'God' Versus Greens

By Darryl Mason

Cardinal George Pell and some of his lackey bishops aren't happy with The Greens. Now there's a surprise.

Maybe 'aren't happy' isn't an accurate enough description. More like, 'Terrified'.

And, curiously, for an institution that is supposed to avoid getting involved in political campaigning to retain their non-taxpaying status, the Catholic Church is now demanding what remains of Australia's Catholics, at least those who bother to listen to anything Pell has to say, not vote for The Greens in next week's NSW elections.

Leesha McKeeny and Anna Patty in the Sydney Morning Herald (excerpts) :

Catholic bishops have warned the faithful against voting for the Greens in the state election, saying their policies were of ''grave concern''.

A two-page document entitled The Green Agenda is being circulated by Catholic agencies and through schools. It states the party's human rights and social policy areas are in direct conflict ''with the beliefs and values of virtually all religious people, and the beliefs of many other people as well''.

It also warns against voting for candidates who might share similar views, pointing out that some MPs in the main parties had voted for ''bad legislation'' such as same-sex adoption.

The letter outlines eight areas of ''grave concern'', including the Greens' treatment of personal drug use as a health and social issue ''and therefore acceptable'', and its efforts to legalise gay marriage.

But of course, as is usual with Pell's Catholics, it's really all about money.

The Full Story Is Here

State election ads are usually worse than national election ads, so when even a mildly entertaining one comes along it should be enjoyed for the rare treat that it is :

Federal Election 2010 : Who's Doing What Now?

By Darryl Mason

Oh, looks like I missed most of it.

Anyway, I have no idea why the mainstream media is dying, or why the Federal Election 2010 appears to revolve almost solely around trivialities. It's a complete mystery. Really, it is.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :



Get used to saying it, Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

And get used to saying this, too : Governor General John Howard.

Or will it be US ambassador John Howard?

That Greens-Liberal coalition I predicted for 2016 is about to move forward a few years, if Tony Abbott doesn't win, that is, and Malcolm Turnbull snatches back the Liberal Party leadership (bringing back to the party with him all the vital, big cheque writing donors who bailed), probably before Christmas.

Today should be a very interesting day for The Greens.

Both the Labor and Liberal parties have only 24 hours to come up with something horrifying enough about The Greens to push down their share of the vote on Saturday, and deny them the balance of power. I'm sure the Murdoch media will help the Labor and Liberal parties to come up with something to really fuck them over.

Unless Greens leader Bob Brown does the damage himself, by making the mistake of injecting gay heroin into a Christian child during a press conference, which, if Piers Akerman's judgement on The Greens can be trusted, just might still be a possibility.

It's the best ad of the Federal Election 2010 campaign, it's a shame the Greens can't use it :



The ad was, however, seen by more than 1.6 million viewers on Gruen Nation last night, will be seen by a hundred thousand more in repeats and will probably clock up another 20-50,000 views on YouTube between now and election day.

Considering The Greens didn't pay for the production of the ad, or come up with the slogan, or pay the equivalent of getting such an ad screened on commercial networks to more than a million and a half Australians in prime time, the ABC did The Greens one hell of a huge favour.

Compared to 'Stand Up For Real Action' and 'Moving Australia Forward', the gifted to The Greens slogan 'If You Think, Vote Greens' is election pitch poetry.

Free Gay Heroin For All

John Birmingham poses a What If? on The Greens, who now command a chunky 16% of the national vote, according to recent polls (excerpts) :

What if Bob Brown's lentil eating slouch bikers and militant anti-military-stuff movement actually got a couple, just a couple, of seats up in the lower house, and forming a government after the next election actually required the eventual victor, be it Abbott or Gillard, to cut a deal with Brown?

What would that government actually do? And more importantly what could it not do, in terms of passing laws and spending money?

They might well be able to leverage their support into seemingly minor but actually significant policies such as, say, a moratorium on the release of genetically-modified organisms into the environment. Or a ban on old growth logging.

They'd almost certainly put a bullet into any xenophobic nonsense about demonizing asylum seekers as mad bombers and child killers waiting to jump our queues and blow up our shopping malls because they hate our precious, precious freedom so much they're willing to spend years in a detention centre just to have a crack at us.

...in actual security policy, even motherhood statements like the party's central principle that "no nuclear armed or powered forces should be deployed within Australia's maritime boundaries" would mean a radical transformation of decades of settled, bipartisan policy, abrogating as it would the entire alliance with US.

A great read.

Read The Full Story Here

The Greens Are Now Bigger Than The Nationals, Even In The Bush

It won't be the Labor Party or the Liberal Party who see startling swings towards them at Federal Election 2010. It will be The Greens, as Lenore Taylor explains in National Times :

In 2010 the Greens want to be seen as a mainstream party, not a protest movement in political disguise. They base the claim on their polling and on how they have used the power they have already got.

In the latest quarterly breakdown of Newspoll the Greens are polling 11 per cent, 3 percentage points ahead of their 2007 vote. Even taking into account the tendency for opinion polls to slightly overestimate the Greens' vote, it's a strong position. The Greens now outpoll the National Party in both the cities and in the bush.

And ever since 2007, when they found themselves the largest party on the Senate crossbenches with five senators, after the demise of the Democrats, they deliberately set about proving they could be "responsible" holders of the balance of power.

They negotiated the passage of many critical bills including the government's second stimulus package, which Malcolm Turnbull's Coalition opposed. The Greens also negotiated through bills like the youth allowance and the Medicare levy surcharge. The claim to be mainstream could have a significant impact on this year's poll.

In the Senate the Greens will be pitching to the centre - with a message that a vote for them is a vote for stability because they can negotiate a way through legislative deadlocks.

"We're the ones that made the stimulus package better and then voted it through. Without us there wouldn't have been a stimulus package and we are not going to let that be forgotten," (said leader Bob Brown)

The Greens vote in the recent Tasmanian elections was a whopping 21%. Their best result yet. And this makes the gatekeepers of the traditional Two Party State System very, very nervous indeed.

It's going to be a strange election. You'll see Labor hammering The Greens wherever they can, while the Liberals will stay quietish. An unofficial Greens-Liberals coalition may become reality sooner than most political pundits think.

The Full Story Is Here

Labor, state and federal, are extremely worried about The Greens, and their ever-growing popularity. The anti-Greens campaigning by Labor, in the lead up to the federal election, has begun.

Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner kicks the campaigning into gear :

The Greens are not some benign group loosely allied with Labor. They're not a middle-ground party. They're not idealistic activists changing the world. They're just another political party, no less cynical or manipulative than the others. They feed off Labor's need to make compromises to marry progressive reform with majority government. Their energies are directed to attacking Labor, not the conservatives.

It might seem like a good idea to support those who yell the loudest, but it's unlikely to produce good outcomes. Labor is the only worthwhile option for achieving progressive change through parliamentary politics. It might be a bit piecemeal and gradual, but it beats the hell out of doing nothing.

While he doesn't say it directly, Tanner is pushing a mantra that declares if you vote for The Greens, then you are also voting for the Liberal Party, whether you intended to or not. It sounds surreal, but it's a line Labor will continue to push, perhaps hoping that opposition leader Tony Abbott will come to The Greens defence, which would allow Labor to brand them as radicals, extremists, or worse.

It won't happen anytime soon, but Labor clearly understands that if a new generation of Liberals find much common ground with The Greens, that is a mid-decade Liberals-Greens coalition, Labor will be in big trouble.

Democracy Hater

By Darryl Mason

How much does Rupert Murdoch's most prominent Australian opinionist, Andrew Bolt, hate democracy? So much it makes him seethe at the free election choices about to be made by Tasmanians.



He's trying to claim, yet again, as always, that people who exercise their democratic rights in a way that displeases him are mentally ill.

If you don't like the free and fair democratic vote we have in Australia, Mr Bolt, why don't you go live in North Korea?

Love it or leave it, democracy hater. Love it or leave it.


.

Vote Liberal, Labor Or Greens, It Doesn't Matter, Australia Will Still Get A Carbon Tax

By Darryl Mason

Chris Ulhmann writes on ABC's The Drum that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott knows he has only one shot at becoming prime minister, so this is it, he's going in hard...or so it would
appear :

The Coalition is not going to win a war for the votes of climate change purists or the devotees of detail. What it wants is to set up a position that it can defend while it seeks to win a war of attrition against the Government's emissions trading scheme.

It is reminiscent of what has happened to United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given its domination of the sky, no conventional army can stop an America invasion. But as Machiavelli knew, taking a country and holding it are two very different things. The way to beat America is to get its soldiers out of their planes and tanks and into a prolonged street-by-street battle.

The Coalition doesn't want to engage in lofty debates that it knows almost no one understands. It wants hand-to-hand combat on the cost of living increases that come with putting a price on carbon.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong was almost, almost, worn down by Tony Jones on Lateline last night, when he refused to stop asking her how much pricing carbon will eventually cost the average family. She avoided answering at least twelve questions on the subject. It was gruesome, like watching John Howard in late 2002 trying to deny we were about to go to War On Iraq, when Australian soldiers had already been deployed, knowing they were going there to fight.

The Rudd government for now has not much to counter the opposition's claims that the GBNT (Great Big New Tax) will cost everybody. It will.

But Abbott already appears suspicious is his mind-numbing repetitive use of "Great Big New Tax" by not calling the GBNT what it really is, will eventually become, was always going to be. A Carbon Tax.

Abbott is reluctant to call it a carbon tax because he knows that if he becomes prime minister, it will be all but impossible for Australia to function in the New Global Economy without one.

Labor and The Greens want a carbon tax, the Liberals will accept one, and Barnaby Joyce will be told to hold back from shouting about '"Carbon Tax!!" in public, too often. Entertaining his own dreams of one day becoming prime minister himself, Joyce will also, reluctantly, play along.

The Carbon Tax was always going to be the end result of either the introduction of an ETS, or the abandonment of an ETS. It doesn't matter which reality unfolds between now and election day. The introduction of a carbon tax was the mission from at least 2006 onwards for Labor, the Liberals and The Greens, irrespective of how oppposed they appeared to be of each other's plans.

To really whip up the growing tide of climate change skeptics in Australia, to get on side a new Liberal conservative base, Abbott needs to go to the election pledging 'No Carbon Tax!' if he really wants to win.

But he won't do it.

No matter how much he wants to win.

.

Fantasy Boy Steve Fielding Still Appalled, Mortified By Realisation That Jesus Was The Original Hippy Greenie

By Darryl Mason

Is Senator Steve Fielding outsourcing his press releases to Rupert Murdoch's anti-Greens chief propagandist, Andrew Bolt? Sure reads like it :

The Greens would rather send Australia back to the Stone Age than use common sense....

“I don’t know what planet the Greens are on, but by the look of their ‘Safe Climate Bill’ they look like they’re lost in space,” Senator Fielding said.

“If Bob Brown and his hippy friends really believed in their cause they’d ride their bikes to Parliament House instead of using the Commonwealth’s petrol-guzzling V8s.

“If we did what the Greens propose Australia would no longer exist because there’d be no industries left to drive our economy."

“The Greens’ proposed 40 percent reduction in emissions would cripple our economy and boot thousands of jobs offshore.

“The hypocrisy of the Greens beggars belief with the way they carry on about the environment yet show no evidence of doing anything about it in their personal lives."

“The Greens should either practice what they preach or just shut up and go away.”

Further proof needed? Here's the headline Fielding chose for his press release, in all screaming caps :

GREENS PLAN ECONOMICALLY LAUGHABLE, FOOLISH AND LUDICROUS

Fielding better watch himself. Rupert Murdoch has been ranting like a loon (or like someone who's lost a few billion dollars) about the evils of "content kleptomaniacs" recently. If Fielding's going to lift so much content from Andrew Bolt, he may be in big trouble :

"(the) plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content."

But can you copyright political propaganda?

UPDATE : Earlier today, Andrew Bolt published the key lines for the revived, and rather boring, political strategy for attacking The Greens (they use cars! and planes!) from Fielding's press release, before it went online.

How very similar it is to Andrew Bolt's own favoured "Look! Hypocrisy Over There!" methodology for attacking The Greens. Surely just a coincidence, and not at all groupthink.

Or something more suspicious.

Did Andrew Bolt get a preview of the press release from Fielding by e-mail, or fax? Or did Fielding read it to him over the phone while he was 'putting it together' ?

Family First Senator Steve Fielding is tired of being hectored by hypocrites:

From 1 July to 31 December 2008 Greens Senators spent $164,240 flying around the country.

“The carbon footprint the Greens leave behind jet setting across the country is just another minor detail they forget to include when they campaign about lowering carbon dioxide emissions....”

(No link yet to press release.)

How very, very interesting.

Is 'journalism' now a second job for Andrew Bolt?

Below, David Marr catches up on the Sunday morning papers, during the 'Morning Papers' segment of Insiders, while Bolt waffles about his latest climate change conspiracy theory, that doesn't include the fact that his boss, Rupert Murdoch, is the world's leading promoter of global warming fearmongery and carbon neutral corporatism.

The Australian Praises One Party State

By Darryl Mason

Having some trouble working out why the Labor and Liberal parties spend so much time agreeing with each other? Do you find it surreal that the main point of contention this week between the mainstream 'The Left' and 'The Right' in Australian front bencher politics appears to have been something to do with signs in school yards? Do you find it a bit unnerving that the only voices of true opposition to just about anything of major importance seem to be coming from The Shooters Party or National Party backbenchers?

Obviously you'll need a little bit more time to adapt to the new 'Centrist' reality. But his lead editorial in The Australian explains why you should just sit back and float downstream (excerpts) :

Such is the centrist nature of contemporary Australian politics that it is not beyond imagination to see Malcolm Turnbull as a Labor leader and Kevin Rudd as a Liberal. It is not that the ideologues have departed the scene, just that today's political parties are driven by policy and pragmatism rather than the blind tribalism of earlier decades. In this context, it is easy to see the Opposition Leader being courted by, or courting Labor.

Australian politics has sometimes been deeply divided along ideological lines, but our general temperament is more centrist. These days, voters are keen on conviction and competence in their politicians, not outdated ideological positions.

Even Maxine McKew thinks War Is Right for now. The War On Afghanistan anyway. And bits of the one in Pakistan.

The true opposition party with the numbers to do some real damage to Labor at the next election is not The Liberals, but, of course, The Greens.

I wonder why Malcolm Turnbull didn't pester The Greens for a gig back when he was auditioning for Labor? It's what a true maverick would have done.

Rudd Is Still Messing With Their Minds

Most Australians don't care about the nation falling into deficit. Why would they? Why should they? Even $20 or $30 billion in the hole won't affect their lives negatively, it will work to their favour, as long as the money is used to repair and upgrade the schools their children attend and get some real infrastructure rebuilding and modernisation underway.

PM Rudd is actually on fire, just a little, during Question Time right now (2.08pm), as he hammers opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull for "being against fixing the primary schools". It's devastating. The Liberals have allowed themselves to be painted as being anti-public school renovation. Even if it's not true, this is likely the impression most will take away from the evening news reports.

Turnbull's opposition to what Rudd is now calling a $42 billion package to "rebuild the nation" is a masterstroke in self-destruction, as Bernard Keane at Crikey points out (excerpts) :

At about 10.30 this morning in the House of Representatives the Opposition walked into a baseball bat. It caught them flush across the head. BANG. Then they got up and invited the wielder to swing it again.

The wielder -- Kevin Rudd -- won't need to be asked twice.

Refusing to back the Government's stimulus package, which Malcolm Turnbull announced in the chamber this morning, is a truly colossal -- indeed, almost suicidal -- error by the Opposition.

The Coalition and much of the media haven’t worked out that politics has for the moment changed completely. A crisis mindset has taken hold and voters are in no mood for anyone getting in the way of it being addressed with urgency.

Rudd will be delighted with the Opposition's stupidity. But he won't be celebrating. Instead, he'll be flexing his muscles and practising his swing. That mild-mannered, bespectacled bloke will be swinging the baseball bat, hard and without pity. And he's going to hit the Liberals again, and again, and again, and again, and he's not going to stop until they're a bloodied mess.

Who put Turnbull up to coming out against the StimuPak #2? Was it Costello's boys?

By Q2 of Question Time, Turnbull looks shocked, totally rattled, perhaps with the reality dawning across his usually sharp mind that he just got fucked, royally fucked, by some in his own party, who are, presumably, trying to knock Turnbull aside for The Return Of "The World's Greatest Treasurer."

Malcolm Turnbull, in fact nobody in the Liberals, should forget that Rudd promised, in February 2007, that he was going to mess with then PM John Howard's mind, and in turn, the collective mind of the Liberal Party.

Why would they assume that Rudd, particularly with his massively publicised attack on "neo-liberals' and "extreme capitalism" in The Monthly magazine, is not still messing with their minds?

Of course he's still doing it. It worked so well on Howard, why wouldn't Rudd keep messing with the Liberal Mind every moment he gets the chance to do so?

Who will come out of this StimuPak #2 fight looking the best? The Greens, of course. Watch the Liberals poll numbers plunge even further in this wake of this catastrofuck and The Greens favourability numbers rise, perhaps even soar. It gets harder and harder for The Greens to be painted as extremists when both Labor and Liberals are fighting to put their ideas and policies into action.

UPDATE : I don't know how long this re-interest in national politics at The Orstrahyun will last. I can feel myself fading out as I watch a second interview with Turnbull in less than 48 hours, added to what felt like two hours of Costello defying God's laws about Vanity, on Lateline.

The Good Doctor (Nelson) would have been far more apopaleptic and thereby hysterically funny, if he was upfront. But those days are gone....sadly.

Recent Election Results Show The Two Party System Controlling Australia Is Melting Down

Greens leader Bob Brown thinks the spectacular political chaos thrown up by voters' choices in three elections in the past few days proves that the Liberal-Labor, two party system is breathing its last breaths.

Well, you can only hope so. Australians are getting anarchic at the miserable, pathetic performance of local, state and federal Liberal and Labor politicians. Why else are we now so willing to give the minor parties and independents such a go?

The good news is that both Labor and the Liberals are shitting themselves at the results of byelections in the federal seats of Mayo and Lyne, and the tumultuous results of the WA state election.

Incredibly, the Liberals almost lost Alexander Downer's old seat of Mayo...to the Greens.

Australia's major political parties have been put on notice after all were given a thumping during coast-to-coast elections held over over the weekend.

Until Saturday, Labor had won the past 23 successive state and territory elections.

Yesterday the WA National Party leader, Brendon Grylls, whose party won a better than expected four seats, held talks with the Labor Premier, Alan Carpenter, about forming a minority government - but today he will hold similar talks with the Liberal leader, Colin Barnett.

Buoyed by the result in the west, where there is no coalition, the federal Nationals leader Warren Truss flagged his party walking away from the federal Coalition in a bid to survive. The massacre in Lyne wiped out any lingering joy from the Nationals' emphatic win in the Gippsland byelection two months ago.

Peter Hartcher :

Until only a year ago Australia was the Contented Country. Governments, state and federal, just kept getting re-elected, no matter how bad they were.

Now Australia is the Cranky Country. A cocky government can no longer call an election in the expectation that a nonchalant electorate will casually stamp its ticket for another term.

Since November, an election poses an existential threat to a government. Australians have snapped out of their long torpor, and they are unhappy with what they are finding.

The Howard government was the first victim, falling under the force of a 5.4per cent swing against it. In August the Northern Territory Labor Government suffered a brutal 9.8per cent swing but managed to cling to power by the tiniest majority, a single seat. Now the West Australian Labor Government has lost its majority after suffering a 6per cent swing.

In Alexander Downer's former seat of Mayo the Liberals managed to hold the seat but suffered a drubbing, a 10 per cent swing. In Mark Vaile's former seat of Lyne the Nationals lost to a strong independent.

Interestingly, in all the tat and twaddle now being spoken by senior Labor and Liberal politicians about the election results, they take aim only at each other, and have almost nothing to say about the all too obvious rise in popularity of smaller parties and independents. It's like Labor and Liberal politicians are telling themselves, "Maybe if we pretend all those independents don't exist, they will fade away and leave us alone."

Even when the truth of their fading favour with Australian voters is kicking them savagely in the face, Labor and the Liberals continue to pretend that the very core of two-party control of Australia is not suffering a catastrophic meltdown, when it so very clearly is.

Tough Stance On Licorice Legs

The Liberals are mounting a tough opposition to the introduction of the Carbon Tax (or emissions trading system). They're totally against Australia joining an EU-initiated program to impose a global tax on every kilometre you drive, the food you eat and just about everything you buy that hasn't been grown by a neighbour.

The Federal Opposition has intensified its attack on the Government's emissions trading scheme, warning it has "very big flaws".

Treasury spokesman Malcolm Turnbull went on the offensive today, saying parts of the scheme were absurd, it was too rushed, and the whole country was at risk from the scheme not working out.

So, the Liberals are finally taking a real stand of opposition to one of the most radical plans for a global tax ever devised.

The Government, which could struggle to get the scheme through a hostile senate, is putting pressure on the Liberals to approve the scheme.

But Mr Turnbull was in no mood to be conciliatory today as he spoke out against the Government's proposal.

The Liberals think a carbon tax is wrong, evil, and will destroy the Australian economy and smash tight household budgets to dust. Wow, how exciting it must be for Liberals to finally have a major Labor policy issue that their party leaders are mounting real opposition against.

Mr Turnbull said the Liberals' policy was to move towards emissions trading but to do so "with great care and with great deliberation".

Oh.

Sorry. It appears I've been mistaken. Turns out the Liberals are not opposed to the introduction of a carbon tax after all. They're all for that, of course. Just as John Howard was in his last months in office.

The Liberals aren't ready to oppose something they've clearly been told must be introduced, they just want to fuck around claiming the Rudd government are doing it wrong.


And is this the most curious thing of all? The introduction of a carbon tax for all Australians is the one issue upon which the Liberals, The Greens and Labor all agree.

We must have a Carbon Tax, just like Al Gore says.

Did they all get a divine memo from Green Jesus or something?


How desperate and bizarre it must be to be a decades-dedicated, die-hard Liberal voter, who truly believes that global warming is a New Green Order hoax and thinks Greenism is prettified socialism, that Nelson is a tool, but that Turnbull is even worse.

How galling it must be to them that Peter Garrett, for Menzies sake, is a senior government minister and regularly represents Australia on the world stage.

How shocking it must still be to see Bob Brown being interviewed, taken seriously, shown respect, not just on the ABC, but on the morning, midday and evening news on 9, 7 and 10.

How nauseating it must be for Howard-era Liberals to hear the dirty tree hippie chants and envirolosophy of early 1980s anti-logging and anti-dam protests being repeated by almost the entire front bench of the Liberal opposition every time a microphone turns in their direction.

Who do they turn to for representation now? The Nationals?

Labor might have moved centre and fully adopted (for now) Rudd's promised 'economic conservatism', but the Liberals turned long lines of humiliating backflips to update themselves to modern Australia's Green-soaked belief systems and passion for clean(er) energy.

The Greens are now the real third party of Australian politics.

Bob Brown didn't need to become prime minister to see entire slabs of his environmental conservation and anti-global warming policies become reality.

So popular had long-established Green Party platforms become by 2007 that we witnessed the brain-frying Theatre Of The Absurd that was John Howard's Liberals and Kevin Rudd's Labor actually fighting in public over who loved and cared for the environment more, and who would be best at fighting climate change.

In the shaping of a new pro-environment, clean energy Australia, it wasn't Labor or Liberal ideas that won in the end.

It was The Greens.

They were there first, and they did most of the ground work in re-introducing city-dwelling Australians to the wonders of our rainforests, wetlands and wilderness areas, promoting the theory and suspected consequences of global warming, demanding expansion of solar energy usage and investment in alternative energy sources, while raising the original arguments for why we have to have a carbon tax.

A carbon tax that both Labor and Liberals now fully agree must be introduced, but the details of which are now being squabbled over. Like it will make any difference in the end.

The Greens won.

Australia Finally Gets A Viable Third Party

The Greens Scored More Than One Million Votes At Election 2007

The success of The Greens at Saturday's election would have been much more impressive if both the Labor and Liberal Party had not adopted soft version of their climate change key platforms in the past twelve months.

The Greens put climate change on the map as a key election issue. Labor got serious about climate change when around 30% of Australians said they were concerned about how global warming would affect their childrens' and grandchildrens' future. The Liberals Under Howard suddenly became climate change disciples when that percentage tipped over 70.

It's also refreshing to see that despite a concerted anti-Greens campaign in Murdoch daily papers in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne, The Greens still polled remarkably well. More than one million votes.

In some locales, they blasted the Nationals out of the water and also managed to match, or at least came close to matching, the number of votes cast for the Liberal Party.

No doubt, Bob Brown's appearance on Rove, six days before the federal election, killed off a lot of the negativity and scare campaigns hurled at The Greens by the Liberals, Family First, the Exclusive Brethren and the Murdoch media.

Bizarrely, for a party that we were told want to end all coal-mining within three years (they don't), The Greens managed to pick up thick slabs of votes in coal mining districts like Kalgoorlie.

When Australia undergoes a generational change, and transformation, they really go in hard :

The Greens have declared themselves Australia's third-largest political party claiming to have out-performed the Nationals by a "country mile".

The party says it attracted nearly 1.1 million (9.02 per cent) senate votes at Saturday's federal election compared with less than 6 per cent for the Nationals.

And, in claiming a definite five seats in the Senate with a chance for two more, the Greens have also seen off the Democrats whose four senators all lost their seats.

"The Democrats' famous aim was to keep the bastards honest but our long-term vision is to replace them," Greens leader Bob Brown said.

"All the epithets and abuse have boomeranged and people valued the big environmental issues around climate change, the pulp mill and drought."

Senator Brown said the party's rural vote had increased along with its pensioner vote after the party campaigned to increase pensions by $130 a week.

Tucker still chances to secure spots.

The Greens surpassed the Senate quota barrier (14.2 per cent) in Tasmania for the first time, meaning they won a Senate seat in their own right and didn't have to rely on preferences.

Labor could not have won the election without the help of The Greens. They will demand, and should get, some of their wishes fulfilled.

The Greens deserved one million votes if only for their pledge to do something about the appalling poverty that hammers elderly Australians, many of whom worked themselves into the ground for decades for the good of the country, besides going to war and having to cope with that emotional and physical fallout.

In their last days, the elderly should be treated with far more respect and regard than John Howard ever felt they were worth.

Bob Brown Hugs Trees "Very, Very Often"

Bob Brown Hugs Trees "Very, Very Often"




For our international readers, a bit of background : Dr Bob Brown was the first leader of the Australian Greens elected to the Australian Senate and has been instrumental in helping to preserve vast regions of Australia's ancient rainforests and wilderness. Some of the areas Bob Brown fought to preserve discovered there was more money to be made from wilderness tourism than would ever have been made from logging.

Bob Brown's the only Australian political party leader you can count on getting an honest answer from to almost any question, and whether you agree or disagree with his political views, it's hard not to admire his honesty.

The Australian Greens have been rapidly building their base in the past six years, opposing the War On Iraq, the detention of immigrant children in outback prison camps, John Howard's 'War On Drugs' and the absurd fiasco of Australia's supposed anti-terror laws.

The Greens are expected to probably win control of the Australian Senate in next weekend's federal election, and could capture as much as 12% of the national vote.

Quick fact : Dr Bob Brown was working as a hospital intern in London in 1970, and he was the young medico who stood before the media and announced that Jimi Hendrix had died.