Seismic shift shapes nation

NSW delivered a tectonic shift in Australian politics yesterday - a shift so dynamic it has the capacity to alter the cultural course of the nation for the next decade and longer.

Most noticeable will be the obvious power shift between the states and the Gillard federal government. On Friday, there were two conservative state governments. Tomorrow, there will be three - and they have the palpable capacity to dominate the national debate. Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania are no match for Western Australia, Victoria and NSW in terms of economies, populations or sheer competence and governance. The shift in political gravity provides the opportunity for a reversal of the Green-Left cultural drift that has been accelerated with the connivance of the Rudd-Gillard governments and their cohorts of morally self-righteous doctors' wives and culturally detached inner-urban activists. During the last week of federal parliament, Gillard and her minions demonstrated their understanding of this new reality. The Prime Minister led Labor into a series of responses to her fatally flawed carbon-dioxide tax from a wholly reactionary position. Her huge election lie on the tax was just a part of it. In so markedly moving from her "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead" position, she felt it would be timely to attempt to project a whole series of new political and moral positions, all of them totally contrary to her previous stances on the same issues. The woman who for many years was a member of the Communist-inspired Socialist Forum now maintains she is actually a cultural conservative. The atheist politician who presided over the formulation of a curriculum that would strip the discussion of the influence of Christianity on Western civilisation from the school system now says all schools should teach stories from the Bible. Gillard has even argued for the sanctity of marriage, even though she hasn't entered into matrimony with the man she lives with in The Lodge - perhaps the polls haven't fallen far enough for that paradigm to shift. She wants the public to believe she thinks the Greens are extremists, but is unwilling to distance herself from them because she needs their support to hang on to power - while at the same time, she excoriates Opposition Leader Tony Abbott for appearing at a rally at which a handful of odd bods held up dissonant posters, and shrilly shrieks that he must dissociate himself from such uninvited attendees at a mass rally. Gillard is fighting from an uncomfortable corner. She cannot claim any mandate to introduce a carbon-dioxide tax because both parties pledged not to introduce such a tax at the last election, and both parties said they would not introduce an emissions-trading scheme until the country indicated it was ready. The Coalition made it clear it would not adopt a new tax that would harm the economy. Labor said it would wait until there was a "consensus" and hired climate alarmist Tim Flannery to head a propaganda team to run its fear-mongering campaign. Gillard broke her promise and adopted the position of the Greens, who hold just one Lower House seat and favour a number of policies that most Australians would find nauseating. Her reversal has nothing to do with the environment, as it's now accepted by every economic expert, including those from Treasury, that a carbon-dioxide tax in Australia will have no effect on the planet's temperature. Gillard's position, and that of her government, is designed wholly to attack Tony Abbott and destroy his leadership of the Opposition. So far, it has had the opposite effect. Apart from the two or three disaffected malcontents who would be happier in the left wing of the ALP, the party room is revelling in the Opposition's higher profile. The doctors' wives being courted by Gillard are probably too preoccupied with self-serving good works to understand this or the true rancid nature of the Greens, but the inner-urban Green-Left activists know full well the repellent content of the revolting Green agenda. In the outpouring of faux outrage that followed Wednesday's No Carbon Tax rally in Canberra, Greens leader Bob Brown sent a note to Gillard in which he confected an apology on behalf of unnamed Australians who may have been offended by a few posters. As stunts went, it was low-grade, but it served to remind observers, including Tasmania's Senator Eric Abetz, that Brown had not only insulted US president George W. Bush when he visited Australia but that Brown and his party have embraced anti-American, anti-Israeli conspiracists who maintain the fiction that the terrorist attack the World Trade Center towers was a US-Zionist plot. The Greens voted against a motion in the Senate on Wednesday that acknowledged Israel is a legitimate and democratic state and a good friend of Australia, and denounced the boycott of Israel by the Green-dominated Marrickville Council. Brown and the NSW Greens have also attempted to deny their support for the boycott of Israeli products, even though ex-Communist and Greens senator-elect Lee Rhiannon was responsible for a motion supported at the NSW Greens' conference last December. It proposed that Australia and its government "boycott Israeli goods, trading and military arrangements, sporting, cultural and academic events". Such is the sheer insanity of Gillard's reliable partners in government. This is the culture that has corrupted much of the nation's education system. This is the culture that must be reversed. Restoring NSW is the first step; restoring Australia must be the goal.