OPINION: Protest over Devine intervention

I NEARLY choked on my organic muesli, as I adjusted my ponytail, put down my spliff and got off my un-immunised arse to write this column.

I NEARLY choked on my organic muesli, as I adjusted my ponytail, put down my spliff and got off my un-immunised arse to write this column.

As I left the Centrelink office to get into my Kombi and drive to work past CSG-free signs outside every hippie village, I started thinking about all the cliched stereotyping that has been going on in the Sydney media since the election.

Miranda Devine and her latte-sipping, BMW-driving, private elite school educated colleagues have been working themselves into a frenzy over the vote for Greens in the Ballina and Lismore electorates.

You'd think the sky was falling in when you read the stitch-up Devine and fellow Tele reporter Geoff Chambers have dished out to the people of the Northern Rivers.

They managed to tar us all with the same rainbow-coloured brush.

It seems that everyone who lives up here hugs trees, smokes pot, collects the dole and roams from town to town looking for a cause to protest about.

Devine, no doubt immaculately dressed with her hair tizzed from some fancy-pancy salon in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, typed this missive: "There are plenty of hippies, knitting nannas and full-time protesters living in Lismore and Ballina who travel to other parts of the country making nuisances of themselves at Lock the Gate protests."

I don't know whether Devine has ever been to Ballina, but the closest thing to a protest down there was when the Big Prawn looked likely to be demolished.

Devine and her fellow city slickers should take a good, hard look at themselves and drop the cliches. They are embarrassing and inaccurate.

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