My plans for a leisurely start to the day were rumbled by a traffic accident at the north end of Hoddle Street. Instead of the easy fifteen-minute run through to the venue for the winter intensive I ended up doing a 35-minute rabbit run through Richmond, Abbotsford, and Clifton Hill to get to work. The day went well after that.
The Greens seem to have been much in the news over the last couple of days. I was amazed to hear a rant on the ABC news at 8.00am where some generic (Liberal?) politician was declaring that the Greens would demand that the clocks be stopped for the next fifty years and that Australia loose all the advantages of industry and development. Frankly, these sprays from conservative politicians are becoming a bit tiresome. I wonder if the ABC puts up whole minutes of these desperate rants just to show how desperately bereft of ideas some politicians are.
Of course, this week it's anxiety about the carbon tax. I am looking forward to learning more about it -- but not before the weekend. Call me what you like, but it would be far preferable to hear a worked-out policy, rather than a running series of announcements that contradict each other in various ways. That's how we got Workchoices, one of the greatest 'reforms' ever to be assembled in a sequence of press conferences.
Carbon pricing and taxes is a totemic issue for the Greens, and the symbolic value of getting a workable framework in place for reducing carbon emissions is very high for them. But this legislation is a very long way from a vote right now.
The Greens may have the balance of power in the Senate, but in the last two days they've lost votes on nominations for the President of the Senate and the Wikileaks Amendment to the Act governing ASIO. It's hardly any fulfillment of their rumoured plans to burn down Parliament House and declare the rule of the proletariat. Have they succeeded in any proposed legislation this week?
The fact is that most of the sprays from politicians (not to mention some journalists) is down to the fact that the Greens don't play by the formula of the politics-media matrix. And that's a good thing. I wish more politicians would talk in 'long hand' rather than the tag phrases, soundbites and talking points that can be heard falling from the Prime Minister, Mr Rabbit and everyone else in those rabbles we excuse by the name 'mainstream parties.'
The Greens are there because both Labor and the Liberal/National parties have failed. The Democrats owed their foundation to failure in the Liberal party. The Greens are a completely different proposition. They are not the shadow of the old Labor left, although they have picked up support in that quarter; reducing the Greens in this way doesn't account for their appeal to a good number of Liberal voters. They owe their foundation to atrophy on both sides of the 'mainstream,' which have ceased to have meaningfully different things to say about how the world is. They are both essentially conservative outfits. The Greens will only grow as long as this covenant of fate persists between the Labor and Liberal parties.
Some people seem to be worried that the change in the Senate means something imminent right now. It's nice to have high expectations, but that's a recipe for frustration and disappointment in about a week or two.
If there is a revolution on the way (and that's very big if), I would lay London to a brick that it's not the one some of the experts on Marxism in the Liberal Party are expecting. There might well be a revolution brewing, but the ranters are looking the wrong way.
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