People sick of funding activist groups out of their dole and faced with no viable alternatives to investing their time and energy in the establishment decided they might as well have some real clout inside it. This combined with the change to MMP and the emergence of the Greens from behind Anderton's skirts led to a resurgence of interest in electoral politics. If you want to know what happened to all the people in your generation of anarchists/ activists look at the Greens, the current Alliance and the various tiny partylets outside parliament.

This tells me one important thing. No amount of single-issue campaigning can substitute for a holistic analysis of the nature of the establishment and how its structures and principles are propogated. This is what the so-called 'lifestylist' aspects of the Tea Party were aimed at addressing, as Torrance observed. I agree that the anarchist movement I became involved with nearly 10 years ago was overly concerned with policing political correctness in its participants. Which is why changing the focus of cultural politics towards building practical, co-operative networks that free up people's time and resources for issue-based campaigning seems like a positive step.

In my opinion we didn't need to spend formal meeting time at Marama-Iti discussing the sort of issues CWGer mentions because the anarchist movement in Aotearoa is not currently large enough to have separate ongoing groups on single issues. Therefore developing anarchist positions on these issues might as well be done through debates in local anarchist groups and national forums like Anarchynz or Anarchy.org.nz. Advancing those positions can be done by anarchists working with campaigning organisations like the Peace Action and GE Free groups and within convergence spaces like Indymedia and the Social Forum.

Politics is now just about knee-jerk reactions to current events. Fundamentally it is about increasing our options and reducing our dependence on authoritarian systems in every aspect of our lives.