Pubdate: Wed, 14 Mar 2007
Source: Daily Telegraph (Australia)
Copyright: 2007 News Limited
Contact:  http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/113
Author: Piers Akerman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

NO BRIDGE FROM GREENS TO SANITY

ON THE 75th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 
ask yourself one question: would the NSW Government have built it today?

The answer is simple. The current Government's dismal record on 
infrastructure has almost certainly ensured that it would NOT be able 
to raise the funds.

Investors are running away from the Labor Government following its 
appalling handling of the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove Tunnel 
developments, as worthy as they may be in the long term.

Further, now that Premier Morris Iemma has cosied up to the Greens 
with a sleazy preference swap, one can only imagine the myriad 
objections the power-peddlers in both the ALP and the Greens would 
have to creating such a bridge.

The unions could claim their members employed on the ferries would 
suffer as greater vehicular access was offered, and the Greens could 
object on the basis that they are opposed to private transport, let 
alone transport that relies on fossil fuels.

The reality is that only the Liberals and Nationals would not be 
forced by minority ideological interests to reject building the Harbour Bridge.

That analogy should send a clear message to those thinking about how 
to vote in the NSW state elections in 10 days time but it is apparent 
that neither Labor nor the Greens want voters to be thinking clearly 
about the choice.

The decision by some Labor candidates to drop all reference to their 
party in their campaign literature accurately reflects the dismal 
party's standing in the minds of many who have endured the past 12 
years of Labor mismanagement in almost all areas of NSW's public service.

As stupendously ridiculous as Labor's advertising campaign is, 
however, it does not compare with the Greens' breathtaking claim to 
hold the solutions to the state's many woes.

State Greens MP Lee Rhiannon may have dropped a bombshell on her 
party's naive and emotional supporters when she told The Daily 
Telegraph that the NSW Greens are not an environmental group. No one 
else would have been surprised.

"It's an old idea that we are an enviro group," Rhiannon said, and 
indeed it is. The Green label has always been used to mask the fact 
that the Greens have a grab bag of bizarre policies, which, when 
allied with their political ambition, leave them in contradictory situations.

How else can their decision to preference the ALP in Menai and 
Miranda, where residents are determinedly opposed to ALP plans for a 
desalination plant, be explained?

Though the Greens claim to be misinterpreted with the same frequency 
as Lakemba's "Cat Meat" Sheik Taj el-Dene Elhilaly, it is possible to 
get their drift by looking at the public record.

Like the shifting sheik, they are concerned about Christianity. They 
want to ban the Lord's Prayer in Parliament at the start of each 
sitting day and they want to force Christian churches and schools to 
employ transsexuals, transvestites and homosexuals, but first they 
want to cut off their government funding.

They want to dump the idea that marriage is defined as being between 
men and women and, perhaps to make it easier for those who aren't 
sure who they are, they want to make sex-change operations free (that 
is, they want you to pick up the bill).

Their plan to decriminalise dangerous drugs including ice was aired 
in The Daily Telegraph yesterday but their agenda is far broader.

In the truest expression of lunatic libertarianism they want illicit 
drugs permitted for personal use, they want to ban the use of sniffer 
dogs and even the use of helicopters for the detection of drug crops.

Their radical plans to limit mining exploration would cripple the 
national economy, if it wasn't already damaged by their desire to 
halt and reverse economic growth both nationally and internationally.

And, not surprisingly, the Greens have rejected every piece of 
industrial legislation introduced since 1996.

Greens national leader Senator Bob Brown, who launched their state 
campaign at the weekend, wants to end coal exports, which would 
effectively send the nation into bankruptcy, if the Greens' plan for 
a four-day working week and the guarantee of an adequate income 
without a need to work, hadn't already done so.

Premier Morris Iemma, who learnt his whatever-it-takes brand of 
politicking at the knee of former senator Graham Richardson, is 
following Richardson's strategy of duchessing environmentalist voters 
by cosying up to the Greens.

Rhiannon's disavowal of the Greens' environmental tag not 
withstanding, there will still be thousands of voters silly enough to 
believe that the party's agenda was primarily about making 
tree-hugging mandatory.

That Labor is prepared to embrace the party despite its broader 
agenda is among its more cynical decisions but in keeping with the 
ruthlessness which has produced ministers of doubtful ability such as 
Frank Sartor, Joe Tripodi and Michael Costa.

The ill-conceived marriage between the ALP and the Greens is about 
wresting more power from the population and can only cause further 
damage to a haemorrhaging state.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman