Try ignorance.
And Ignorance gave us the Greens.
Well, Oz got to play with a minority government in a broken Parliament a little over a year ago, and what a year that has been. The Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate, and with one single member are one of the balance points in the lower House as well.
The Green leader, Senator Bob Brown, has been making hay while the sun shines, despite him probably hating the idea of cutting making hay in the first place. Making hay is, after all, a human activity, and we all know what vermin humans are.
Anyway, with Senator Bob the power behind the throne, able to make the Prime Minister jump every time he says frog, we have been getting a real education about just what we could expect from a Green world. I leave it to Janet Albrechtsen to fill you in:
For many years now, the Greens have skated under the radar of proper analysis. Many people assumed the Greens were just a tree-hugging, forest-loving party with utopian motherhood statements about "ecological sustainability" and "participatory democracy". To his credit, Brown took feel-good politics to new heights, winning 11.8 per cent of the vote and a record 10 seats in federal parliament.
Twelve months on, the new paradigm has taught us that Green politics doesn’t feel so good after all. We will soon have a carbon tax that ought to be called the BBT, the Bob Brown tax.
After all, if Gillard had won the last election in her own right, we would not now have a carbon tax. And never mind that the rest of the world is running away from pricing carbon.
We learned the power of the Greens when Greens senator Christine Milne, not a Labor minister, announced the government’s new Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Charged with spending $3.2 billion on the Greens’ pet projects, it became clear that this is the Christine Milne fund. This is what happens when the Greens get hold of the levers of power.
The getting of a Greens education these past 12 months has meant more of us see behind the carefully modulated voice of Brown to the doctrinaire green hulk that is committed to closing down the coal industry, that believes mining is evil and ought to be subjected to a super-profits tax, is driven by a utopian dream of drawing baseload power from renewables and holds a cavalier attitude to cities, such as Whyalla, which Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young thinks can be turned into windmill centres.
We saw the Greens at work too when the Gillard government capriciously shut down the $320 million live cattle exports trade on June 8. The cattle industry paid the price for Labor’s desperation to hold power by placating the Greens agenda. No other policy reveals a more complete disconnect between Canberra and rural and regional Australia.
We learned that the Greens have a peculiar view of freedom of the press. When Brown labelled News Limited the "hate media", it became clear that a newspaper knows it is doing precisely the right thing when the Greens are upset by the scrutiny. And now the Greens leader is suggesting individual journalists should be licensed. This is the green face of fascism.
We have learned that the Greens don’t have much time for other old-fashioned notions of democracy either. At the National Press Club, Brown laid out his preference for a world government. That’s Brown’s elitist view of participatory democracy.
FYI, Whyalla is a steel town, hard hit by the rising Australian dollar, the insanity of renewables, and the Green hatred of industry.
When it comes to hate speech, little can match Bob Brown and his description of News Ltd papers as ‘Hate Media’. Well, of course he would, the Murdoch press is just not sufficiently sycophantic. Hell, they even discuss climate change, and he REALLY doesn’t like that.
Ms Albrechtsen is wrong when she refers to the green face of fascism, she has it perfectly reversed. We are seeing the fascist face of the Greens.
They don’t like the spotlight, the Greens, they really don’t.
“A world government”?
Whatever happened to “Small is Beautiful”?
Only when it comes to industry. Small may be Beautiful, but when it comes to control - Big is Better.
How do the left square their “community” “small is beautiful” stuff with their desire for world government (as with Agenda 21)?
I do not know.
I have long stopped trying to work out how leftist minds work - they appear to operate on nonAristotelian principles of thought.
By the way….
Sorry Cats, but the more government funding of education you have the more Greens you will get.
Remember “education” no longer means (if it ever meant) giving people the tools (the mental tools) to find out, and work out, things for themselves.
It is about spreading fashionable dogma.
And the fashionable dogma now is……
“I have long stopped trying to work out how leftist minds work - they appear to operate on nonAristotelian principles of thought.”
You mean they’re crazy.
Future historians will marvel at how such a crowd of obviously delusional wackos managed to attract so much credence. It reminds me of the 19th Century craze for spiritualism. I mean, socialism itself you can almost see, especially back in the days when Marx’s class struggle guff probably made sense to people whose economic choices amounted to going down t’pit or starving, but these headcases? In what mad alternative universe is any of their doolally new-stone-age agenda - spend eye-watering amounts of money to produce less electricity, shackle whatever industry manages to survive with a carbon tax, lock up anyone who complains - remotely attractive, let alone workable?
By the way, the thought struck me last night, prompted by an article I’ve lost, that the two central dogmas of modern Greenism - AGW and Peak Oil - are more or less mutually incompatible. If the fossil fuels are running out, what’s all the carbon hysteria about? And if we’re all going to die in horrific agony if continue to anger Mother Gaia by burning oil and coal, then why are we worrying about having none left to burn?
Australians are morons. I should know, because I happen to be one of them.
I pride myself on my vocabulary, but I struggle to devise the word that Brown deserves. A dirty shirt-lifting, two-headed Taswegian communist is too long-winded.
My country is so fucked up that I prefer to live in England. Yes, it is that bad.
Sam,
“The bomber will always get through”
This was widespread military doctrine through much of the ’20s and ’30s. It was true except until it wasn’t. The low-wing monoplane fighter and radar made it untrue and when the real battles happened (from ‘39 on) there was a rude awakening. The similarly great failing of Marx and followers is to see their socio-economic-political thought as eternal. Essentially the idea of a meta-theory of history is foolish because history is by definition about change. If it wasn’t and if, for example, the US Revolution didn’t change anything fundamental why study it? We live in a very different world to Julius Caesar or George Washington or Karl Marx. My point is that any analysis of where we are here now is temporal, not eternal. Looking back it is impossible to see the plight of the average Joe in Industrial Revolution Britain as anything but terrible by our standards but it’s also impossible not to see an age of progress. Genuine, real progress. And this continued…
My Granddad (born 1922) went to school without shoes. He died owning a house and with a not inconsiderable sum in the bank. He had a car (and of course several pairs of shoes). He wasn’t rich but he was comfortable. His daughter (my mother) went to college and qualified as a teacher and is still teaching. He probably would have taken more foreign holidays but for the fact he feared flying. This I found odd because he was a pit shot-firer. So he was OK with setting off explosions in an 18″ seam however far down and three miles under the North Sea but getting on a 737 spooked him.
Things change. By and large for the better but I fear we are entering the endarkening. Civilizations wax and wane and we are fucked.