Gerard Jackson
19 December 2022
Before the Marxist Adam Bandt appeared on the green scene there was Bob Brown, the founder of this pernicious party. Brown was never for the workers any more than the Green Party he founded is today. What is overlooked is just how elitist and loony green economics really is. Brown revealed the Greens real attitude to Australian workers many years ago in a letter he had published in The Australian1 expressing his views on what he sneering called “extraction industries” basically said it all. This brilliant economist and defender of the Koal bear and Australia’s fictitious “first nations2” defined logging and mining as “resource robbery”.
He further declared that Tasmania is a “post-industrial” society, despite the fact that it has never been industrialised, because her economy has never been based on those stinking high-wage energy intensive “dinosaur industries like pulp mills, zinc mills and aluminium mills.” Is this why average wages in Tasmania are about $11,000 lower than in mainland states? Yet these sanctimonious Greens wallow in their sense of moral superiority.
The greens have grown in strength to the extent that they now pose a grave threat to the economy. The useful idiots the Greens’ inner circle send out as missionaries have no idea that without pulp mills there would be no paper to print their drivel on, and certainly no newspapers to promote their lunacy. Simple observation is apparently beyond their ken. The same people who use numerous electrical appliances, drive a cars, including electric cars, who travel by train, ship and plane are the same people who fervently argue that the manufacturing processes that make these things possible are “dinosaur industries”! And many of these people belong to our so-called educated class.
Are these green fanatics stupid are just cunning? Don’t they realise that these industries are at the very highest stages of production and that damaging them must inevitably damage economic growth because their products are vital inputs for the lower stages of production that produce consumer goods? This is as insane as arguing that we can safely return the whole of agricultural to nature because we get our food from supermarkets. But then, the likes of Brown and their disciples think we mortals consume far too much anyway.
Brown argued, and his fellow Greens agreed, “that it is in the green-backed arena of labour intensive small businesses that Tasmania’s future job creation lies.” Judging by other green comments this must go for the economy as a whole.
Let’s get a couple of economic facts straight, the kind of facts that Greens seem incapable of grasping. Finding work is not a problem so long as there is sufficient land and capital to employ people. The problem is generating economic growth, the process that creates evermore higher-paying jobs. And it is this process that the Greens hate.
Now higher-paid jobs for everyone can only come through increasing the ratio of capital to labour. The Austrian school of economics describes the process as one in which an integrated capital structure with many stages of production that keeps ‘lengthening’ by adding more capital intensive stages that embody superior technology and techniques.
It is this process of ‘capital lengthening’ that raises the marginal value of labour’s product and hence its real standard of living. Abandoning this process in favour of small-scale labour intensive firms is a recipe for a massive collapse in the standard of living and a hell for the labour force.
At least Jeremy Rifkin, another green fanatic, was open about the consequences of green economic policies for the standard of living, admitting that in the green paradise people will “live a much more frugal or Spartan life-style. Consumption ceases to be rewarded … and production will center on goods required to maintain life.”3 This state would be a totalitarian nightmare. At least, unlike today’s mendacious Greens the early Greens were honest about what they had in store for us.
Ernest Callenbach’s book Ecotopia4 was brutally honest about greens aims to savagely lower living standards. In his green fantasy green fanatics take control of California and savagely cut the standard of living. What is interesting is that cars are banned and energy is “inordinately expensive”, as expected, with gas and electricity costing three times what it would cost outside Ecotopia. This fantasy is what hardcore greens are lusting after.
Footnotes
1The Australian, 27 June 1991.
2Any person who uses this term has never used a dictionary. We now see the Bowen mob for what it really is: A vicious race-baiting mini-me version of the atrocious Biden regime.
3Jeremy Rifkin, Ted Howard, Entropy: A New World View, Viking Press, 1980, p. 208.
4Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, 1975.
Thank God someone has the backbone to give Bandt a bashing and expose him as a fraud. Keep it up, Gerry
Bandt is just a commie posing as a greenie. And the greens are just as red as he is. Have you seen their stuff? It’s nearly further left than joe stalin.
I think you should do more on Bandt and the green ideologues. At least your stuff is not insipid. Your breakdown of them was very interesting. I always thought of them as being malicious but know I am absolutely convinced they are a dangerous subversive movement. I decided to wait for part 2 of your essay on Ricardo’s rent and Bandt’s demand for destructive taxes on gas and coal.
I dont see any way to avoid the coming energy disaster. The libs are bloody useless and spinless. Fancy thinking you could win an election by going further left on energy than Labor.
They also want to savagely lower human population, starting with developed nations as they ‘harm’ the environment the most. Their arguments are fallacy though as humans are indigenous to the earth and anything we do with the earth’s resources are part of nature.
The hardcore greens are fanatical deindustrialisers. The doorknockers who do the footwork for them are just useful idiots, mere cannon fodder. Our right has had more than forty years to combat green ideology and it did nothing. It is still doing nothing. There is nothing brave in merely writing about greens: you have to confront them. Our right’s closed-shop mentality will make sure that never happens.
By the way, I see our right has set up another ‘think tank’. This one is the Australian Institute for Progress. That noted firebrand and fearless opponent of the left and the Green Party Graham Young is the Executive Director. I guess it will be same old names. Incidentally, Young made the idiotic claim that you cannot control the money supply because retailers create money every time they give a customer credit. He also thinks of himself as a bit of a buff on nineteenth century trade cycle theory.
God help us.
Brave is the important word, conservatives are supposed to stand up for values not appease the latest fad to gain power
People who stand for nothing are not conservatives. Howard’s so-called big tent policy has been a disaster. Because of that idiocy the party was invaded by a bunch of self-righteous wet lefties who had the nerve to call themselves moderates, thereby insinuating that anyone who disagreed with them was an extremist. It’s a stomach-turning spectacle to watch these phonies preen themselves in public.
For a party to hold itself together all of its members must share the same fundamental beliefs. Moreover, the entire membership must have a say. Kroger tore the guts out of the Vic Libs and arrogantly denied its members a say in the party. While this was going on the moderates were busy white-anting the party by slowly eliminating those values that made it a truly conservative party.
1. The party must put the arrogant likes of Kroger back in their boxes where they belong.
2. It must no longer tolerate white-anting by so-called moderates. If these people don’t like conservativism, and they don’t, then they should join the Green Party.
3. The power of branches to choose candidates must be restored.