means only pain and not opportunity then we will struggle to win the argument. If action on greenhouse means that the wealthy can simply carry on with their profligate ways while the rest of us have to suffer, then it ain't gonna be a winner.

But we can do it. We've made profound changes before and we can again. Ordinary people have tremendous capacity to produce change — people just like us.

The question I so often get when speaking about climate change, as I've doing at public meetings around the country in recent months. The question is along the lines of, "Well NZ is so insignificant, what can we do really?"

And of course we are only 0.2% of global emissions, though on a per capita basis we are the third or fourth worst polluter of greenhouse gases in the world.

My answer is that we need to play our part if we are to expect other countries to play their part and that only a global solution will work. In fact let's be a leader in reducing greenhouse emissions, let's be innovative and brave, like we were when we punched well above our weight to help set up the United Nations, like we were when we introduced votes for women and like we were with our nuclear-free policies.

If we do genuinely attack the problem of climate change in this country by a huge increase in renewable energy sources such as solar and windpower, by favouring new public transport systems rather than cities clogged with new motorways, by planting more trees, if do this the world, in this day and age, will soon know about it.

When that happens the leaders of this country - and some of you will be amongst those leaders — will not only be seen to be brave and innovative, we will, once again, be world leaders too. With an issue as important as climate change, let's not aim for anything less.