The Greens... what are they on?

Bob Brown and The Greens scare me; they are poised to become the third most important political party, but they are orbiting a different planet to the one with which they profess to care about. Check out some of their policies as reported in the Herald Sun earlier in the week:

Laws to force people to ride bicycles more often and eat less meat.

Driving farmers from their land.

Medicare funding for sex-change operations.

Capital gains tax on the most expensive family homes.

An open- door policy on asylum seekers.

A welfare program that allows people to remain on higher dole payments indefinitely without any requirement to look for a job.

The Greens also want the population cut by two million, and for unspecified farms, roads and buildings to be turned back into nature. ...

Of couse such kooky and insane policies have been the subject of lots of blog posts throughout the week, none better than this and this from Steve Edwards.

Greg Sheridan from The Australian also jumped aboard the Greens Bashing Bandwagon:

The Greens are essentially left-wing Hansonites, simultaneously reactionaries and revolutionaries, who combine a hatred of modern society as it actually exists with a conspiracy-laden, fantastical view of how the world works. They offer nothing positive beyond dreamlike cliches and slogans, but their negative power is quite great. They can build nothing, they can damage much. But they may hold the balance of power in the Senate. It is conceivable, though not likely, they will hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Bob Brown, the canny, ruthless, manipulative politician who leads the Greens, says 1million Australians may vote for them.

Brown won't be playing that role because the ideology of the Greens rejects the very legitimacy of the modern economy and in many ways the modern Australian state. The rise of the Greens mirrors the rise of extremist third parties of Left and Right throughout western Europe. To some extent a similar process is under way in the US, with Brown and Hanson imperfect but rough analogues of Ralph Nader on the green Left and Patrick Buchanan on the xenophobic and isolationist Right.

The Greens' policies on the party's website are a mishmash of contradictory and incoherent generalised statements. Brown is smart enough to know that the Greens can only suffer from having intelligible or specific policies on the record. They seek to embody a sentiment of rage and frustration rather than to advance real policies. Their few specific commitments, such as legalising cannabis and ecstasy, get them into periodic trouble.

The international economic stuff is quite seriously loopy, calling for the abolition of the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, unless impossible reforms are enacted, because these organisations "are major, all-powerful engines of globalisation that peddle a specific brand of market-obsessed globalisation which is destroying many economies, particularly those of poor countries".

The population policy clearly implies there should be many fewer Australians and the immigration policy is against skilled immigrants, saying the program should be family reunion and refugee based. As to refugees, the Greens believe that anyone who arrives without a visa should be assumed to be an asylum-seeker and all asylum-seekers should be released into the community after an absolute maximum of 14 days. This would lead to floods of people arriving.

Indeed, under Green madness, we could abolish the Immigration Department because anyone could fly here from anywhere and just stay, acquiring instant welfare benefits in the bargain.

Several semi-random examples demonstrate the pure moon juice quality of Green policies. Australia is to be prohibited from exporting military equipment. Presumably the same prohibition applies to all other countries, so the only military equipment we could possess would be the stuff we make ourselves. Perhaps Aussie soldiers could ride into battle on the sheep's back.

Strong stuff, but we need to remember that these are the folk who will no doubt hold the balance of power in the next Australian Parliament, if current polling is to be trusted. Bob Brown has shown himself to be utterly intransigent and will force through all manner of ratbag ideas to get simple supply bills through. And I thought The Democrats were bad enough...