Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of it’s publication, the IPA Review.
Writing in The Age on the 8th of August he opines on the Greens who are currently under much scrutiny. Berg claims;
“They’re about more than climate change and fast trains. Niche parties are easily captured by interests within their membership that insist their peculiar obsessions get aired and adopted.
So the Greens are the only party with an ”animals” policy. With 24 points, it includes things like a plan to ”foster community education about the needs of animals and our responsibilities to them”. Not even the Nationals have an animals policy, and you’d think they know a little more about animals than the Greens do.”
Not simply critical of the Greens, these articles show a maturing of the attitudes to the Greens as a political force. Rightly, questions are asked about policy and policy matures as the Grrens understand more about the issue along with the community.
However why isn’t the reverse question asked of the Nationals [or indeed the other outdated parties] an outgrowth from parties of small farmer which emerged early last century. Surely, if they were moving with the times we would see a party with a close affinity with ‘the land’ and where animal welfare issues had moved to prominence in the Australian community mature and adopt a policy on this issues to guide it.
If my memory serves me correctly animal welfare became an issue in the English parliament in the 1820’s with the treatment of farm animals being debated as one reformer sought legislation to protect animals from abuse. This is the modern emrgence of the question although animal welfare it goes deep into human society where you can see its lack reflected in the treatment of the disempowered by the powerful..
Now we have the 2 major supermarket chains vying over pig welfare to retain a social license for pork meat in a more discerning world.
If the greens had formed in the 1880’s they would have a platform of votes for women. Some women may still oppose such an idea.
Society has not fallen from the sky complete, nor is are its mores innately correct. It is a construct built from the success of humans, some would say the short term success, taken form the lessons we draw from our interaction with our living environment.
Before that is taken out of context it includes all the animals around us including the stupidest monkey that is now busying knowingly taking the world toward the end times by neglecting the thing upon which the constructs of human activity rest. It’s the environment stupid.
Berg raises another criticism, believing that support for Labor’s proposed CPRS/ETS would somehow morph into a scheme that actually reduced emissions once the coal industry approved such a change by government.
The behavior of the forest industry is a clear demonstration of how reluctant industry is to change, the difference is that the fossil fuel industries are killing us, some fossil fuels more slowly than others but there is a limit to the amount of Carbon we can put into the atmosphere before the climate flips out and we are left with the remnants to attempt to rebuild something with what little of the natural world is left.
It’s time for voters to take the path to construct a safe climate and build upon it a sustainable future. The world is seeking leaders and those that lead in technologivcal innovation will benefit.
