Piers Akerman: Labor and Greens riding on back of rogues in GetUp!
The destructive foreign-funded Green-Left activist organisation GetUp! has demonstrated its irrelevance to mainstream Australia through the publication of its electoral goals, including stopping the Adani mine, Piers Akerman writes.
The destructive foreign-funded Green-Left activist organisation GetUp! has demonstrated its irrelevance to mainstream Australia through the publication of its electoral goals.
In a statement to subscribers it claims that its members’ priorities are in the following order:
● To halt Queensland’s Carmichael mine, which promises jobs and economic growth for a region desperate for wealth and jobs.
● To supercharge the transition to inefficient and unreliable energies like solar and wind, that’ll really keep its followers in the dark and punish those who can’t afford to pay for heating and airconditioning to maintain their health.
● Securing an immediate evacuation to safety of all the refugees and people seeking asylum on Manus Island and Nauru, all of whom found their way there because they took advantage of the lax border control policies introduced by the Rudd-Gillard Labor government with the support of the Greens and whose “immediate” evacuation from the safety of the camps established by Labor will ensure that even greater numbers will follow the more than 1200 people who lost their lives at sea because of the failure of the Green-Left to maintain border security.
● Ensuring that Medicare, schools and other essential services are adequately funded — when only the Labor and the Greens and GetUp! itself promulgated the mendacious MediScare campaign which falsely claimed the Coalition planned to slash health funding, and despite the record amounts of money being funnelled to education.
● Finally, these activists want to ensure the biased ABC and its sister network SBS, continues to waste billions, even as the ABC has been exposed as underpaying staff and has a demonstratively dysfunctional management system.
In short, there is not a single goal that accords with the really urgent need to maintain economic growth and stability, as the Coalition has delivered time and again.
Further, GetUp!, which refuses to identify the sources of its foreign funding, has announced it plans to wage campaigns against a number of Liberal MPs despite its claims to be an independent, non-partisan organisation.
No surprise that Opposition leader Bill Shorten was a start-up director of this outfit and green-lighted a $100,000 donation from the union he was then running — the AWU — to get it rolling.
“If GetUp! were genuinely issues-based, they would campaign on issues not personalities,” Tasmanian Liberal Senator Eric Abetz has pertinently noted.
“But if personalities are the focus one wonders why GetUp! would target the dynamic young female Nicolle Flint and not Senator Fraser Anning?”
GetUp!, he said, has form in this regard when they tried to put the Liberals last in Longman, preferencing a convicted criminal who was a white supremacist ahead of the Liberals.
“This is just the latest example of GetUp! showing that they are nothing more than an extension of the Green-Labor campaign apparatus.
“The fact they can’t bring themselves to campaign against a single non-Liberal MP shows that they aren’t independent,” he said.
The ABC’s Radio National correspondent Alison Carabine tried to run defence for the rogue organisation in an interview with Senator Abetz last week.
Senator Abetz is a Liberal warrior but he’s on the straight and narrow, not the devious Green-Left path
Suggesting it would be “progress” to champion the damaging issues highlighted by GetUp!, Ms Carabine said that as the goals were put forward by GetUp! members, the organisation was “not necessarily … doing the dirty work for Labor and the Greens”.
The good Senator was having none of it, insisting he was entitled to call out the group for its dishonesty, for its misrepresentations and its dirty tactics.
“Let’s just remember that in 2014, they went to ASIC and tried to claim charitable status, that’s now been withdrawn,” he pointed out.
“They said that they would set out their membership list because they believed in openness and transparency and when I pointed out that they had never filed their membership list with ASIC, what did they do? They changed their constitution so they no longer had to provide membership lists.
“This is the sort of devious activity that GetUp! engage in time after time. Indeed, when they first got involved they had a computer scheme whereby you could put in your answers to certain political policy questions that would then tell you how you ought to vote given those answers and each and every time it told people, including the Liberal Member for Goldstein Andrew Robb at the time, that he should he be voting Labor despite his answers.
“This is the sort of dirty trickery that GetUp! now has a history of engaging. They are not just a benign issues-based organisation, they are down in the gutter with Labor and the Greens to seek to effect change of government.”
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Senator Abetz is a Liberal warrior but he’s on the straight and narrow, not the devious Green-Left path. The Nationals have a few fighters — Senator John Williams is the stand out — but the Coalition needs an army to fight the massive disinformation campaign the trade union movement is bankrolling to support the ALP in the May election.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has so far demonstrated too cautious an approach to grappling with the issues that the nation needs to remain competitive in a rapidly changing world.
It makes no sense whatsoever for our nation to have some of the most expensive power prices in the world.
It makes no sense not to have developed coal-fired power stations to meet our current and future electricity needs, especially as no less an “expert” than the Chief Scientist Alan Finkel admits that Australia’s so-called greenhouse emissions have no effect on so-called global warming. With most of people returning to work in the next week, the hard facts of the election must be confronted. Labor and its Green allies offer no solutions, GetUp!’s priorities are destructive.
The choice is in your hands.
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