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John Baranyi : the good the bad and the ugly of politics
John Baranyi says that for the past 25 years the three mainstream parties have promised the good, and delivered the bad, increasing pollution (the ugly) and reducing the quality of our democracy.
He has been motivated to run for office, he says, because I realised that the direction of government is such that they are doing damage to our life support system, so I could no longer go about my business as if nothing was wrong.
What is wrong, according to Baranyi, has its roots in the emphasis all other parties have on infinite economic growth, without limits, but we at the Green Party see we must realise the folly of this and talk about limits to growth.
One of the proposals of the Green Party is to institute what they describe as a Green taxation system, where things that harm the environment are heavily taxed and things that are beneficial or less harmful are taxed less or not at all.
Biranyi cites pesticides as an example. Pesticides currently are subsidised by government. We would not only eliminate the subsidy, we would even go to the point of putting a penalty on pesticide use. The polluter pay system says that people who use poisons should be paying a share of health care costs.
The Greens propose a transition mechanism for farms to move to a more local means of agriculture.
This would lower air and water pollution levels, lower the levels of pollution in our food, improve the quality of our environment, reducing health care costs in the long run, stimulating local job creation, and strengthening rural communities.
The Green party, whose support has been pegged at 6% of the electorate in most opinion polls throughout this campaign, could possibly win one or two seats in the 308-seat parliament, but if a proportional representation system were in place as they advocate, that 6% could translate into 18 seats.
At All-Candidates meetings, all of the candidates in LFL&A said proportional representation was something that was worth looking into, but Baranyi says the Liberals and Conservatives pay lip service to it, but it takes power away from government, and that is not something they would like to see, so I dont see any change coming from either of those parties.
Even though the NDP has been promoting their environmental policies in this campaign, Baranyi says there is a fundamental difference between the Greens and all the other parties, and that has to do with their attitude towards economic growth, using a money system and a pension system that is essentially a pyramid scheme that supposes infinite growth. We must put policies in place to steer ourselves away from that before we destroy the environment that we rely upon to sustain ourselves.
Much of our political discourse is based upon a fixation with economic growth, according to John Baranyi, including the divisions between rural and urban development. Our urban areas need to realise that they exist as an ecological organism within the ecosystem, and they also have a need to function sustainably. If you have that perspective you know that the urban and the rural are intimately connected.
