Greens are losing voters as their agenda is exposed

IT is bad enough that a young eco-lout resorts to deliberate fraud and market manipulation to further his anti-capitalist, anti-coalmining dreams.

It is even more repugnant that a mature-aged senator representing Australian voters and drawing a taxpayer-funded salary condones this kind of flagrant illegality and economic vandalism. While regulators ought to pursue Jonathan Moylan using the full force of the law, voters don't need rules and regulations to sanction the Greens. They only require a pencil, a ballot paper and a looming election.

Let us then be grateful that Christine Milne has kicked off an election year with a dose of honesty about the Greens' radical political agenda.

First things first. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission must pursue the tent-dwelling, law-breaking activist for a scam that saw investors misled and more than $300 million stripped from the value of Whitehaven Coal, a company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Nothing short of a hard and fast criminal prosecution under the Corporations Law will make an example of Moylan. If ASIC squibs this or chooses only civil remedies, this kind of eco-vandalism will spread fast. Every activist with a grievance and a laptop will try to disrupt the efficiency of our capital markets, wiping millions of dollars off the value of listed companies, wreaking havoc on unsuspecting shareholders and destroying Australia's international reputation as a safe place to do business.

This is not some tricky insider trading prosecution missing smoking-gun evidence. The 24-year-old eco-activist admitted that, from his protest camp in a forest near Narrabri in northern NSW, he drafted up a fake media release, used ANZ letterhead to disseminate false information about the bank withdrawing a $1.2 billion loan facility and then impersonated an ANZ executive.

His anti-coal mining motives are irrelevant to the commission of a crime under section 1041E of the Corporations Law.

Just imagine the reaction had a neatly dressed white-collar stockbroker who showers daily and works from his swish CBD office committed a similar scam. The Greens would demand the stockbroker's neatly combed head. But when a scruffy, long-haired eco-warrior carries out the same fraud, it's cute idealism at work.

Alas, it makes sense that the Greens leader would condone Moylan's actions. He is the epitome of fraudulent Green politics where so-called idealists use feel-good platitudes about ecological sustainability to disguise a deep loathing of modernity, capitalism and the free markets.

These people are not harmless idealists. They are not even genuine environmentalists. They are dangerous ideologues driven not by reason or intellectual debate, but by zealotry.

If your moral code is askew, it must be fun being Green. It means never having to say you're sorry no matter how destructive the outcome of your actions. Moylan's view of capitalism - "my main concern is not for the people who won't be able to buy their next Rolls Royce" - reflects the Greens' warped view. Quite apart from being a snub to those Green-voting doctors' wives who travel in these Rolls Royces, it is an insult to the mum and dad investors who lost money thanks to Moylan. Most importantly, it ignores the fact that free markets, not Green policies, have lifted billions of people out of poverty. Being Green means never having to think rationally about such issues.

In short, being Green means decoupling responsibility from power. This is what happens when better dressed, but equally reckless adult versions of Moylan reach Canberra.

Being Green should also mean you will, inevitably, get punished at the ballot box by sensible Australian voters when the moral bankruptcy of Green politics is exposed. In fact this week's Newspoll hints at a declining Green vote.

The last time this newspaper suggested that voters hold the Greens to account, then Greens leader Bob Brown launched a hysterical campaign against the "hate media".

Akin to Orwellian Doublespeak, this was Greenspeak for any media that dared to analyse and criticise Green policies.

Brown's dismay is unsurprising. For a long time, the Greens succeeded in skating under the media radar, presenting themselves as just a bunch of happy tree-huggers.

To be fair to many Australians who voted Green believing their vote was a harmless two-finger salute to register their dissatisfaction with the two major parties, Brown was a consummate politician. Love him or loathe him, the former Greens leader, a master at hiding the Greens' more radical agenda, took his fringe party to new electoral heights. But even the salubrious sounding Brown could not always hide his party's nutty left-wing agenda, let alone his own hubris. His support for "one world government" betrayed the Greens' anti-democratic preference for decision-making by a small group of globe-trotting elites, self-appointed moral guardians even further removed from voters than our politicians in Canberra. And Brown's dream, in the interim, that the Greens would replace Labor as a political force in Australia seems just that. A dream.

As the new Greens leader, Milne also presents well. The daughter of farmers and carefully decked out in conservative attire, she has promised to take the Greens more "mainstream." But Milne's presentation and her words could not be further from the truth. This is the standard Greens trick. Use soft-speak to hide a radical agenda.

So let us thank Milne for her honest outburst. Her statement last week that Moylan's fraud was "part of a long and proud history of civil disobedience, potentially breaking the law, to highlight something wrong" revealed utter contempt for those mainstream voters who would never condone Moylan's law-breaking vandalism and it revealed contempt for those small shareholders who lost money as a result of the eco-lout's fraudulent scam. It also exposed the Greens' broader contempt for our system of democracy.

Instead of winning hearts and minds with reasoned arguments (which is what ought to happen in a thriving liberal democracy) the Greens have revealed themselves as the party that prefers breaking the law to further their pet causes.

We only have ourselves to blame for the fact that such a party has enjoyed great influence in the minority Gillard government. Not enough of us paid attention to warnings from those who better understood the true motivations of the wider Green movement. Just over two years ago, former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore explained that after the collapse of communism and the Berlin Wall, the peace movement moved into the environmental movement, "bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation than science or ecology."

Moore was warning us about people such as Moylan and Milne. Both deserve our contempt. And both deserve to be sanctioned by decent-minded folk who understand why, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell one way and not the other.