I joined The Greens back in 2002. I didn't intend to! I wanted to be involved in the local community. I initially thought of standing for the local council as an independent. I attended one council meeting to see what it was like. It was the same time that the ABC TV comedy series 'Grass Roots' was being aired about the Mayor and council of a small country town. During the meeting I could not get the signature tune for that series out of my head and I could not take their discussions seriously! End of that idea. The next day I saw a poster advertising a meeting of the local Greens group. I had always shunned political parties in the past as being too much under the influence of either big business or militant unions. I expected The Greens to be heavily influenced by the tree huggers. Still, I thought, tree huggers are pretty harmless. I was pleasantly surprised. Tree hugging was not a pre requisite for membership and during the meeting environmental issues were hardly discussed, it was more focused on rights for asylum seekers, our education system, talk of the Iraq war, etc. I was also intrigued by their structure and organisation. How can you run an organisation of 8,000 members without any 'leaders' and by striving for consensus from all members for all decisions? I have remained a member of The Greens since then and have slowly got more involved with them. Like all political parties, they have their faults, but I am continually impressed by their professionalism, their principles and their lack of pomposity. I am also impressed by their openness. There are no secret meetings, no 'caucus', no 'inner circle'. And they are the only political party that openly publish all of their policies in complete detail on their website. There is, in my opinion, too much detail in their policies. That detail makes them sometime cumbersome to read and also makes it easy for their detractors to nit pick. But the detail is a result of the consensus process that they have been subjected too. The benefit though is that, even though you may not agree with some of the policies, they are very comprehensive and well balanced. Check them out yourself at http://greens.org.au/ and if you want to learn all about how you run an organisation of 8,000 members from the bottom up and consensus decision making, attend some of their meetings.