gillards carbon confusion, page-3

Read this and weep....

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/extreme-secret-agenda-aims-to-change-our-society/story-e6frg6zo-1225954629630

THE Greens are anti-free trade, anti-capitalism, anti-wealth and anti-growth.
WE have seen this before. A third party taps into voter discontent with both sides of politics, rises to become a force in Australian politics, then fades into electoral oblivion. Remember the DLP? Remember One Nation? Remember the Australian Democrats?

At the 1990 federal election, the Democrats won 11.3 per cent of lower house votes and 12.6 per cent of Senate votes, picking up five upper house seats. Then they fizzed. By July 2008, the Democrats were a spent force.

Picking up 11.7 per cent of lower house votes and 13.1 per cent of votes in the Senate at the August election, will the Greens go the same way? Consider some more parallels. Riding a green wave of environmentalism, the Democrats looked like a long-term political force. The fairies at the bottom of the garden picked up seats at every Senate election between 1977 and 2001 by appealing to middle-class, inner-city, educated voters, especially younger voters.

Democrat support was, as analysts remarked at the time, more a case of a negative protest vote against the main parties than a positive voter support for Democrats policies. Ditto for many who now mark the Greens box.

Strong leadership helped the Democrats rise to political strength. Think Bob Brown and the Greens. Last week even Labor man Graham Richardson declared that Brown was "arguably the best politician in the country".

Success breeds excitement, and hubris. The Greens' website boasts their 2010 vote was larger than any previous third party in modern Australian political history and the first time a third party elected a senator in every state.

Remember when then Democrats senator Cheryl Kernot declared in 1997 that "after 20 years, we are entitled to say with confidence that we are here to stay and, after [the 1996 election], we can say with equal confidence that our best is yet to come"? She was wrong. The Democrats' best had been and gone. No wonder Kernot switched sides to join Labor.

Perhaps the rise of the Greens is just another third-party firecracker, an explosion of colour and light, then nothing. Just another party that for a time splinters votes away from one side, just as the DLP did to Labor and One Nation did to the Coalition.

Don't count on it. Voter cynicism is here to stay. For so long as voters are looking for a way to protest against their alienation, the Greens may snatch votes from both sides of politics.

And the reason the Greens should be taken more seriously than other minor parties is simple enough.

Behind the moderate face of a politically astute Brown and the clever green camouflage is a political force that wants to transform Australian society in a way most Australians would find abhorrent if these voters understood the policies behind their protest vote.

As former Democrats senator Andrew Murray warned before the August federal election, "don't expect the Greens to put on the mantle of a centrist party, a small-l liberal party. The essence of the Greens is a determination to change society: the way goods and services are produced, the way you are taxed and governed, the way energy is delivered. The Greens will be true to themselves."

Both sides of politics are busy with the politics of dealing with the Greens.

The decision on the weekend by the Victorian Liberal Party to reject any preference deal with the Greens at the November 27 state election is sensible politics. Voters aren't stupid. You won't defend your Liberal Party brand by giving preferences to a party you believe is a danger to the country.

The Labor Party is having enough problems defining itself given its new relationship with the Greens. Richardson and Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes think the left-flank bleeding to the Greens will stop if the ALP would only reclaim its brand as the progressive party of compassion. Good luck with that political contortion.

Inadvertently Howes, the young, comfortably middle-class, inner-city dweller, sums up Labor's political wedge. His stated preference for putting out the "red carpet" for asylum-seekers is unlikely to find much support among blue-collar workers living in outer suburban seats where elections are decided. However, the Greens raise bigger problems than preference deals and branding.

Last week, Liberal frontbencher Kevin Andrews gave an address exposing the history and the philosophical roots behind the rise of the Greens.

Had someone such as Malcolm Turnbull given this speech, the media would have lauded it as a brilliant treatise demolishing the Greens as anything but a moderate force for good. Instead, the speech by a more conservative Liberal is buried. That's a shame.

Andrews traces the values that underpin our liberal democracy, ideas such as the intrinsic human dignity where the individual is paramount.

He juxtaposes our Judeo-Christian heritage and the ideas of the Enlightenment with the very different historical roots of the Greens, where the subordination of the individual has become the driving ideology to effect radical economic and social change.

"Unless we understand the ideological foundations of the Greens, we will fail to effectively address the challenge of their revolution . . . What the Greens present is the cutting edge of a clash within Western civilisation itself," Andrews said. By looking closely at Greens policies, he has uncovered what he calls the new coercive utopianism.

It becomes clear that behind every stated purpose - and an increasing number of anodyne motherhood statements - set out in Greens policies through the years is a secret agenda that, at its core, is anti-free trade, anti-capitalism, anti-wealth, anti-consumption and anti-growth.

The Greens' latest bill to stop banks raising interest rates beyond the Reserve Bank's official cash rate is just the latest example. It fits the Greens' agenda to reduce the flow of credit in an effort to reduce consumption. Drawing on the Greens de facto think tank, the Australia Institute, new Greens member Adam Bandt wants us to work less, too, presumably so we earn less money and consume less material goods.

For too long, Greens extremism has been hidden from the Australian public under a cuddly shroud of green goodwill.

As success brings more scrutiny, the Greens may well go the way of earlier "new forces" in Australian politics. But just as the Greens would be foolish to take their continuing success for granted, we would be unwise to treat their demise as a given.