Shorten trying to go greener than Greens

IT’S passing fashionable for members of the chuckle-headed chattering class to say there is now no difference between the Coalition and Labor.

As usual, they’re wrong. The parties that have actually merged identities are Labor and the Greens. Under Opposition leader Bill Shorten, Labor has been dragged to the Left. Within Labor there are significant rumps opposed to the party’s public positions on ­border protection and the ­environment. No one in the ALP seriously believes that Shorten will be able to prevent the Left reversing the party’s support for the Coalition’s successful boat turnback policy and offshore detention program. Both Labor and the Greens are fighting for the support of the politically correct minority, which is obsessed with gender politics, as their support for La Trobe University’s radical Marxist school indoctrination program with its advice on breast-binding and penis tucking demonstrates. But the parties are also virtually agreed on any number of other policies. It is reaching the point where the Greens advance one of their economy-destroying policies and Labor then rushes to match their madness, as ­implausible as the goals clearly are. It is sheer fantasy to suggest that Australia could achieve a 50 per cent renewable energy target in 14 years — solar only operates in daylight hours, the wind doesn’t blow on command, tidal power is a dream and hydro is dependent on rainfall and huge dams, as Tasmanians have discovered to their enormous cost. However, the Left-leaning Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) within the ALP has pushed the party to adopt the unachievable 50 per cent target over the objections of the mining division of the CFMEU, even as the Greens have claimed they would ­demand a target of 90 per cent renewable energy within the same timeframe. As fossil fuel remains the only source of backup power required to ensure continuity of electricity supply, the target would be largely ineffective in reducing Australia’s emissions but it would inevitably drive up the cost of energy to households and businesses. LEAN’s logo is green, its members wear green T-shirts and its agenda is for the ALP to abandon its current policy ­positions and adopt Greens policies on a range of issues. One of LEAN’s co-founders is Senator Jenny McAllister, a former national president of the ALP. Her co-convener is Felicity Wade, a former member of the Greens who joined Labor in 2013 in order to seek preselection in the seat of Newtown in the hope she could “force change from the inside” of the ALP. At the time of joining the ALP, she was employed as NSW campaigns manager for the Wilderness Society, Bob Brown’s pet lobby group. Both the pressure group and the Greens oppose any new coal power stations and want to close down the existing ones, and they both oppose nuclear power. A vote for Greens/Labor is going to hurt traditional working-class Labor supporters most severely and hit the hip pocket nerve of all Australians but that doesn’t concern either parties’ extreme Leftists as they are largely well-heeled (or at least well-sandalled) high- income earners in the inner urban suburbs and not reliant on jobs dependent on high power consumption. The bottom line is that both Labor and the Greens have a total disregard for the millions of people in poverty across the Third World and particularly in India, one of the largest consumers of Australian coal, who would benefit from ­access to cheap light and power. The Greens/Labor voters show as little compassion for this underclass as they do for the thousands who would undoubtedly drown if the current border protection policies were wound back and illegal people smuggling resumed. Further proving that they don’t care about the cost of their policies to Australian taxpayers, the Greens want to lift the annual refugee intake to 50,000 at a cost of $7 billion, while Labor is rushing to meet them with a promise to double the intake to 27,000. Just as the LEAN ginger group within the ALP boasts of its influence, so do the members of Labor for Refugees brag that they can swing the party’s policy and indeed they boast that 90 per cent of their proposed amendments to soften Labor’s border protection policies were adopted at last year’s national ALP conference. A fortnight ago, on May 14, Labor for Refugees endorsed the Greens’ asylum seeker policy along with a future deal with the Greens to further ­soften Labor’s policy. There is a certain irony in the blending of Labor and Greens policies and that’s ­because Labor has adopted the poisonous Greens program in a desperate attempt to fight the Greens challenge for those city seats it holds. No less a Labor stalwart than Anthony Albanese has been forced to abandon his support for the overdue and much-needed WestConnex project, which he boasted funding just three years ago. Facing a challenge from the Greens in his NIMBY-burdened seat of Grayndler, the hail-fellow-well- met Albo now says the link from the Western Sydney suburbs to the city won’t get any more funding though the principal users would have been the tradies from the West for whom it would have slashed the daily commute. Which surely indicated how out of touch with its traditional supporters Labor has now ­become as it moved further to the Left to appeal to the Greens. Those who think they have reason to punish the ­Coalition should seriously contemplate the obvious dangers of giving power to a party hell bent on trying to out-Green the Greens.