Yes, there's a silver lining to PM's green salad days

REMEMBER more than a year ago when Julia Gillard promised to "forge a new paradigm" in her minority government with independents and the Greens. In those heady post-election days the PM promised "to draw the curtains and let the sunshine in".

Those who waxed lyrical about that new paradigm in Australia need to answer one question. To coin a phrase, how's all that hopey, changey stuff going now?

More than 12 months on, the new paradigm is working so well that the PM's parents have been drafted to implore voters to give their daughter a go.

Indeed, Gillard resembles a political Cleopatra secretly lamenting her youthful dalliance with Bob Brown, her political version of Julius Caesar: "those salad days . . . when I was green in judgment". While Gillard is being punished in the polls for courting the independents and Brown, there is a silver lining from last year's election. Mercifully, we now know much more about the real nature of power-sharing politics. And if this is the new paradigm, most voters seem to be saying, "No thanks".

Some in Canberra dare not listen. Take independent MP Rob Oakeshott, who said on ABC1's Q & A last week: "The interesting thing that is happening, potentially in Australian politics, is power sharing might just be here to stay." Oakeshott is either deluded or disingenuous. Voters are shouting out their displeasure at the present power-sharing paradigm. Barely 26 per cent of Australians support Gillard and her government.

It's time to reflect fully on all we have learned. Early on, we discovered that power corrupts even those starry sounding independents. Remember those 17 excruciating days when independent MPs Oakeshott and Tony Windsor kept the nation waiting. Recall Oakeshott's indulgently long press conference to announce his decision. Here started the new paradigm. Independents, so eager to remonstrate against toxic Canberra, played their own version of egocentric politics, using clever words such as "stability" and "national interest" to disguise naked self-interest.

Few will forget that Windsor said he decided to side with Gillard because Tony Abbott would be more likely to call a fresh election and "he is more likely to win" an early election. So we have learned that independents who talk much about the beauty of democracy don't hold much regard for the views of voters.

Remember too that Oakeshott and Windsor ignored the democratic preferences of their own electorates of Lyne and New England, respectively, when at last year's election only a fraction of voters supported Labor in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The effrontery of the independents continues today. Oakeshott said recently he continued to believe that he made the right decision handing power to a Gillard government. His electorate seems to have a different view.

According to one poll, less than 15 per cent of Lyne voters support Oakeshott after a year of the new paradigm.

More important than uncovering the clamouring self-interest of a few independents, the last election has allowed the electorate to move from a state of somnolence to one of deep circumspection about the Greens.

For many years now, the Greens have skated under the radar of proper analysis. Many people assumed the Greens were just a tree-hugging, forest-loving party with utopian motherhood statements about "ecological sustainability" and "participatory democracy". To his credit, Brown took feel-good politics to new heights, winning 11.8 per cent of the vote and a record 10 seats in federal parliament.

Twelve months on, the new paradigm has taught us that Green politics doesn't feel so good after all. We will soon have a carbon tax that ought to be called the BBT, the Bob Brown tax.

After all, if Gillard had won the last election in her own right, we would not now have a carbon tax. And never mind that the rest of the world is running away from pricing carbon.

We learned the power of the Greens when Greens senator Christine Milne, not a Labor minister, announced the government's new Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Charged with spending $3.2 billion on the Greens' pet projects, it became clear that this is the Christine Milne fund. This is what happens when the Greens get hold of the levers of power.

The getting of a Greens education these past 12 months has meant more of us see behind the carefully modulated voice of Brown to the doctrinaire green hulk that is committed to closing down the coal industry, that believes mining is evil and ought to be subjected to a super-profits tax, is driven by a utopian dream of drawing baseload power from renewables and holds a cavalier attitude to cities, such as Whyalla, which Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young thinks can be turned into windmill centres.

We saw the Greens at work too when the Gillard government capriciously shut down the $320 million live cattle exports trade on June 8. The cattle industry paid the price for Labor's desperation to hold power by placating the Greens agenda. No other policy reveals a more complete disconnect between Canberra and rural and regional Australia.

We learned that the Greens have a peculiar view of freedom of the press. When Brown labelled News Limited the "hate media", it became clear that a newspaper knows it is doing precisely the right thing when the Greens are upset by the scrutiny. And now the Greens leader is suggesting individual journalists should be licensed. This is the green face of fascism.

We have learned that the Greens don't have much time for other old-fashioned notions of democracy either. At the National Press Club, Brown laid out his preference for a world government. That's Brown's elitist view of participatory democracy.

In short, we have learned about Brown's clever tactics as Greens leader using an environmental cloak to hide a much broader, more radical agenda to change the way we live and work to reflect the party's anti-commerce, anti-growth beliefs. We should be eternally grateful the Greens have educated us so well these past 12 months. More voters now understand that former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore was right when he said that when the Cold War was over and the Berlin Wall fell, the leftists moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas: agendas that have more to do with opposing capitalism and globalisation than with science or ecology.

Power-sharing here to stay? Tell Oakeshott he's dreaming.