In this last election we should face up to the fact that the green vote was bigger than we expected. There were probably a hundred thousand disaffected Labor voters ready to turn on their political brethren. Most of us lefties are just about as sick of our party as we are ever likely to get so I and many other left-leaning loonies may just move our pencil down the ticket and mark someone who is not identified as Labor and I was one of them. I picked a Green for the Lower House knowing it to be just a protest vote and my tick for John Madigan got lost becasue he renamed his party just prior to the election and nobody knew who he was.
The Greens have decided, following the loss of Dear Leader Bob Brown, to move away from the screaming tree-huggers and try to become a more mainstream party which will attract a different shade of green voter.
The Greens should be increasingly to attracting those who believe in Gay Marriage, and that’s about 72% of the population and playing down their stance on Boat People which deter those of us who are not refugee huggers. They should be playing up to the rural electorate in areas where the Nationals have been negligent at best. Encouraging or putting forth legislation that will attract people to the regional areas for a better environment and a healthier lifestyle.
The Greens would be best placed working on ways to reduce road traffic and increase the use of rail as the lesser of two evils. Fuck the cyclists. Admittedly the U.S has a population spread right across its continent but its private rail system is spending billions upgrading and the government is matching those billions with new infrastructure to handle the increases, at least they see a move from road to rail as a significant advantage. The problem is that a crazy, mysogynist, narcisist, anti-semetic, anti-Spanish carpet-bagging, snake oil salesman of a President may have to ship wheat from West to East but men, arms and ammunition to the West.
We don’t need high speed rail we just need high speed efficiency. Our country is too big for fast rail, by the time it's built we'll have driverless double-B's and the cost of fast-rail will be so prohibitive it would be cheaper to have everything hand carried between the cities. Instead of trucking from city to region and then to smaller towns many goods could come via rail, especially with containerisation, to the hubs where they can be trans-shipped by road. This will take thousands of trucks a day off our highways and reduce the need for even more expressways criss-crossing good prime real estate and arable land.
The Greens should be discussing with farming organisations how best to strike a balance between the needs of the farmer and the environment after all they a both strong environmentalists but just coming from different directions. They might lessen our dependence on the pleasures of bush-walking and increasing awareness of the difficulties a modern society faces in an agrarian community. Equalising the GST between city and country, equal services, equal access to public transport and equal access to all forms of education. Providing the countryside with fast reliable communications, or at least making mobiles work in all areas.
Farmers, are by nature conservationists, one only has to look inside their sheds at the ‘moth-balled’ equipment. Farmers are environmentalists. If they didn’t look after the land they could not make a living. The Greens should include the landowning gentry in their deliberations on policy not just listen to Inner-city Vegetarians.
Greens need to sit down with local councils and work out more beneficial codification of laws so that landholders are not penalised on the whims of someone whose 4WD has never seen a dirt track.
What most political parties are missing this election are policies that differentiate between the ideologies, not just re-wording the other sides policy to sound more attractive to their voters. Putting forward new ideas and policies is far preferable to the constant whinge and whine about what the other side is doing without coming up with credible alternatives. It seems to us that all one side wants to do is to destroy the other. This destructive attitude is only turning voters off and giving them the impression that every politician is just jerking themselves too much and not concentrating on the most important matters which just happen to be ‘what’s best for Australia’.
The Greens need to work out ways to eliminate the partisanship of local and state farming groups in favour of a national agenda. To allow the live export market to operate efficiently and with the treatment of animals properly monitored by trained staff with a camera and not a Chardonnay glass in their hand.
So we had several greens to choose from other than just the leaf green of the vegetarian sector that want us all to ride bikes, heat our homes with used cooking oils, make our own sack cloth and ashes and wipe out slavery in our cat and dog population?
The Greens are starting to have candidates that look and sound halfway normal, who are willing to get down to the nitty-gritty of problems and speak directly to the man on the land and not some executive from a farming organisation who have their eyes on being politicians some time in the future.
The Green voter has always been a bit of a loose cannon. Like the Tea Party in America there are too many chiefs with differing opinions, too many varied solutions and too much chattering with no action. Regardless of how you voted this time we ask that you at least look at the Greens policies before marking your ballot in a few years time. You owe it to the bush.
