That's hilarious. "Green party leaders need to stop behaving like petulant school children."

Let's face it. Despite their protestations to the contrary, the Greens only have seats in the Victorian Upper House, or indeed in the Senate, because of the idiocy of proportional representation which has to be about the least democratic form of election you can think of. Do a majority of voters in any seat or State want the Greens in charge of anything? No thanks. So why should the legitimately elected Bracks government have to "negotiate" with idiots who represent about 7% of the population - where "negotiate" is code for "bribe" to get legislation through the upper house. The Senate is even worse of course. Bob Brownie, from the bottom of the Tasmanian garden, represents about 0.5% of the Australian population and claims some legitimacy as a political party. Give me a break.

I'm waiting for Green party leaders to stop behaving like petulant bullies who feel (and are) unloved and unwanted by the majority of grown-ups.

Regards

Kevin

Good point, Kevin. For all Bob Brown's posturing, he only needs the votes of about 24,000 Australians (half a tasmanian quota) to hang onto his seat in Senate. And that is only 0.2 of 1% of us.

Ha he reeeeeeally got a BA AND! an MA? - from the University of Tasmania no less. It says so in is little bio

What a putz.

What was the point of this piece - I may well need to go to universtiy to understand it.

No one cares about the green vote - it has dried up and has been doing so for a while _ if I were a green voter I would be well pleased with the attention the major parties have devoted to the environment - for if it twerent for the greens we'd be a whole lot worse off - if that is all the greens have done - good on them

This Prins person, as an employee of the state ALP, would say all this wouldn't he. Labor hates the Greens worse than they hate the Coalition, as we all know. Thanks to his party we got Family First instead of a Green into office - congratulations, Stewie et al. As for Peter Garrett, now Labor's parrot, he pretends still to have a principled position on the environment but only when it suits the party. Just for one example, he has refused to even reply to several pleas for support from a large alliance of environmental groups in NSW campaigning to call a halt to irreparable mine damage to river systems. Not even a polite brush off, let alone a supportive statement for a significant environmental issue in his state. Could this be something to do with the influence of the miners' union, the CFMEU ? Yep, Bob Brown has every right to call attention to Garrett's hypocrisy.

Wikipedia states: "An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin, literally argument against the person), involves replying to an argument or assertion by attacking the person presenting the argument or assertion rather than the argument itself."

(or in this case the "person" is the Greens party)

This waste of web space article didn't actually address whether the Greens were right to criticise Peter Garrett or not, or talk about the reasons why people should vote Green or not. When it comes to "behaving like petulant school children", perhaps the author should take a closer look at their own shrill writings.

“It's time for the Greens to stop whining about conspiracy theories, and to accept that voters are able to think for themselves.”

I’d put it slightly differently:

It is time the Greens started concentrating on real sustainability issues, that is; seeking the essential balance between all things human and all things natural, and between the rate of exploitation of resources and the ability for those resources to be supplied in an ongoing manner.

THIS is the essence of greenness. Or at least it should be. But quite frankly we don’t see or hear too much of it from the current bunch of ‘pseudogreenies’

Yes they should just state it straight and let voters think for themselves about what is being said, instead of getting caught up with bickering and relatively trivial issues.

Even the biggest issues that the Greens are on about, to any extent publicly at least, are either piddling compared to the things that really matter, or beyond us to do anything meaningful about.

They shouldn't be wasting time on bloody climate change. Yes it is real, but for as long as China and India continue to rapidly grow and exploit their huge coal reserves, we’d may as well just get used to the new climate regime. It’s toooo big to handle!!

What is the really big issue that the Greens should be dealing with? Achieving an end to the absurdity of continuous rapid expansionism, which is simply taking us rapidly away from sustainability. At the core of this is population stabilisation. We can’t deal with this globally but we surely could in this country if the message was just put out there by the people who are supposed to be fighting for sustainability.

So the Greens are riding a bit of a wave in Victoria at the moment. But it appears to be based on the climate change issue and just completely not at all on the sustainability issue.

Oh how hopeless. It seems this country is destined to crash and burn.