Month: December 2003

From Jamie Walker in today?s Weekend Australian Inquirer

Discussion about the ideological orientation of the Greens tends to revolve around the watermelon thesis that what’s green on the outside is actually red beneath. Does it matter in this day and age? Well, yes, especially if the Greens are trying to pull the shade cloth over our eyes.

And they are!

Bob Carr, one of the most astute Premiers in Australia claimed that;

.. many Greens were unreconstructed Trots, closet members of the SWP. The whole Labor Party knew this, Carr said, and voters should, too.

I agree, the voters should be told often that a vote for the Greens is a vote against all that Australia stands for. Every now and then Brown, with sympathetic TV cameras in tow, hugs a tree and all the Greenies squirm with righteous pleasure but for the rest of the time he beats a different drum, and its funereal beat offers no hope for a better world.

Hazy summer days at campus creates great breeding grounds for the Greens. Uni students, all in that phase of life that questions society are all conned by cute pictures of Koalas in threatened forests…remember No Tree – No Me. Truly a gallant cause but the innocent Koala is a front for anti-capitalist, anti US, anti globalisation and all the other Trotsky/Marxist failed bullshit ‘antis’ of the previous years.

After Uni, most students go on to read newspapers other than the left-wing uni rags and their opinions mature. They realize in a complicated world the Greens have few real-world answers and what policy they do have will never be put to the test. They will never occupy the treasury benches but will be able to force disastrous results on legislature that can literally harm the nation.

All green, no sense, stop industry, bugger the jobs. Policy in a sentence.

Jamie puts a negative spin on the Greens years but I’m still concerned.

So here we are, sitting in Brown’s gloomy office in Parliament House, looking to what he insists is a bright future. Leaving aside events in Queensland, the year hasn’t ended as well as he would have hoped. The Greens’ vote, according to Newspoll, has slipped to 5 per cent, down three percentage points from the October high.

Other published opinion polls show a similar dip. Brown and Nettle’s juvenile antics during the joint sitting of parliament addressed by US President George W. Bush appear to have been coolly received by the electorate. Senior adviser Ben Oquist insists, though, that the polls reflect no more than the bounce Labor received from the leadership change to Mark Latham. You’d hardly think that was a comfort.

Their juvenile antics will have put the electorate off but those who’s opinion and choice of newspapers never matured will again swing away from Labour and head to the Greens for socialist Trotsky solace.

When Latham forces the issue at the forthcoming Labour conference all the left wing luvvies will be dismayed at the centre and right wing ascendancy in the party. They will vote Green and the 5% will head to double figures.

Poor fellow, my country.

Latham has done his sums and come up with an answer that will further wind up the left wing baggage of the ALP. To have any chance of Government Labour needs to debate and where relevant support the Government in it’s Security issues. To disallow every Coalition submission because it doesn’t sit well with the left wing is going nowhere fast.

During a wide-ranging interview with The Australian, Mr McClelland – who, like Mr Latham, hails from the NSW Right – suggested many Labor grassroots members, such as teachers, lawyers, university students and social workers – were out of touch with the security concerns expressed by ordinary voters.

“Some of the relatively narrow membership base that we have in the party is refusing to acknowledge the legitimate security concerns and anxiety that working Australians have,” told The Australian

It’s not so much the grassroots members but the left wing portion that drag the party down. Rational thought lost in a hate haze of Bush/Howard et al, they refuse to see any good that can come of the current world power grouping.

Both Latham and McClelland are heading in the right direction in this article in todays Australian but I don’t think much of their chances of dragging the left wing into any arena of rational thought. Carmen Lawrence, given any power, will only want to lead the ALP into a 40 years sojourn in the wilderness.

It’s a pleasant thought but we do need a viable opposition.

McClelland isolates the left wing further by cannonising Satan and calling the UK labour to task over Iraq.

In further controversial remarks, Mr McClelland conceded that Tony Blair’s Labour Government in Britain had been “dishonest” in its arguments for joining the war in Iraq.

“America was far more honest in their reasons for going into Iraq,” he said.

“It was essentially the doctrine of pre-emption.”

Anyone not handicapped by the hate haze could see the Iraq war was pre-emptive and that the establishment of a democracy in the centre of the Middle East is a good idea but McClelland is being a bit disengenious by claiming the US were far more honest that the two junior partners. The US set the agenda and both the UK and Australia went along with it.

The WMD only mattered until Saddam lost his ability to deploy them.