Andrew Bolt: Greens Party wounded by own incompetence
THE Greens have been wounded by their own incompetence and are dying at last. But not fast enough and not before causing terrible damage around the world, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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THE Greens are dying at last. But not fast enough and not before causing terrible damage around the world.
In Australia, the Greens have been wounded by their own incompetence, with both deputy leaders — Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters — forced to quit parliament this month for having dual citizenship.
But Greens everywhere are also declining, as their global warming scare crumbles and the cost of their obsessions mounts.
The trends are clear. Here, the Greens’ highest vote was the 13.1 per cent Senate vote they got in 2010. In both elections since, they won just 8.7 per cent.
The trend isn’t just local. In Germany, where The Greens once shared government, they lost a quarter of their vote at the 2014 election, and recent polls have them as low as 6 per cent — their worst support in nearly 15 years.
In Britain, the Green Party lost half its vote in this year’s election, and Canada’s Greens won just 3.45 per cent at their latest election — half the level of seven years earlier.
Every Green party is different, but here is why Australia’s is dying.
END OF THE SCARE
THE Greens were running out of forests to lock up, but then came the global warming scare to give them new relevance.
The Greens’ scaremongering was reckless. In 2006, leader Bob Brown blamed man-made warming for a drought in southern Australia which he predicted could be “permanent”.
But in 2011, when the rains returned, Brown switched to blaming our coal mines for the warming he claimed caused Cyclone Yasi.
Again, the Greens were proved fools. We’ve actually had fewer cyclones, not more.
Such fake scares have made voters cynical. A survey by the warmist CSIRO in 2015 found even 19 per cent of Greens voters now believed there had either been natural warming or none. Among all voters, believers in man-made warming were outnumbered by sceptics.
THE COST OF THE GREENS
THE Greens have suffered as the cost of their crusades became clear.
When the Greens backed Labor’s scrapping of our tough border laws in 2008, Australians soon saw the price: 50,000 illegal immigrants came and another 1200 drowned.
Now we’re paying another price.
Forcing us to switch to more expensive wind and solar power, as demanded by the Greens to “stop” global warming, has made our electricity about the world’s most expensive.
Some poorer Australians cannot now afford electricity and businesses have been sent broke by price rises of up 180 per cent in a year.
More voters now ask: can we afford the Greens?
THE GREENS’ OPEN DOORS
THE Greens’ happy-clappy multiculturalism demands for weak border laws and vilification of the “racist” West was the kind of moral posturing many Australians thought cost nothing.
Now Islamist terrorism makes that posturing seem dangerous.
In a war to defend the West, the Greens seem on the wrong side. They demand we leave our doors wide open and suggest what’s inside is trash hardly worth defending.
WHAT LEADER?
GREENS leader Richard di Natale lacks charisma but has a more fatal weakness: he likes to do deals with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Many Greens’ supporters aren’t into such pragmatism. They are adolescents in age or in temperament — in permanent and pensioned opposition to Daddy.
They don’t put themselves in the shoes of those who must run things and be held accountable.
They want only the power to bully, not to manage.
That’s why the Greens lost support when they shared power with the Gillard government.
The compromises they made offended the pure.
The policies they passed offended those who had to pay.
THE SPLITTERS
FAR-Left militants, such as Senator Lee Rhiannon, joined the Greens after the collapse of communism.
They never were much into hugging trees and, as the environmental movement declines, this watermelon faction is flexing its muscles.
But the recent fighting between Rhiannon and the other nine federal Greens MPs makes the Greens seem a Trojan horse for the kind of red extremists Australians never liked under any banner.
THE GREENS’ COMPETITION
LABOR and even the Liberals have — sadly — stolen much of the Greens’ global-warming agenda. Labor also backs same-sex marriage and identity politics.
When even Labor is extremely green, the Greens can’t outbid it without seeming mad.
So, the Greens are wilting, but have too many supporters in our universities, the ABC and the global warming bureaucracy to vanish fast.
Meanwhile, pray the next new faith to galvanise the Left proves less devastating to our reason and our wealth.
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