Nickie Muir: Engage in local elections

Nickie Muir is encouraging people to speak up and vote these local elections.

I like lists. I found my "February list of Things to Do" last week and quite a few items remained unachieved. Things like: "Clean out the Deep Freeze", followed by the over use of the exclamation mark. Last on the list was: "Change Voter Apathy in Whangarei."

I think I was being facetious. As if anyone can go around gratuitously willing stuff like political change to happen. As if what we randomly wish for on a shopping list to the self will be delivered.

Except I also have a secret belief that if you don't ask the universe for stuff you want - there is little chance you'll ever get it, in which case, one should make the effort to ask. This is dangerously close to the border lands of urban shamanism some of my friends indulge in. They write long lists to the universe of all the things they want in say ... a bloke and still end up with the Brazilian bongo player who has a problem giving up his 16 other girl-friends.

The quasi-facetious wish for an end to apathy was conceited and, worse, contains a fundamental error. I have heard that "people are too stupid and too lazy" to vote - in other words "they just don't care".

Apathy is framed as the cause of the dysfunction we've had in local democracy not, what I suspect may be the actual case, a rational response to a system that has deliberately excluded whole sectors of the community to better serve the purposes of a favoured few.

I've met a lot of people over the last year and they are a lot of things. What they're not, however, is either stupid or lazy. All of them, without exception, care. So what causes half of our population not to vote in the North and why, when 40 per cent of our population is Maori, and 75 per cent of our youth are Maori, does local government not reflect that voice in anything more concrete than some rather toothless advisory panels?

Dave Meslin's short video The Antidote to Apathy makes excellent viewing and outlines what he sees as seven barriers to social change, pin-pointing many of the problems we've seen locally.

The use of jargon and impossible to understand press releases neatly avoid any call for engagement. The framing of leaders as "heroes" who are chosen and connected and anointed (usually by themselves) who will come to "save the day" when what we need is their less flashy cousins, the quiet, constant achievers who know that real leadership is a collective process not an individual quest. The constant polling that regurgitates what we say we want back to ourselves without ever breaking the loop of cynicism with real vision.

The Tu Kotahi movement, is an exciting sign there are people who are willing and ready to see themselves as legitimate leaders and not wait to be "invited in" to the inner circle knowing instead that, in a democracy, that is already their right.

The Whangarei mayoral candidates Pecha Kucha evening on September 18 in Forum North is another example of allowing the silent majority to speak up and engage. The Mayoral Talk Whangarei Facebook page is inspiring evidence that Northland is anything but apathetic. I'd have to agree with Soloman Tipene though: "All the sweat and hard work will be a waste of time if our people don't get out there and vote." It goes for all of us. Like making a wish list to the universe for what you really want.