The point of making submissions?

I posted something like this on my greenpress blog but it has got lost and I found myself talking to someone about it the other day so thought I'd write it here.

Sometimes the whole business of writing and presenting submissions is depressing and feels like a waste of time. Once a plan is in draft, it seems to me that very little is likely to change. However despite our best efforts, this process is still all that we mostly have at least in our little corner of the world.

However I was talking with a local councillor who gets to hear all these submissions and she noted that unless people like me DO write and present submissions, people like her (who are in the minority on Council in terms of being a little Green and slightly left wing) cannot defend that perspective. So my writing to suggest safer measures for cyclists or pedestrians does have a purpose even though actually very little comes of it through the process.

So now I write fewer submissions, but when I write them, I think of them as placeholders rather than necessarily as instruments of change. I guess I"ll just have to cast around for the latter (if such things are possible in our current political climate here in Christchurch).