Kipp, for context see comments at 'The house that Bob Brown built' and

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13510#233449

Life after brown for the Greens may be purple.

OR david f;

…Life after “Rainbow” Brown for the Greens may be purple!

I seem to recall that the Democrats were quite green to start with - well, they certainly were compared to the Liblabs – and then their greenness lost out to humanitarian issues or disconnected small side issues or something.

The Greens formed specifically because the Democrats weren’t cutting it in the environmental capacity, in an era of rapidly developing environmental awareness.

But then just about the same thing happened to them!

I think it is a crying shame that these parties have been largely usurped by terribly misguided humanitarian types, epitomised by Sarah Hanson-Young.

This is not new in my experience. I’ve seen it happen with the Australian Conservation Foundation and the North Queensland Conservation Council of which I was president twenty years ago.

It shouldn’t be a hard problem to solve, as there is definitely a place for strong humanitarianism in essentially environmental organisations. But it just needs to be focussed in the right directions… and not be deemed to be much more important than a holistic environmental / sustainability philosophy.

But crikey, it has caused enormous damage to the green movement in Australia, and hence to our ability to tackle the all-important issues of continuous growth and the massively antisustainable direction that our country is heading in.

There is a new party – the Stable Population Party, which is trying hard to focus on sustainability. It hasn’t gained much acceptance yet, but I think it is nicely poised to take over from the Greens if they now rapidly decline, which is almost certain to happen if they don’t undertake some major policy changes.