Consult and Survive: The First Session

I've just come back from the first session of the New Zealand Government's consultation meetings on New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for 2020.

Climate Change Minister Nick Smith was faced with an audience of between 300 and 400 people. After his twenty-minute presentation, doing its best to send a message of "we'll sign up to a target, but don't expect it to be substantial", members of the audience had the chance to speak — and, one after another, they implicitly or explici