Fear of 'boat-people' coming in massive numbers will continue to be stoked by the Murdoch and Fairfax media and tv and radio. Some people will therefore continue to fear the Greens as agents of the 'boat-people' bogeyman. Others will fear them as politicians who would see their countrymen dispossessed by a strange and unaccountable rhetoric.
Vivienne Ortega's article, draws our attention to one of the great political mysteries of our time.
Political dissonance
The views expressed in the Greens' policy for are quite extreme. If successful they would actually give substance to the grotesque threat that the media have cultivated of endless hoards of 'illegals' overrunning the country. Real 'Greens' scratch their heads and seek ideological or mystical explanations for the persistant coexistence of such policies with ordinary member expectations, but maybe they should look for more practical reasons for this enduring internal dissonance.
Some writers on candobetter.net think that the Greens and the Socialist Alliance are pretend parties, designed to confuse the electorate. Even a pretend party, however, needs an income.
Why do unpopular policies survive?
There is an old political method for working out why unpopular policies survive despite costly impacts. Look for focused benefits and diffuse costs. The people who benefit financially from population growth in Australia are well organised to keep it going, whereas the rest of us, who pay for it, lack the support of the press or the banks which are in favour of this jugganaut for inhuman reasons of profit. Using this logic and method, we can reasonably infer that if unpopular policies survive within the consensus community of the Greens, it is because they benefit some people in the Greens enough to make their time there very worthwhile.
If you look at them in that light, the Greens' unrealistic and extreme immigration and refugee policies bear the hallmarks of a strategy to attract finances from the growth lobby to the party.
Where else can you read views on immigration as extreme as this? You can read them in the writings of flag-bearers for property development.
How do corporate take-overs happen?
In fact it sounds like the growth lobby may have already taken the Greens party leadership over. It would not be difficult. It would start with bullies from socialist alliances, earth-sharers and dodgy refugee action coalitions moving in on the finances.
Indeed, we hear of this.
Later signs could be where architects, planners, and solicitors start to hold leadership positions.
In the face of this kind of anti-democratic extremism, bullying, naive posturing and studied nuttiness, reasonable people who want to preserve the environment and democracy will leave the Greens, which seems to be what the Greens want. This doesn't mean that the Greens started out like this; it's how they have become.
This exodus of bona-fide members has happened to the decimated ALP already, and probably to the Liberals as well. Toothless political parties make it easy for the corporates to run our political system.
There have been many attempts by many members of the Greens to get a rational population policy over the past two decades. Pseudo-left forces in the Greens have however suppressed these democratic attempts quite savagely and continue to do so.
I repeat that these views bear the hallmarks of a bid for corporate funding from the growth lobby. Yes, folks, I don't think this is about refugees or asylum seekers. I think it is about money and advantage from the growth lobby. Why? Because the growth lobby will be the beneficiary and democracy will be the victim.
Ironically these policies don't benefit refugees and asylum-seekers
Policies which focus exclusively on benefits to non-citizens don't make sense in a democracy. They don't benefit citizens.
The asylum seekers themselves also won't benefit because of the predictable reaction which the designers of the policy
must be aware of and which, I would argue, some of them actually courted.
The newsmedia will orchestrate a public perception that the "Green threat" of being "overrun by asylum seekers" can only be combatted by increasing "skilled migration"!
Fear of 'boat-people' coming in massive numbers will continue to be stoked by the Murdoch and Fairfax media and tv and radio. Some people will therefore continue to fear the Greens as agents of the 'boat-people' bogeyman. Others will fear them as politicians who would see their countrymen dispossessed by a strange and unaccountable rhetoric.
Children overboard
Cast your mind back to the time of the Children Overboard. (Mr Howard's time.) So-called Greens raised the alarm that asylum seekers were being discriminated against. This cry was taken up by the newsmedia, which conducted a campaign of community polarisation, so creating two largely fictitious extremes. The community was presented with the idea of an uncontrolled hoard of people from god-knows-where streaming in through our coastline demanding economic support versus a moderate stream of highly educated willing workers selected by skilled bureaucrats for the exclusive benefit of our economy.
In reality it was the numbers of legal immigrants that were out of our control and being ramped higher and higher by forces that benefited financially from this influx. It was the presence of huge numbers of legal immigrants, not that of asylum-seekers that was
pushing up the costs of land, power, water and education. The government was inviting them through advertisements in every state.
These quite viciously false pictures drove wedges between Australians, making the issue of immigration and the consequence of population growth so inflammatory that people were afraid to speak of it.
And the "Greens" cooperated with Murdoch et al by hammering in the wedges.
Who benefits?
Now, did asylum seekers and refugees benefit from this growth-lobby orchestrated electoral division and conquest?
Nauru. Christmas Island.
A situation had been engineered or a crisis had been created, probably with the planned objective of moving our sea-borders further out whilst artificially boosting demand for property and resources by importing masses of wealthy legal immigrants. Mission
successful.
Does it quack like a duck?
The concept of a Green government is a beautiful one that I personally long for. But that doesn't mean that a Party that calls itself Green has any intention of living up to that concept. Look at the evidence.
Does it look, feel, sound, smell and taste like environmentalism or democracy?
They say that patriotism is the refuge of a scoundrel. Well, these days Green seems to cloak some very mealy-mouthed growth lobbyists who are probably laughing all the way to the bank.
We need to turn away from the official political parties and their masters in the mainstream media. We need to look for our similarities, not our differences, and to eschew wedge politics. We should identify and embrace our grass-roots community activists and begin to recognise our own heros by the relevance of their actions to democracy and environmental wholeness. And we should
loudly point out those professional politicians and NGOs whose actions actually undermine our democratic voices, our shelter and our natural ammenity, for all their soothing, slimy slogans.
On Monday 31 March 2014, I watched the last half of Q and A, entitled "Human Rights and Wrongs." I was very annoyed by the hugely innaccurate information the panellists were operating with, which went uncountered by Tony Jones.
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