An inspiring brave politician? Can this be true?

I loved this speech by Russell Norman, the leader of the New Zealand Green Party in Parliament. I wish I had the same sort of depth and clarity of thought. He really is too good to be a parliamentarian. I voted for Labour in both the local candidate and party options. But the Green Party is probably where I belong. Watch his speech, it is worth the 15 minutes. It has inspired and encouraged me on a day when I have been struggling with depression. In my experience he has a better grasp of the way of Jesus than most Church-going-Christians and their leaders have. Here is a transcript of the most "universal" part, before he gets into NZ politics.

The context: the Christmas story

We're about to break for Christmas, a time for family, sleeping in, barbeques, trips to the beach, and spending time with our mates and family.

We will work hard and smart to repay the faith you’ve put in us to deliver a richer New Zealand with a smart green economy that works for everyone.

Our Christmas holiday has its roots firmly in the Jewish and Christian traditions. It's based on a pretty amazing story about the birth of Jesus Christ — "God in the flesh" as many Christians believe.

The story of the incarnation of God in a baby born in a stable is remarkable even to me, an atheist, because it's a story about the distant God of the heavens coming down to live amongst us on earth.

It's a story about that god decreeing that tyranny on earth and utopia in the afterlife is not acceptable and that freedom and equality must characterise life here on earth as well as the afterlife in heaven. It's a story of the birth of new hope.

The Christmas story tells us that a saviour of humanity came not as some great warrior or prince but wrapped instead in swaddling cloth — a baby born amongst farm animals, and in absolute poverty.

You know the rest. The shepherds in the field saw a bright star and followed it. Three wise men turned up with expensive-sounding gifts.

The baby grew up a carpenter in ancient Palestine, stirred up a lot of trouble later as a young man, and was executed by crucifixion, under Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, as legend has it, sometime around 30AD.

But the story doesn't end there. After his death, the new hope that sprang from the stable in Bethlehem started to gather steam. Religious and political elites were threatened by the wild growth of a new religious sect committed to living out here on Earth the values of their God, once worshiped from afar.

The early Christians shared their resources and lived with greater equality amongst themselves than had earlier been known.

They believed that the world on earth could be a better place for ordinary people. Countless Christians were martyred for their faith, such was the threat that they posed to the ruling political and religious elites.

By 112AD, even the farmers cursed Christ's influence; Christian beliefs on idolatry were causing a slump in agricultural markets as people challenged the need to buy animals for ritual sacrifice to Roman emperors or gods.

Two thousand years later the story of the brief life of Jesus Christ still resonates.

This is why Christmas is still such an enduring part of our culture. Christmas was the start of some unlikely trouble and the start of new hope.

How the story touches me

I'm not a Christian, and there is not historical certainty about the records in the Christian Bible. But what I admire about the Christmas story is that it speaks to values I share, including some that make me feel a little uneasy speaking from this place of privilege and power. I think you'll agree we're pretty far away from a Palestinian stable.

But like all parents, perhaps particularly those newly acquainted with the role, the story of change arriving in the form of a baby has resonance in my life.

And whether we're parents, grandparents, aunties, or friends, in our children we find our own awe at the beauty of our planet; they show us what it is to be truly open minded, and in their ferocious capacity to learn and grow and change we see that things could truly change and be better.

This Christmas we wish for all our babies to have their unquestioning need for love generously met; we wish that all our children are treated with patience and understanding, trust and commitment. And we wish that all our parents have the time, support and resources necessary to give our children the best start in life.

And for us here in Parliament, I wish that we have the intelligence and compassion to choose to make things better for those who depend on us to make the right calls.

Christmas as a way to understand what really matters in life

Mahatma Gandhi said this about Jesus Christ: "I believe that Jesus belongs not only to Christianity but to the entire world, to all races and to all people."

Ghandi was right. The hopes and values Jesus Christ articulated during the course of his short life are too important to belong only to Christians. They belong to us all: believers and non-believers alike. They live within us. They are embedded in our culture. They are reflected in most of the world's major religions.

These are the values that help to lay down the essential nature of what it means to be human and guide us to live a 'good' life — good to ourselves, good to one another, and good to the world in which we make our livelihoods.

I identify with the Christianity that teaches love and compassion towards each other, especially the most vulnerable — the widows, the orphans, the sick, and those in prison. Those values inspired some of the world's first hospitals, orphanages, universities, and reforms to the way we treat those who've broken the law.

I also identify with the Christianity that demands we live with truth and justice between one another. Those values challenged the status quo on slavery in Great Britain and moved Martin Luther King to march for equal rights for African Americans.

And here, in our home, it was through applying those same values that Michael Joseph Savage turned the state on its head in an attempt to offer cradle to grave security from poverty and despair. In fact, the very first act of the new Savage Government was to grant a special Christmas bonus payment to the unemployed. Now there was a true moment of Christmas in this Parliament that gave birth to a new hope that our political economy could be bent to protect the vulnerable. That was applied Christianity.

Finally, I identify with the Christianity that teaches an awe and respect for the natural world. The Christianity that says tread sacredly through nature because God incarnated himself in the world through the person of Jesus Christ. St Francis of Assisi wrote sermons for the birds and taught us to live simply and value nature for its own sake. Listen to the dying words of Father Zosima, a character in the last work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Christian novelist:

Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, … you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

[The Brothers Karamazov]

The undermining of those values in the pursuit of economic growth

Those values of love, generosity, and a reverence for nature should not sound so out of place in this Parliament.

But the talk in here is dominated by a different kind of worship — one of economic growth, at all costs. We heard this mantra yet again today in the speech from the throne.

Today the Government said a strong economy provides the resources to then protect the vulnerable and the environment. But compassion shouldn't be conditional.

The protection of the vulnerable and the environment are necessary preconditions for a successful, fair and sustainable economy.

The economic and political agenda announced today undermines the values that we celebrate.

What's worse, we still have a virtually universal agreement in this House that mindless economic growth is the overriding purpose of government, if not society itself.

There is little discussion about the quality of that growth, the costs of that growth, or how we might share the benefits and costs more fairly. There is precious little discussion of how we could possibly have never ending growth in resource use and pollution on a planet which is ultimately finite.

Other parties in this House continue to represent the elite economic and social consensus of the 1980s and 1990s Labour and National governments in which we aim to maximise GDP growth and hope that trickle down will mean those at the bottom get a few crumbs. Thirty years later and many of our families are still waiting for the trickle down.

Even our private banking system can bring the world to its knees and escape largely unchanged from the melt down. The Westpac CEO earned a $5.4 million salary this year, which included a $260,000 tax cut — an early Christmas present from the government. Why is this Parliament giving taxpayer-funded Christmas bonuses to the obscenely wealthy and not the poor?

Christ didn't accept that gross inequality is inevitable and neither should we; isn't it time we turned the money tables over in the temple once again?

Our current political and business worldview has become so focused on endless growth that it has to conveniently ignore the increasing social and environmental collateral damage that comes from mindless growth without values.

This Parliament has for the last thirty years conveniently ignored things like runaway climate change, increasing inequality, declining water quality, and growing debt.

The unqualified pursuit of growth of any kind is no longer delivering the kinds of advantages it once did, at least not to most people.

We need to grow renewable energy not inequality and greenhouse emissions.

And international organisations like the OECD, the IMF, and the UN are starting to reflect this change of heart as they increasingly document and question the environmental sustainability of economic growth at any cost and the growing inequality within developed societies as wealth is further concentrated even as our economies grow.

Inequality

We know better outcomes in health, education, happiness, and social trust are no longer correlated with growing levels of GDP in developed countries.

If the Government's measure of progress was expanded from simple changes in GDP to include social and environmental indicators, it would be pretty clear that in nearly every other measure of "progress", we, as a society, have gone backwards.

Our problem is not so much about earning more; it's about sharing what we do earn more fairly. We could earn more as a country but still be poorer if that wealth isn't shared around. The evidence is striking: less unequal means living longer, healthier, safer lives. And that's true for all of us, not just those at the bottom of the heap. More sharing is good for everyone. It's the big differences in wealth within our society that drive many of the major problems that now bedevil us. And it's not just about equality of opportunity. It's about equality of outcome.

It is not surprising that societies that allow their economic systems to produce great inequality are socially dysfunctional. How could a society be any other than dysfunctional when our society is deeply at odds with our fundamental values of caring and compassion for one another?

When those on the very top earn closer to those on the very bottom, suddenly everyone is better off: We live longer, we suffer less from mental illness, we're less violent, we trust more, we lock up fewer people, we have better health, we have higher levels of social mobility, we live with less fear.

I believe in a society like that, where we trust one another and look after one another — where we are our 'brother's keeper', not their bitter rival.

Good stuff Russell Norman... You are a brave statesman.. I hope "they" don't cut you down like we have a tendency to do with such people.