Chatting by the river

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The last weekend we (Georgie, Beck and Squid and I) went down the South Coast for a couple of days. It was great to talk about the ride when we felt like it and not be pressed into a small time slot by other commitments.

We mainly discussed the how we were going to organise the ride in terms of decision making structures and about the focus of the ride.

My friend Chris (a campaigner and social change activist from way back) came down for Saturday and Sunday and provided some excellent (and enlightening) pontification about various socio-political subjects. The net result of his pontification and the ensuing discussions was that we will probably adopt an affinity group type structure with a modified consensus model for the actual decision making process.

The other thing we resolved is that our campaign will be an Anti-Nuclear campaign that focuses on pushing sustainable alternatives not one that dwells primarily on the how bad nuclear is and how bad the system that supports it is (most of us already baulk at the idea of nuclear anyway). We will be striving for a paradigm shift in the way people think about energy generation from a very centralised model to a much less centralised, more independent/local model for energy generation. The current government is a master of playing the fear card. We could probably run a very powerful and effective fear campaign but probably wouldn't achieve the best results.

One of our other discussions revolved around what to do about the situation. One of our campaign aims will probably be to get a commitment from each party to phase out subsidies for non-renuable power industries and a development of support for real renuable power generation and maybe even (we didn't discuss this - this is my personal aim) a commitment to subsidise retrofiting energy saving insulation and other devices for all Australian homes.