Trevor Grice

There is a dogged persistence in the way Sue Kedgley, the Green Party spokesman on Consumer Affairs, trains her magnifying glass on the contents of every tin or package of food. Whether it’s the processing of food, the importation of food, the push for organic home grown, the contaminated clothing, the poison toys and so on, little escapes her exhaustive scrutiny. We should probably congratulate her for her efforts to protect our ‘Internal Environment’ - even if she could quite rightly be accused of evangelism.

Over the past 30 years New Zealand society has undergone some seismic shifts in philosophical, ethical, political and technological thinking. It is not so much that society has been subjected to a single, life-shaking quake but more a case of many seemingly small and innocuous changes adding up to a landscape shift that appears increasingly unacceptable to many people. And like so many situations we are confronted with today it is difficult to see how such changes can be challenged or modified when responsibility rests somewhere ‘in the system’.