I was fortunate to be born into a loving family with four amazing sisters in Thames. My dad was a commercial fisherman and my mum ran the canteen in the local car factory. I finished Thames High School first in Economics and with an ‘A’ scholarship mark in English. My tertiary economics studies began at Victoria university in Wellington in the early 1980’s. In the same year, I became aware of research about Global Climate Change, which has been a major influence on the last 39 years of my life.
My economics studies continued in Sweden, and in the field, whilst engaged in relief and development projects around the world. I participated in development project design in the South Pacific, assessed recovery projects in Bangladesh after the floods, I was part of a team in Europe that sent Attachment specialists into Romanian orphanages where a lot of the referenced clinical work on attachment theory was do. I was also working in the Middle East after the first gulf war, assessing responses to refugee displacement and infrastructure rebuilding. During this period I continued with my studies on wholistic economic theories, especially PROUT (Progressive Utilisation Theory), and on non-financial forms of capital which I saw were crucial to communities recovering from disasters and dealing with development issues.
I spent four years working for Greenpeace, saving the whales and promoting global climate change science. Also a further three years working for The Tasmanian Wilderness Society, successfully campaigning to save the Tasmanian Styx Valley and Southern Forests from logging and wood-chipping. I have participated in five successful Greens election campaigns in New Zealand and Australia, including Jeanette Fitzsimon’s historic 1999 Coromandel campaign.
For the last 15 years I have worked in Social Services whilst studying the effects of trauma and attachment on brain development and behaviour patterns. I continue being involved in environmental activism, sustainable design and wholistic economic study. I am passionate about drawing connections between PROUT economic theory and other wholistic economic theories, including first nations economic systems.
It became obvious for me to move away from working with the Greens, and to participate in starting the Progressive Party of Aotearoa New Zealand (PPANZ). I believe that the old materialistic economic systems the Greens and other parties rely on are unable to provide sustainable outcomes going into the future. The development of wholistic economic theory and modelling by the shadow economics community, offers a new way forward and is now a credible science in its own right.
I am excited to be nominated for the Mana electorate. I feel the diverse population of this electorate will be fertile ground for developing conversations around the ideas I am most passionate about, grounding these in community activity, and finding solutions to the problems that we are all facing.
