Re: International filth merchant lobby exposed
bo n o
"Fran" <fran...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:578ad77f-5415-4ec4...@f18g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
On Nov 7, 7:13 am, "Ouroboros Rex" <i...@casual.com> wrote:
> Monkey Clumps wrote:
> > On Nov 5, 9:51 pm, Fran <fran.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't believe he wants to kill anyone. I see him simply as some
recklessly ignorant angst-driven suburbanite whose first and last
interest is protecting his creature comforts and lifestyle at any
cost. He's waging his own little part of the culture wars because he
thinks this is in his interests, but he is of course, deluded.
======================================
Aha, sounds like Al Gore!
Warmest Regards
Bon z0
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps
US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists
worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct
from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville
o no b
On Nov 10, 1:33 am, Monkey Clumps <spacebrai...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Nov 8, 9:14 pm, Fran <fran.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
The green movement gets its way almost never and certainly
not on any issue of substance, except in alliance with other major
sectors of society.
======================================
Oh really??
They certainly got their way in Australia by blocking hazard reduction
burnoffs and fire trail maintenance,
thus causing the bush fire tragedies we have had recently!
And what about the blocking of urgently needed dam building, especially in
Victoria and NSW, and instead, building energy guzzling, hugely expensive
desal plants!
Bushfire Tragedy Was Due To "Green Doctrine"
The Victorian government wilfully ignored the advice of a previous inquiry
because it did not want to "offend the sensitivities of the Greens".
July 19 2009
QUOTE: At the core of Green doctrine is the belief that trees are sacred and
that mankind is a pest or a virus on the planet.
QUOTE: The Brumby government ignored the 2008 report for reasons which were
wholly political and which go to the heart of the problems we face not only
on the bushfire front, but also on water supply issues and on any major
development in Victoria which offends the sensitivities of the Greens.
QUOTE: The Communist Party of Australia and its fellow-travelling socialists
in the ALP were having doctrinal and morale problems. In a brilliant
strategic move, it was decided that the environmentalist movement was a new
and promising vehicle for obtaining political influence and power.
QUOTE: The takeover by the socialist Left of the environmentalist movement
in Australia can be dated from the early seventies, culminating in the 1973
AGM of the Australian Conservation Foundation, an organisation founded by
Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir Maurice Mawby, funded in part by the McMahon
government, and which had as its aim increasing the public awareness of the
importance of environmental matters.
QUOTE: "The appeal of Environmentalism, in its more extreme manifestations
at least, becomes irresistible to that permanent cadre of political and
social radicals Western society has nurtured ever since the French
Revolution. This cadre has never been primarily interested in the protection
of nature, but if such a movement carries with it even the possibility of
political and social revolution, it is well that the cadre join it; which,
starting with the late 1960s, it did."
QUOTE: staffed at senior levels by officials who believe that trees are
sacred, and are there to be worshipped rather than exploited for the use of
mankind, cannot manage the forests.
Because an explicit avowal of such beliefs would, at this stage of the Green
Revolution, be premature, the sacred nature of forests is euphemised by
words and phrases such as "old-growth forests", the incommensurability of
"wilderness", and by appeals to the over-arching importance of biodiversity
and the necessity, therefore, of leaving forests untouched and dead trees on
the roadside undisturbed. Biodiversity is a magic word which is used to
legitimise the expropriation of private property (amongst many other uses).
QUOTE: I have quoted from this essay at length to illustrate the current
state of the Green justification of their stewardship of the forests, and
also to illustrate the revolutionary ambitions of the Greens in combining
the bushfire tragedies with their faith in anthropogenic global warming, in
order to justify "retooling the economy from top to bottom."
IN 1994, Ray Evans bought a cottage at Marysville (Victoria, Australia)
which he and his wife subsequently renovated and extended. The cottage and
its extensive garden were destroyed by fire on the night of Saturday
February 7 - now known as Black Saturday.
In the following provocative and political article Mr Evans blames the fire
"on green doctrine" and the Victorian government wilfully ignoring the
advice of a previous inquiry because it did not want to "offend the
sensitivities of the Greens".
"IN 1966 the Victorian government published a booklet entitled Summer Peril.
On the cover was a terrifying photo of the 1964 Lorne bushfire. The foreword
was by the Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, who began: "Over the years our state of
Victoria has been plagued by bushfires leading to tragic loss of life and
devastation of natural resources, public and private property."
The booklet offers practical advice to farmers and rural landholders about
the precautions they should take to minimise the risk to their property and
what to do if bushfires should engulf them. One noteworthy sentence
declares: "Anyone who ignores warnings about the fire risk during acute
danger periods must be a fool, and a selfish, ignorant and stubborn one at
that."
The report by the Environment and Natural Resources Committee of the
Victorian Parliament Inquiry into the Impact of Public Land Management
Practices on Bushfires in Victoria, July 2008, lists twenty-three bushfires
from 1965 until 2008, resulting in the deaths of 102 people. On February 7,
2009, Black Saturday, 173 people died. Those words from 1966 now have a
prophetic ring to them.
On February 9 the Victorian Premier, John Brumby, announced the
establishment of a Royal Commission with wide-ranging terms of reference to
inquire into the causes of the firestorm and to recommend policies which
would mitigate against future disasters.
The Premier would have been aware that the appointment of such a body would
forestall criticism of his government for failure to act on the
recommendations of the parliamentary committee that had reported in July
2008. This committee made very specific recommendations, particularly about
the need for fuel reduction activity, which had either been rejected by the
government or accepted in principle only. The committee, chaired by former
Labor minister John Pandazopoulos, comprised members from both houses and
both parties with an independent, Craig Ingram, as deputy chair. Its report
is an example of the great benefits that federalism provides. Canberra could
not match this document. It is comprehensive in its scope, witnesses of all
shades of opinion are quoted at length, there is much historical material
woven into the narrative, and much detailed local knowledge is laid out for
the reader; but its recommendations, made without dissent, were ignored by
the Brumby government.
The Royal Commission has now been established. My deep interest in the
proceedings and outcome of this Royal Commission is a consequence of the
decision my wife and I made in 1994 to buy a cottage at Marysville. We
renovated and extended the cottage, which we rented out to tourists; we
constructed two outbuildings, and developed a magnificent garden on
three-quarters of an acre. The house and the garden were destroyed on the
night of Saturday February 7. The workshop survived.
Paragraph 2 of the Royal Commission's terms of reference refers inter alia
to the "prevention . of bushfire threats and risks". As far as I am aware no
submission or comment following the tragedy of Black Saturday has raised
arguments concerning the prevention of bushfires in the future. All the
attention so far has focused on what went wrong. The Royal Commission would
be doing a much greater service if it inquired into ways in which bushfires
in Victoria were to be eradicated.
The Brumby government ignored the 2008 report for reasons which were wholly
political and which go to the heart of the problems we face not only on the
bushfire front, but also on water supply issues and on any major development
in Victoria which offends the sensitivities of the Greens. The Brumby
government, to its credit, stared down the Greens on the Port Phillip
channel deepening issue, but that is the only attempt it has made to win a
serious confrontation with the political-cum-religious forces which seek to
stop economic development in Victoria or, as in the case of the Latrobe
Valley brown coal power stations, simply shut them down and thus leave
Victoria without electricity.
The takeover by the socialist Left of the environmentalist movement in
Australia can be dated from the early seventies, culminating in the 1973 AGM
of the Australian Conservation Foundation, an organisation founded by Sir
Garfield Barwick and Sir Maurice Mawby, funded in part by the McMahon
government, and which had as its aim increasing the public awareness of the
importance of environmental matters.
By the late 1960s the communist Left was suffering from defections over the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but more significantly from the brutal
repression of the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968. The Communist Party of
Australia and its fellow-travelling socialists in the ALP were having
doctrinal and morale problems. In a brilliant strategic move, it was decided
that the environmentalist movement was a new and promising vehicle for
obtaining political influence and power.
The American sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote in a review article in the
American Spectator in 1983:
"As an historian, I am obliged by the record of the Western past to see
Environmentalism-of the kind espoused by the Barry Commoners and the Paul
Ehrlichs-as the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history;
the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism.
"The appeal of Environmentalism, in its more extreme manifestations at
least, becomes irresistible to that permanent cadre of political and social
radicals Western society has nurtured ever since the French Revolution. This
cadre has never been primarily interested in the protection of nature, but
if such a movement carries with it even the possibility of political and
social revolution, it is well that the cadre join it; which, starting with
the late 1960s, it did."
So Greenpeace was taken over in Canada, its founder, Patrick Moore, was
ousted, and in Australia, the Left, having enrolled into the ACF in
considerable numbers, ousted the old guard in October 1973, and installed
Geoff Mosley, hitherto a recent employee of the ACF, as its new Director.
John Blanche, the former head of the organisation, resigned immediately, as
did many members of the board.
An example of the attitude of the new regime to the role it envisaged for
the ACF is found in 1983-84 Annual Report, written by Geoff Mosley:
"Undoubtedly the main issue to attract the Foundation's attention was peace
and disarmament and the related topic of opposition to uranium mining and
export.
"The worsening arms situation not only threatens annihilation, but by
absorbing resources and creating a feeling of doom is rapidly eroding the
possibility of dealing with drastic social problems such as land degradation
and deforestation.
"It is, indeed, difficult to see the arms race and deterioration of the
physical and social environment as being in any way separate matters. Any
solution will require a global anti-nuclear movement."
The ACF has adhered to a hard Left position on every environmental issue
ever since.
In 1982 the Cain Labor government won office in Victoria. Although Rod
McKenzie was appointed Minister for Forests in 1982, Joan Kirner was in
charge of the political agenda. Kirner was the leader of the Socialist Left
faction in the ALP, in effect a medieval baron not beholden to the Premier
for her office. In June 1983 Cain announced the creation of a new
mega-department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, which subsumed existing
departments of Forestry, Crown Lands and Surveying, the Department of
Planning and the Department of Conservation. The Victorian Forests
Commission was dissolved and the new department came into being in December
1983.
Joan Kirner was the first minister and early in 1985 she fired Ron Grose, a
forester with an internationally distinguished reputation, who had been
chief of the Forests Commission. She also fired or retrenched the people who
had served in the top three layers of the Forests Commission. She appointed
as head of the new department Tony Edison, an unknown figure from the UK,
who was outspoken in his hostility to foresters and forestry, and he in turn
appointed hardline greens as senior officials in the department. From that
day to this the department, now officially the Department of Sustainability
and Environment but known throughout rural Victoria as the Department of
Scorched Earth, has been completely dysfunctional.
The Victorian Forests Commission had a history going back to its
establishment in 1918, and had built up a culture of expertise in forest
management which made it respected throughout the international forestry
community. Its expertise and knowledge of local terrain and silviculture
extended deep into the domain of Victoria's forests. Some of that expertise
and knowledge is still to be found in the people, mostly now retired, who
once worked for the Forests Commission. Its dissolution at the hands of Joan
Kirner was akin to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, but
where Henry handed over the vast treasures of the monasteries to his
favoured courtiers, Kirner handed over the treasure trove of Victoria's
forests to the Greens.
The cause of the dysfunctionality of the DSE is doctrinal.
At the core of Green doctrine is the belief that trees are sacred and that
mankind is a pest or a virus on the planet.
So the logging and timber industry has been targeted by the Greens for
extinction, just as whaling was targeted for extinction in the 1970s. In
fact the ban on logging in parts of Western Australia, and the closure of
timber communities in those regions, for example, was specifically likened
by West Australian Greens to the end of Albany as a whaling town. Trees and
whales are either very tall or very large, and both are sacred.
Two characteristic examples of the articulation of Green doctrine, one from
1990 and one from 2007, illustrate this point. Ted Traynor, lecturer in the
Department of Education at the University of New South Wales, gave a talk on
Robyn Williams's ABC radio program Ockham's Razor in May 1990:
"For a long time to come, our top national priority in countries like
Australia should be to reduce the GNP as fast as possible, because we are
grossly over-developed and over-producing and over-consuming and there's no
possibility of all people ever rising to the per capita levels we now have,
let alone those we're determined to grow to.
"Often it is obvious that developments that would do wonders for the GNP
should be prohibited, such as devoting local land and water to export crops.
"There would be far less trade and transporting of goods than there is now.
There would have to be many co-operative arrangements; the sharing of tools,
many community workshops, orchards, forests, ponds, gardens, and regular
community meetings and working bees.
"Applying the concept of appropriate development in the over-developed
countries would make it possible for most people to live well on only one
day's work for cash per week, because many of the relatively few things they
need would come from their own gardens, from barter, from gifts of surpluses
and from the many free sources within the neighbourhood."
Paul Watson, the anti-whaling activist who has been charged with piracy on
the open seas, said in an editorial on May 4, 2007:
"We are killing our host the planet Earth.
"I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the
"AIDS of the Earth". I make no apologies for that statement.
"No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from
other communities by wilderness areas.
"We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where
other species are free to evolve without human interference. We need to
radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one
billion.
"Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest
ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be
by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary."
Statements of this kind could be multiplied hundreds of times. They are
representative of the core Green movement. Although most people who vote for
the Green Party in Australia would be horrified if governments enacted
legislation to bring about the reduction in population and living standards
thought essential by Traynor and Watson, these are the doctrines which
illuminate and influence Green decision-making, wherever the Greens have
political or administrative power.
Now a department of state which has management responsibilities for forests
on Crown land (an area in Victoria comprising one third of the state), but
which is staffed at senior levels by officials who believe that trees are
sacred, and are there to be worshipped rather than exploited for the use of
mankind, cannot manage the forests.
Because an explicit avowal of such beliefs would, at this stage of the Green
Revolution, be premature, the sacred nature of forests is euphemised by
words and phrases such as "old-growth forests", the incommensurability of
"wilderness", and by appeals to the over-arching importance of biodiversity
and the necessity, therefore, of leaving forests untouched and dead trees on
the roadside undisturbed. Biodiversity is a magic word which is used to
legitimise the expropriation of private property (amongst many other uses).
Green doctrine on trees and forests is pre-Christian and incompatible with
Western civilisation. An important example of the clash between the pagan
worship of trees, and Christian utilitarianism concerning the use of timber
for structures and implements of all kinds, took place in Germany in the
early eighth century.
An English boy called Winfrid was born in Devon about 675 AD. He showed
great intellectual promise and wished to devote his life to the church. His
parents objected but he eventually obtained their permission and was
ordained as a priest in about 705. He became a Benedictine monk and
eventually received the Pope's permission to evangelise the German-speaking
peoples to the east of the Rhine.
He was later appointed bishop, taking the name of Boniface. In one famous
encounter with the environmentalists of his time, and to show the heathens
how utterly powerless were the gods in whom they placed their confidence,
Boniface felled the oak tree sacred to the thunder-god Thor, at Geismar,
near Fritzlar. He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the
Prince of the Apostles. The local tribesmen were astonished that no
thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were
converted. The fall of this oak tree marked the decline of pagan influence
in that part of Germany.
Today St Boniface would be prosecuted for cutting down a tree without a
permit, although since it was an oak tree he may have escaped the watchful
eye of our own Green high-priests who, in a nice blend of paganism and
xenophobia, are concerned with worshipping eucalypts and anathematising
exotic deciduous trees. This may seem a trivial thing, but it is indicative
of the power which the Green movement has seized. It is arguable that
environmentalism has become the established religion of the Commonwealth of
Australia, in contradiction of Section 116 of the Constitution which
prohibits such establishment.
The firestorms of Black Saturday are a stark reminder of the incompatibility
of pagan beliefs about trees and the demands of twenty-first-century life.
As the Victorian parliament's report of July 2008 demonstrated, any program
of bushfire control in Victoria's eucalypt forests which has any chance of
success must rely upon continual and sustained fuel reduction as the basis
of policy. In the absence of more radical changes to property rights in
Victorian forests, this requires the end of Green hegemony within a
restructured public service charged with responsibility for managing Crown
forests.
The most illuminating recent defence of Green doctrines concerning forest
management is found in an essay entitled "Thoughts on the Victorian
Bushfires", in February 2009, by Andrew Campbell, who claims to have been a
Victorian forester; a bushfire researcher; the founder of the Potter
Foundation's whole-farm planning in early 1980s; one of the initiators of
Landcare; CEO of Land & Water Australia until about three years ago; and is
now a consultant living in Queanbeyan, close to the corridors of power in
Canberra. This essay has not been published but is available on his website
and has been widely circulated.
The essential points he makes are as follows:
"Claims that more broadscale fuel reduction burning in Victoria's forests
would have prevented these fires . are nonsense . Extreme weather conditions
following lots of late spring-early summer growth, after a decade of
drought, made for an explosive tinderbox .
"The crucial point that must be underlined is that under very extreme
conditions (Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) above 50-see below), fuel loads
are no longer the key driver of fire behaviour, compared with weather (some
of which is fire-induced) and topography (especially slope) .
"Prof Ross Bradstock . from the University of Wollongong and the Bushfires
CRC, has pointed out that the Fire Danger Index (FDI) was over 150 in
Melbourne on February 7. The FDI incorporates temperature, wind speed,
humidity and a measure of fuel dryness. It was developed in the 1960s and
calibrated on a scale from zero (no fire danger) to 100 ("Black Friday"
1939) for both forests and grasslands. Fuel reduction research has mostly
involved small-scale experiments at FDIs between 10 and 20. A forest FDI
(FFDI) above 50 indicates that, due to fire crowning and spotting behaviour,
weather becomes the dominant indicator of fire behaviour, and it becomes
impossible to fight a running forest fire front. When eucalypt forests are
crowning, fuel reduction at ground level is academic. Recent research
suggests that with a drying warming climate we are now seeing unprecedented
FDIs, and need to introduce a new fire danger rating above "extreme" called
"catastrophic" to more realistically present the dangers associated with
days like 7 February .
"The whole planning system should be overhauled, way beyond just building
codes and vegetation management. Premier Brumby and his cabinet-and I
suspect now Kevin Rudd-appear to understand that business as usual will not
do. They also seem to understand the link to climate change in making events
such as these (and worse) more likely in future. But they have yet to make
the logical jump to the urgency of mitigating climate change, which means
setting ambitious targets, and retooling the economy from top to bottom to
achieve them."
I have quoted from this essay at length to illustrate the current state of
the Green justification of their stewardship of the forests, and also to
illustrate the revolutionary ambitions of the Greens in combining the
bushfire tragedies with their faith in anthropogenic global warming, in
order to justify "retooling the economy from top to bottom."
Nevertheless Campbell has made an important point about fires in the crowns
of eucalypts. The reason why we have had so many bushfires in south-eastern
Australia is because eucalypts, after long periods of hot, dry conditions,
become equivalent to large fire bombs, containing highly flammable
hydro-carbons which are released into the air above the trees as vapours,
where they form a fireball when ignited. When our forests are composed
entirely of eucalypts, the outbreak of bushfires cannot be prevented,
although their severity can be greatly reduced by ensuring the fuel content
of the floor of the forest is as close to zero as possible. We know that the
eucalypts were not always dominant in Australia; some time in the past
eucalypts were restricted to the outskirts of rainforests and various native
beech trees (which can still be found in sheltered gullies) were the
dominant species.
It is impossible, therefore, to escape the conclusion that if we are to make
Victoria free of bushfires, we need to reduce substantially the density of
eucalypts in our forests and replace them with other species. On Black
Saturday exotic deciduous trees, poplars, elms, oaks and plane trees were in
large measure untouched by the fires, particularly if they were at some
distance from eucalyptus trees. The Gould Memorial Drive on the Buxton Road
approaching Marysville, two glorious rows of Lombardy poplars, provides such
testimony; as does the Fernshaw Park Reserve, a haven of elms, plane trees
and oaks, halfway up the Black Spur Road from Healesville.
The argument that Victoria has to replace a major portion of its eucalypt
forests with exotic trees such as English oaks, poplars, plane trees, and
other non-flammable exotic species will be seen as sacrilege of the most
egregious kind by the Greens who have ruled the DSE and other departments
since the 1980s. But since it is they who must now give an account of how
their stewardship of Victoria's forests resulted in the deaths of more that
170 people on Black Saturday, and the loss of billions of dollars worth of
property, they first have to acknowledge that what has been done since the
1980s has been a terrible mistake. If that does not happen then there has to
be a reversal of the Kirner revolution of 1983 and new people, untainted by
Green pagan doctrine concerning the sacred nature of indigenous trees, have
to be appointed to senior positions. More of the same will not survive a
serious political backlash.
The greater part by far of Victoria's forests are never seen by the public
except from the air. Whether they comprise eucalypts or other species is a
matter only of symbolic value. From a social point of view, the squeeze that
has been placed on the logging and timber industries by the Green
bureaucracy-a squeeze designed to kill the industry within a politically
acceptable framework and timetable-has significantly reduced the number of
people living and working in the bush (people with a knowledge of bushfires
and firefighting); has reduced road access into the forests; and has
exacerbated greatly the damage done in the recent disaster.
The deliberate and systematic throttling of the timber industry has been
manifest in the establishment of the Great Otway National Park and the
shutting down of the timber industry in the Otway Ranges; the reduction of
timber harvesting in the box-ironbark forests to a minimum level; the ending
of timber harvesting in the Wombat Forest; and the establishment of new or
expanded national and state parks totalling over 100,000 hectares.
These vast areas of forests become wilderness, symbols of Green religious
power, in which man is a hostile and unwelcome intruder. They also become
sanctuaries where feral animals and noxious plants of all kinds flourish and
can spread into neighbouring farms and properties. Above all they become
huge reservoirs of stored energy, awaiting the next dry spell and hot
weather before turning into raging infernos.
From an economic point of view the closing down of that substantial portion
of the timber industry based on Crown forests has resulted in timber
shortages, increasing dependence on imported timber, and above all, the
substitution of steel for timber in the domestic building industry. If steel
were to replace timber as the consequence of competition between alternative
materials on a level playing field, which culminated in a cheaper product of
equal or superior quality, that would be one thing. But when an industry is
deliberately choked to death by government fiat, that is another.
In order to protect Victoria from a repeat of the tragedy of Black Saturday,
the logging industry must be given a new charter which will provide
confidence for revival, growth, new investment and the development of new
technologies and processes which will restore timber's competitiveness with
steel. Such a charter requires the transformation of the Crown forests,
however they are designated, into ninety-nine-year leaseholds which can be
auctioned in appropriate sizes together with covenants requiring the
replacement of eucalypts with exotic non-flammable trees (excluding pine
trees, which burn readily), up to a certain proportion, within a reasonable
period.
Once secure property rights were established for the forests, investors and
entrepreneurs would not only see opportunities in developing the logging and
timber industry but also in investing in eco-tourism and recreation. Above
all, these proprietors would have an overwhelming interest in securing their
assets from the destruction of bushfires, and in ensuring they were not
liable for damages to neighbouring property caused by their own negligence.
The government could then withdraw from the business of forest management,
confident that the interests of proprietors and the public alike were in
alignment.
We know from the Soviet tragedy that communal farming and the absence of
property rights in the farming industry produced chronic famine and
shortages. The absence of property rights in the Victorian forests sector
has produced the same sort of result. It is no coincidence that the radical
students of today proclaim themselves as activists in the green-red
coalition.
Many of the deaths on Black Saturday were caused by the transformation of
roads under firestorm conditions into "channels of death". Roger Underwood,
an experienced forester from Western Australia, came to Victoria after Black
Saturday and was taken through many of the regions devastated by fire. He
subsequently wrote:
"I was shocked to observe kilometres of long-unburnt road reserves running
through semi-cleared and agricultural landscapes. These are more like
tunnels than roads, with a narrow strip of bitumen winding between
overhanging trees and bush right at the road edge which had clearly not been
burned for over 20 years and carried a fuel load of about 35 tonnes to the
hectare. These roads are potential death traps, not escape routes."
Currently the clearing of fallen logs and other debris from roadsides is
prohibited. This prohibition is another example of Green Power in action.
People should not only be allowed, but should be encouraged, to obtain
firewood from the roadside and to keep the road verges clear of debris.
The capture by the Greens of a number of shire councils and the regulations
such councils imposed on new housing certainly aggravated the damage and
arguably caused increased loss of life on Black Saturday. This issue has
received considerable attention in the media but there has been no comment
on how a small group of people, admittedly passionate in the religion which
gives meaning and purpose to their lives, can capture a council and impose
regulations which are not only dreadful in their consequences but are also
regarded as lunatic by most people living in the shire.
Following the changes made to local government by the Kennett government, in
which a large number of small shires were amalgamated into fewer, much
larger entities, local government became too big to be responsive to local
opinion and knowledge, and too small to be taken seriously by most people.
This enabled small groups of zealots, through commitment and political
skill, to capture these bodies. They had the advantage that a high
proportion of Greens are childless (most Greens are against children) and
many are well off in secure jobs. They therefore had the time, energy and
resources to devote to political activity. The Nillumbik Shire Council on
the north-eastern edge of Melbourne is perhaps the best-known example of
this phenomenon, but other rural shires on the outskirts of the metropolis
have the same problem in varying degrees.
The answer to this serious problem is a return to local government. In other
words, shire councils should represent real communities, not conglomerations
of towns and hamlets extending over hundreds of square kilometres. If, for
example, Marysville had its own shire council, then local government would
be representative of Marysville and its immediate surrounding district, and
local knowledge of the district would be brought to bear in every discussion
on council. The argument that there are economies of scale in local
government, and that amalgamations would lead to reduced costs, is belied by
the substantial increases in rates that have occurred since the Kennett
"reforms".
The same arguments apply with equal force to Kinglake and Flowerdale, two
other towns destroyed on Black Saturday.
It may be said that the Greens are too entrenched both politically and in
the bureaucracy for any arguments made here to gain any support. However,
the next Victorian government will find, as in 1992, that Victoria is deep
in debt and radical measures are necessary to restore the financial
viability of the state. Turning the Crown forests into private leaseholds
would bring in a very large sum of money, and it would demonstrate to
everyone that the new government is prepared to take desperate measures in
desperate times and, in particular, is resolved to ensure that bushfires of
the kind we have experienced so often in recent years become a thing of the
past.
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/07/defining-the-greens-part-16-and-bushfires/#more-5849
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Dying Of Thirst Thanks To Greenie Lies
27 Aug 2009
QUOTE: Banning new dams will do very little to benefit wildlife values but
is a first step in Green dreams for a return to some pre-industrial Nirvana
QUOTE: Melbourne people will have to assert themselves at the ballot box to
put in place increased dam storage if they find that Governments are not
delivering them an adequate water supply.
There is much mention of "sustainability", this clever Green buzzword that
the Greens and their bureaucratic / regulator / leftie mates managed to
slip past a sleepy Australian population in the last decade.
The implication being that dams are somehow "unsustainable", a notion which
the Melbourne population will discover will deliver them increasingly
expensive water in years ahead.
Minister Thwaites says smugly, "..dams do not create water..", a misleading
little slogan more suited to an advertising jingle than a politician with
Premiership ambitions.
Dams certainly do store water in times of plenty for you to use when it
suits you and are worldwide the most cost effective foundation for reliable,
clean, public water supplies.
Green claims of environmental harm to rivers downstream of dams will on
close examination I believe, turn out to be exaggerated and misleading as
are most claims the Greens ever make.
The total area of catchments in say eastern Victoria, affected by dams is
very small compared to total catchment area.
In any one catchment affected by a dam, the area not affected by the dam is
huge compared to that upstream of the dam.
Rivers have always run low in dry spells, with or without dams.
Rivers have always run low in summers, with or without dams.
Freshwater flora and fauna have survived and evolved for millions of years.
Banning new dams will do very little to benefit wildlife values but is a
first step in Green dreams for a return to some pre-industrial Nirvana and
is also supporting the mantra of those anti-immigrationists who say
Australia can only support this or that population.
I notice from reading further into the White Paper and on the media, claims
that irrigator groups are happy with the plan. This leads me to think that
there are elements in this of the Government trying to shore up support for
itself in rural electorates.
For example in eastern Victoria, Independents have done well in the last
decade running on environmentalist platforms including returning natural
flows to rivers.
Twenty or thirty years ago I would have said it was a ludicrous notion that
unscientific and radical fringe groups could influence Government water
policy for a major metropolis in a way that equated to a first step in a
roll-back of two centuries of progressive improvements to public water
supplies and public health.
It is clearly a ludicrous notion that relatively few people in sparsely
populated Gippsland have some greater right to influence water policy on
crown lands, than the more numerous people of Melbourne. Presumably because
they live closer to the said crown lands and water resources.
Melbourne people will have to assert themselves at the ballot box to put in
place increased dam storage if they find that Governments are not
delivering them an adequate water supply.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/melwater/