Growing a community is like growing trees. It takes time.

Sustainable development is like gardening, continual growth is like a cancer; no tree grows forever. We must always be ready to abandon old methods, plant new ideas, take out the dead wood for compost, pull out the weeds, fertilise with new ideas and prepare for winter.

Waiheke's future has to be placed in the hands of those who will live in that future. The vague and contradictory plans that issue from those with no understanding of this community and the way it works have to be set aside as valueless.

While other parts of the world are facing increasing environmental chaos, Waiheke is managing to move away from such folly. We have made a brilliant start. Now we have to develop our ideas further.

No intelligent person would deny that globally our current situation is unsustainable. The world's population is growing exponentially. We have been living on the stored oil energy wealth of billions of years and this will become in progressively shorter supply. Our lifestyles are wasteful and polluting. But, on Waiheke we have the chance to change this and become a world leader in sustainable development. This island is blessed with a vast range of brilliant people offering brilliant ideas. Let's secure a future in which those ideas get a chance to be properly heard, and better still, implemented.

We in this community have already shown how well our ideas and initiatives can work. Waiheke is becoming famous for it's determination to avoid the pitfalls of quick fix solutions and bad policies imposed from afar. I want to see a time when communities all over the world look to us for inspiration as they too try to remain viable and sustainable in a changing world.