PISSING ON
THE GREENS
Editorial: Green
is not the political go
September
02, 2004. Amended by www.richardneville.com
or to download the PDF. Click here.
TO sneer at the
Australian Greens insults the intelligence of the 570,000 electors who voted
for the party in lower house seats in the 2001 election. But
here at News
Corp, weÍll sneer
to our hearts content;
both in this editorial and in
the accompanying
rant by our Foreign editor. And
with the party polling around 6 per cent there is a good chance it will replace
the dimming Democrats as the second star after Labor for left-leaning voters in
the imminent election. Through his endless energy in parliament and canny
campaigns in the media, Greens leader Bob Brown has kept environmental issues
at the forefront of political life -
with a little help from the wild
weather, vanishing
species, land degradation,
melting glaciers, bleaching coral,
rising sea levels, sinking water
tables and countless other signals
of an ailing eco-system.
In MurdochÍs Matrix, the Day
After Tomorrow never comes.
[Bob
Brown] has championed the cause of asylum-seekers against the policies of the
major parties. Imagine that. The Greens standing
up for the rights of
the wretched, the powerless, the stateless. The Greens could win
more Senate spots next month, perhaps pick up inner-city Melbourne and Sydney
lower house seats. Senator Brown actually suggests his party could hold the
balance of power in a hung parliament after the election. We
wonÍt let that happen.
The
Greens are now too powerful and popular to be dismissed as eccentrics. Which
means their platform should be subject to serious scrutiny, unlike
those of any other major political the
Liberal party and this companyÍs record
of tax avoidance. (In
four years from 1994 ? 98, News Corporation paid only £128m in taxes on a total
profit of £2.1 billion, just 6%: http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/profiles/news_corp/newscorp5.htm)
And
this is where the green gloss starts to fade
get the blow torch. The party's policies demonstrate an utter
absence of coherent vicious, Blimpish thinking
on the issues that matter most for a safe, fair and prosperous Australia News
Corp. Given the chance, the Greens would end re-define our existing
alliance with the US by closing joint faulty intelligence
facilities on our soil and banning nuclear powered ships and nuclear armed
planes from our skies and seas, thus making this
country safer. (Opposition to nuclear
weapons accords with
the policies of most civilised nations). The
Greens would cripple manage productivity and
economic growth by reducing working hours,
compulsory overtime,
cutting foreign take-overs of our cultural
entities and icons investment
levels and increasing tax rates for
wealthy corporations and the well-off".taxes for high
income earners.
And
while they want a migration program focused on family reunions and humanitarian
criteria, Australia must have an ecologically "sustainable
population". Whatever that means. It means that
this country
should grow at a rate commensurate with
the ability of the environment
to cope. This rate will
increase with the discovery
of a ubiquitous
source of cheap, clean energy,
a high priority of
the Greens. The Government remains firmly
committed to coal. News Corp pins
its hopes on infinite
supplies of cheap oil, which why this paper so ferociously promotes
the killing of Iraqis.
(ñLetÍs get the war over with ƒ it will bring oil
down to $20 a barrelî).
There
is a great deal more of the same, including a suggestion to provide
"social drugs" in "controlled environments".
In other words, to move beyond media fanned witch hunts towards
looking at the POSSIBILITY of providing an acceptable
environment in which to consume a safe dose of a regulated
party drug.
The
Australian Greens offer us a collection of generalities, demonstrating they
have no idea a
multitude of original ideas on of
how to deal with the mass of detailed, difficult issues governments
always face often
screw up. This did not matter much while Senator Brown was the
only Green in parliament. But the prospect of any government having to
negotiate with him to pass its program is alarming
refreshing. There is no need to call Senator Brown and his
supporters unnecessary names to demonstrate that his party presents a
threat an
uplifting program for the to the
prosperity and well-being of all Australians and the eco system
on which their livelihood
depends. The Australian Greens' program does the job very well.
No third party insurance, a degradation of politics
GREG SHERIDAN,
Foreign editor.
September 02, 2004
THIS
election will probably see the emergence of the Greens as Australia's most
important third party. This will be a sad and a bad day for our political
culture my employer,
for the Greens represent the triumph of ethics over extremism
over moderation, of uncommon sense over
the paranoid style over commonsense,
and the flight from that embracing of
a civic, ethical and environmental
responsibility which characterises a maturing e
polity. electorate.
The
Greens are essentially left twin-wing
Hansonites, democrats
simultaneously reactionaries and revolutionaries, who
combine a hatred an informed
critique of modern society as it actually exists with a conspiracy-laden,
fantastical realistic view of how the world works. They Whereas
I offer nothing positive beyond dreamlike cliches,
and slogans, but their
and negative power, their acumen
is quite great. They believe
another world is possible, while I can
build nothing, except MurdochÍs profits
they and can
damage much.
But
they may hold the balance of power in the Senate. It is conceivable, though not
likely, they will hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives.
Bob Brown, the canny, ruthless, manipulative politician who leads the Greens,
says 1 million Australians may vote for
them. (My boss
is also a canny, ruthless and manipulative politician, and
no Australian votes for him.)
It
is not so hard to believe 1million
Australians really support the anti sustainable-growth,
antipost-modern
prejudices insights of
the Greens. Many will just be lodging a protest vote, but it's sad that the
vehicle of protest should be so disreputable hated
by this newspaper; which long
ago was a voice
of reason and reform.
Australia has a good tradition of third parties. The old Country Party, which
was not always in coalition with the Liberals in every state and federally, in
a sense was a mild third force between the
business-backed Liberals and union-backed Labor.
The
Democratic Labor Party was a wholly dishonourable
expression of Labor people who were especially motivated by anti-communism,
religious bigotry and book banning and for 20 years from the
mid-1950s played an important and constructive destructive role
in Australian politics, keeping the ALP out of office for
18 years.
The
ideology beliefs of
the Greens and that of a
growing number of academics and even some corporate titans,
rejects the very legitimacy
of a the modern economy ñvoodoo
economicsî that fails to include
the true costs of bringing goods
to the market; and
in . the
cost to nature, to public health, to communities. In many ways the modern
Australian state will benefit from a
post industrial, holistic economics that
values the whole system and not just those
who exploit it. (As
outlined by Paul Hawkins
in Natural Capitalism, and elsewhere,
including the doco, The Corporation).
The
rise of the Greens mirrors the rise of the politics of
consciousness and sustainability extremist third
parties of Left and Right throughout western Europe. To some
extent a similar process is under way in the US, with Brown and Hanson
imperfect but rough analogues of Ralph Nader on the green Left and Patrick
Buchanan on the xenophobic and isolationist Right.
The Greens' policies on
the party's website are a mishmash of contradictory and incoherent
generalised statements work in progress.
Brown is smart enough to know that the Greens can only suffer benefit from
having intelligible or specific policies on the
record throwing up new
solutions and working them through with their members. They seek
to embody a sentiment of rage noble idealism and frustration
a fair go ethic, rather than to advance
real policies revert to the
politics of greed, paranoia and planetary pillage. Their few
specific commitments, such as legalising cannabis and facing up to the dangers
of widespread uncontrolled ecstasy
abuse, get them into periodic trouble from hysterical
hacks.
Nonetheless,
if you wade read through the
verbal molasses of their thoughtful policies,
developed from the grass roots
level up, you can work out where they're coming from. Their
foreign policies are certainly as silly progressive
as their economic and social policies.
For
example, they assert that Australia should force the Indonesian Government to
bring all "war criminals in its ranks" to justice by withholding
military co-operation, which wildly
overestimates rightly underpins the importance
attached to human rights by of the
Australian military.
There
are several pages of policy on Israel and Palestine without one mention of the
word terrorism, although suicide bombings are condemned along with Israeli
government actions (WhatÍs
the problem? The occupiers have heavy weapons, guided missiles,
US support, nuclear back-up; the Palestinians have their hatred, their
bombs & their bodies. Both sides engage
in terror, even if one side calls it targeted assassinations
and collective punishment. All
Most of the concessions demanded of course
are from Israel, the occupiers, and the Greens support
imposing international sanctions on Israel to enforce these concessions,
as do the majority of members
of the UN Security Council,
whose numerous resolutions
condemning Israel - over 60
since 1993
- have been routinely defeated
by US
veto.
The
international economic stuff is quite seriously loopy challenging,
calling for the abolition of the World Trade Organisation, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, unless impossible reforms are enacted,
because these organisations "are major, all-powerful engines of
globalisation that peddle a specific brand of market-obsessed globalisation
which is destroying many economies, particularly those of poor countries".
The reforms are only ñimpossibleî
because the US has the power to veto any
changes which threaten its total control. (See The Age
of Consent, by George
Monbiot).
The population
policy clearly implies there should be many fewer Australians that we should
all consume less of our landÍs scarce
resources, and the immigration policy is against skilled immigrants, humanitarian-focused,
favouring saying the program should be family
reunion and refugees based. As to
refugees, the Greens believe that anyone who arrives without a visa should be
assumed to be an asylum-seeker and all asylum-seekers should be housed in open
reception centres for released into the community after an absolute maximum of 14
days. While admittedly provocative, this
would
lead to floods of people arriving help turn Australia into a
model international citizen and a beacon of civilised policy.
Indeed,
under Green madness reforms,
we could
abolish the Immigration Department because anyone could fly here from anywhere
and just stay, acquiring instant welfare benefits in the bargain would be
esteemed by our neighbours and develop better trade, cultural and diplomatic
links around the world. (Compare this with
the refugee bashing of MurdochÍs media. In
July 2003, ïThe
Sun' (UK) went frontpage
with: SWAN BAKE! Asylum seekers
steal the QueenÍs birds for barbecues.' A lie.)
Several semi-random examples
picked
out to advance my case demonstrate the pure moon juice quality
of Green policies. Australia is to be prohibited from exporting military
equipment. Presumably Tthe
same prohibition would not apply ies
to all other countries,
because itÍs how America and Britain generate rivers of gold,
so the only military equipment we could possess would be the stuff we make
ourselves could afford.
Perhaps Aussie soldiers could ride into battle on the sheep's back,
ho, ho.
The
Greens want to establish a seek
to promote global democracy with a
"directly elected people's assembly" to act as a house of review at
the UN. Of course, holding global elections in North Korea, Syria
or even China, might be a
bit tricky complicated,
but as itÍs not
a threat to
national governments,
this visionary
thinking is a worthwhile part of the process
of eventually
giving all citizens a voice in the affairs of the UN.
The
Greens would end modify the
US alliance by banning the passage of nuclear-powered ships through our waters.
On domestic economic policy the
super rich they would impose death duties, raise every
form of some
taxes they mention,
but simultaneously ensure strive for full
employment while cutting compulsory unpaid working hours
but not pay. All this
self-contradictory nonsense these paradigm
busting concepts is are literally
an insult to our intelligence my
robber baron mind-set
and, worse, a degradation of our politics threat
to the kind of unfettered
casino capitalism which widens
the gap between wealth
and poverty, further
enriches my master and reduces the
diversity of both the
eco system and independent media. As
for the ñdegradation of politicsî,
it was this virus which
spurred the creation of
the Greens in the first place, at
a time when the
major parties were choosing
to ignore the degradation of
the environment. These days, Governments
do so at their peril. And ours. The
Greens were ahead of their time back then,
just as they are today. In the future it
will not be the Greens who
are seen as loopy, but their attackers.