Greens on Campus not keen on debate
It’s worth considering their seven demands to understand what they really want.
- Venues must be non-alcoholic. Why? Is alcohol bad and pot good? Backbenches is a show set in a pub. The audience turn up on the basis they can have a drink and a bite before and during the show. No one will turn up to watch youth wings debate in a church hall.
- I don’t know what trained equity officers are I suspect safety provisions don’t mean earthquakes but instead someone saying something they disagree with should be deemed unsafe and removed
- Now they want to control what the other youth reps can say? They no doubt consider opposing Maori seats in Parliament as discriminatory, so really they are saying they want to veto what others can advocate
- This definitely means that no views which are different to their views on the Treaty can be tolerated
- What do they mean by a code of conduct? Do they mean you can’t heckle or interrupt?
- The speaking panel is not decided by Backbenches but by the youth wings. The four or five youth wings decide individually who will represent them. If all four presidents are women, then why should you be forced to have a male on the panel?
- Who do they suggest should be in charge of fact checking? Them? Does this mean that if say the Green youth president claimed GMOs are unsafe, they should be halted as this is factually untrue?
It worries me that more and more young people in politics don’t seem to believe in debate, and want to place huge barriers in the way of open debate.