One View:
Baillieu shows guts on Greens
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
From: The Australian November 18, 2010
THERE are good reasons the Liberal Party should win the Victorian election.
FOR the sake of national security, and foreign policy more generally, it will be good if Victorian Liberal leader Ted Baillieu is elected premier on Saturday week. This is a big call. After all, Australian politics are generally pretty provincial and nowhere more so than state politics.
But there are two big decisions Baillieu has made that have important international or national security consequences, and three other significant reasons John Brumby's time in office should come to an end.
Baillieu deserves election partly because of the Victorian Liberals' sound and brave decision to put the Greens last in the preferences on their how-to-vote cards. The tactical significance of this can be overstated. After all, how-to-vote cards are only a recommendation. But in this time of political querulousness and confusion, the public wants clear direction and clear beliefs.
You can make a case that tactically it would be advisable for the Liberals to preference the Greens at least sometimes. But in principle you can't make any such case. The Greens are a party of the far Left, Labor of the Centre Left, and the Liberals of the Centre Right. It is profoundly damaging to the Liberals' strategic prospects, and to Australian society, to have a surge of support to the most left-wing party in the Australian parliament.
Consider this imperfectly but instructively analogous situation. In 1990 one David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, fluked, under complicated rules, a win in the Republican primary for the governorship of Louisiana. In the race against the Democrat incumbent Edwin Edwards, George H. W. Bush, the Republican president, urged his supporters in Louisiana to vote for the Democrat because it was unconscionable to support Duke. Edwards was no statesman and nobody thought he was. There was a stench of corruption about his administration, leading to the memorable bumper sticker: "Vote for the crook, it's important".
The Greens are a pernicious and extreme party; they are now in power in coalition in Tasmania and are part of a power-sharing arrangement with the Gillard government in Canberra, though Gillard got absolutely nothing from the Greens in return for going into alliance with them. The Liberals are not compromising their contest with Labor by putting the Greens last and making it hard for them to get into Australian lower houses of parliament.
The trouble with the Greens is ABC television treats them with the deference it might have shown an Anglican bishop 50 or 60 years ago. The Greens are treated as though they represent a purer, higher form of ABC ideology, that is, received opinion only more so. Graham Richardson commented recently that Greens' leader Bob Brown was the best politician in Australia. This may be because Brown is never asked a tough question. His monsignorial demeanour reduces the ABC's hard men to adoring altar boys, lighting devotional candles.
However, a cursory stroll through the Greens website shows just how extreme and destructive their ideology is. It's built on a hatred of modern Western society and as such is the logical successor to the Communist Party, just as many Greens were former communist activists or their progeny.
Let me give you a few examples of Greens positions. They want a minimum 40 per cent reduction in Australia's 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and by 2050 they want net zero greenhouse gas emissions from Australia. Translated into broad English, that means deindustrialising our society. They want no uranium mining or export, and opposition to nuclear power everywhere, which shows how utterly fatuous their greenhouse ambitions are. They want to abolish the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. They want Australia to withdraw from all free trade agreements. They want an end to our alliance with the US. They want no Australian defence exports, which means if other countries adopted a similar policy it would be impossible for Australia to have a defence force at all.
And there's much, much more. They want our immigration program focused on family reunion and asylum-seekers, as opposed to the skilled migration that has won strong support from Australians. Traditionally, they have wanted a smaller Australian population, though I couldn't see that on the website. All their welfare policies involve vast increases in government spending yet, of course, there is no attempt to reconcile this with their wealth destroying, anti-business agenda.
The presence of this extreme and frankly loopy party in our parliaments moves the whole of Australian politics to the Left. It damages our ability to confront our problems, it represents a destructive, anti-American, almost nihilist approach to geo-strategic issues and it must be bad for the Liberal Party.
The other positive reason to elect Baillieu is the way he stood up for Indian students in Victoria when they were being systematically bashed on public transport. He did this before it became a media issue and with no profit for himself. Foreign students in Australia don't vote. Baillieu's stand was honourable, brave and true.
Similarly, there are three reasons Brumby should go. He comprehensively mishandled the Indian student matter. This was a bad failure in itself but it also did Australia's international reputation more harm than any other event in the past two decades.
Brumby's government is much better than the shambles in NSW and there is a case for keeping the most coherent Labor government in office, simply to remind the Labor Party how it's done. But Brumby's government also has seen a steady decline in services and safety in Melbourne. Brumby denies this. One of his most annoying habits is claiming everything is perfect and that problems are only problems of perception. This reluctance to face harsh facts was the root of his failure with the Indian students. The Victorian capital runs better than Sydney, but there comes a point where that defence is not good enough.
And, finally, Labor has been in power for 11 years in Victoria. That's long enough. It's good for democracy to have a change. Baillieu has shown courage in adversity and given leadership on important issues. It's best for Australia if he wins.
Baillieu shows guts on Greens
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
From: The Australian November 18, 2010
THERE are good reasons the Liberal Party should win the Victorian election.
FOR the sake of national security, and foreign policy more generally, it will be good if Victorian Liberal leader Ted Baillieu is elected premier on Saturday week. This is a big call. After all, Australian politics are generally pretty provincial and nowhere more so than state politics.
But there are two big decisions Baillieu has made that have important international or national security consequences, and three other significant reasons John Brumby's time in office should come to an end.
Baillieu deserves election partly because of the Victorian Liberals' sound and brave decision to put the Greens last in the preferences on their how-to-vote cards. The tactical significance of this can be overstated. After all, how-to-vote cards are only a recommendation. But in this time of political querulousness and confusion, the public wants clear direction and clear beliefs.
You can make a case that tactically it would be advisable for the Liberals to preference the Greens at least sometimes. But in principle you can't make any such case. The Greens are a party of the far Left, Labor of the Centre Left, and the Liberals of the Centre Right. It is profoundly damaging to the Liberals' strategic prospects, and to Australian society, to have a surge of support to the most left-wing party in the Australian parliament.
Consider this imperfectly but instructively analogous situation. In 1990 one David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, fluked, under complicated rules, a win in the Republican primary for the governorship of Louisiana. In the race against the Democrat incumbent Edwin Edwards, George H. W. Bush, the Republican president, urged his supporters in Louisiana to vote for the Democrat because it was unconscionable to support Duke. Edwards was no statesman and nobody thought he was. There was a stench of corruption about his administration, leading to the memorable bumper sticker: "Vote for the crook, it's important".
The Greens are a pernicious and extreme party; they are now in power in coalition in Tasmania and are part of a power-sharing arrangement with the Gillard government in Canberra, though Gillard got absolutely nothing from the Greens in return for going into alliance with them. The Liberals are not compromising their contest with Labor by putting the Greens last and making it hard for them to get into Australian lower houses of parliament.
The trouble with the Greens is ABC television treats them with the deference it might have shown an Anglican bishop 50 or 60 years ago. The Greens are treated as though they represent a purer, higher form of ABC ideology, that is, received opinion only more so. Graham Richardson commented recently that Greens' leader Bob Brown was the best politician in Australia. This may be because Brown is never asked a tough question. His monsignorial demeanour reduces the ABC's hard men to adoring altar boys, lighting devotional candles.
However, a cursory stroll through the Greens website shows just how extreme and destructive their ideology is. It's built on a hatred of modern Western society and as such is the logical successor to the Communist Party, just as many Greens were former communist activists or their progeny.
Let me give you a few examples of Greens positions. They want a minimum 40 per cent reduction in Australia's 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and by 2050 they want net zero greenhouse gas emissions from Australia. Translated into broad English, that means deindustrialising our society. They want no uranium mining or export, and opposition to nuclear power everywhere, which shows how utterly fatuous their greenhouse ambitions are. They want to abolish the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. They want Australia to withdraw from all free trade agreements. They want an end to our alliance with the US. They want no Australian defence exports, which means if other countries adopted a similar policy it would be impossible for Australia to have a defence force at all.
And there's much, much more. They want our immigration program focused on family reunion and asylum-seekers, as opposed to the skilled migration that has won strong support from Australians. Traditionally, they have wanted a smaller Australian population, though I couldn't see that on the website. All their welfare policies involve vast increases in government spending yet, of course, there is no attempt to reconcile this with their wealth destroying, anti-business agenda.
The presence of this extreme and frankly loopy party in our parliaments moves the whole of Australian politics to the Left. It damages our ability to confront our problems, it represents a destructive, anti-American, almost nihilist approach to geo-strategic issues and it must be bad for the Liberal Party.
The other positive reason to elect Baillieu is the way he stood up for Indian students in Victoria when they were being systematically bashed on public transport. He did this before it became a media issue and with no profit for himself. Foreign students in Australia don't vote. Baillieu's stand was honourable, brave and true.
Similarly, there are three reasons Brumby should go. He comprehensively mishandled the Indian student matter. This was a bad failure in itself but it also did Australia's international reputation more harm than any other event in the past two decades.
Brumby's government is much better than the shambles in NSW and there is a case for keeping the most coherent Labor government in office, simply to remind the Labor Party how it's done. But Brumby's government also has seen a steady decline in services and safety in Melbourne. Brumby denies this. One of his most annoying habits is claiming everything is perfect and that problems are only problems of perception. This reluctance to face harsh facts was the root of his failure with the Indian students. The Victorian capital runs better than Sydney, but there comes a point where that defence is not good enough.
And, finally, Labor has been in power for 11 years in Victoria. That's long enough. It's good for democracy to have a change. Baillieu has shown courage in adversity and given leadership on important issues. It's best for Australia if he wins.
