Greens are the biggest catastrophe

THIS new year our country is beset with natural disasters, again.

Almost every year since I can remember, it has been drought and the terrible fires that follow as a consequence.

This time it is floods in Queensland.

For the people of the major towns that have been inundated the economic and personal consequences are appalling, but the scenario facing the farmers of the region is devastating.

As for the vast majority of us city dwellers in the world's most urbanised country, the rise in food prices, tipped to be at least 50 per cent, combined with a probable rise in interest rates, will have consequences for Australian families beyond any of the tacked-together family welfare policies, such as the much-heralded parental leave policies, that the government or the opposition can come up with.

So here we are in the midst of the most catastrophic natural disasters in our nation's history, yet where are the voices of those new Green saviours of our wide brown land, the apostles of global warming, the people to whom Australians have entrusted the balance of parliamentary power? Why do the Greens have so little to say?

Understandably Bob "no dams" Brown and his deputy Christine Milne are probably not anxious to remind the electorate of the political impetus that got them into the Senate in the first place, before they got on to gay marriage and euthanasia.

It is a sure bet that the citizens of Rockhampton are probably not thinking about gay marriage as they take to boats down the main street. Nor, I hazard a guess, could those citizens, and most of the rest of us, care less about whether the government's negotiations on whaling were sincere or a diversion, despite a fair chunk of northern Queensland looking like it has turned into the set of Waterworld.

However, Brown obviously thinks the subject is of vital importance. As the floods peaked in Rockhampton, Brown was pointing out that an Age newspaper poll claims 90 per cent of Australians think the government's negotiations on whaling were a "diversion".

This issue is relevant apparently because it came via a leak from that font of all new wisdom, WikiLeaks, with the imprimatur of the blessed martyr Julian Assange. But why am I suspicious that it might be Brown's comments that were the diversion?

The Greens are masters of diversion, or to look at it another way, spin: hogging the limelight, stealing the show and turning drama into farce.

Meanwhile, other people know something about the environment of this country, produce most of our food and have been trying for years to get the momentum to build the infrastructure that would have prevented the floods, and they are ignored.

Take the long-awaited report on northern Australia last year, given to the then parliamentary secretary, now Special Minister of State, Gary Gray. Many people, including some politicians, were furious there were no recommendations that we build new dams.

The report, which took a lot of time and money to compile, did not challenge the existing Labor policy against building new dams in the north, and the idea was dismissed out of hand.

Not even cost was cited as the main objection, as it was not investigated. Instead of challenging the no-dams orthodoxy. let alone costing it, it was dismissed, but we'll be counting the cost of this inundation for years.

So what are the Greens doing for the environment? Admittedly, from Senator Sarah Hanson-Young we have heard a lot about wind power.

However, talk about tilting at windmills: Hanson-Young and new lower house member Adam Bandt spend most of their time championing the Greens' refugee policy, which is simply to open our borders to refugee claimants.

According to the little-known official party policy site, the Greens' definition of a genuine refugee is anyone claiming to be a refugee who arrives without a visa. This is not a policy the Greens want too widely known, of course, preferring to stick to the "humanitarian" line, although there is nothing humanitarian about the spectacle of uncontrolled immigration.

Nor is there anything too green or eco-friendly about any uncontrolled immigration policy. But the Greens blithely ignore that particular inconsistency.

As with all their social policies the Greens get away with this baloney because of diversions, and the ignorance, and political naivety, of its Facebooking, urban farmers-market-going constituency, which is ill-informed on the finer and wackier points of their social policies.

So, for example, with gay marriage - which will obviously take up a fair bit of parliamentary time and effort and popular anxiety, and is meant to cement the Greens' credentials as the party of forward-looking tolerance - there is actually a different agenda. Again, according to the official website, the policy encompasses a bizarre demand that all sexual permutations be given legal relationship status.

In fact, so many sexual permutations are mentioned in this policy - intersex, intrasex and transsexual, up down and round about - that this average heterosexual mum finds it difficult to follow, or to take seriously.

Perhaps that is the problem with the Greens: not enough people have taken them seriously. However, the end result of this policy is the complete negation of the central and special importance of the natural family, the mum-dad-kids family.

Once these odd permutations are enshrined in law, you won't be able to say, on pain of politically correct death and probably legal constraints, that the ordinary heterosexual family is natural and superior to, say, a lesbian group house in inner-city Sydney with a vegie patch.

Of course, more people should be asking what any of this has to do with the party of the environment. Actually, if you think about it, denying the fundamental naturalness of the heterosexual family is a hilariously inconsistent position for a party that claims a superior grasp of the natural world.

But then it is only one of many Greens inconsistencies, diversions and chaos that are being insinuated into our social fabric. In this new year as we watch the catastrophic floods from the comfort of our urban living rooms we should be prepared for many more. Happy green new year.