Remco: I agree with you. The rural sector has a massive sense of entilement. They're more socialistic than the left. Yes, they've completely stuffed the land (and many continue to do so). Yes, they're inefficient. Yes, many grow on marginal land.

There are plenty of people in urban areas whose families have lived in the same suburb for several generations, yet they have no more right to the land than anyone else. Why do farmers think it is their right to the land for all time? Small/family businesses in urban areas don't get massive handouts for poor business decisions or for salting their own land (literally). Yet you'd think these twits out bush had never heard the word drought or flood before. If they don't save during the good times, then too bad. If they can't save during the good times, then they shouldn't be there either as the land is obviously not profitable and sustainable.

When are we going to get over this collective myth as a nation that the farmers are the heart and soul of our country, to whom we should pay tribute (in both sense of the word)?

So, Remco, you want me to "get smart or ship out" do you? So what part of the farming practices that I described do you want me to stop? Regenerating native trees perhaps?

And which of the so-called "you beaut" Israeli farming practices do you actually want me to implement in the man made native forest that now covers 80-85% of my property? Do you seriously believe one could even pay the rates from irrigated oranges when they are shaded by 30 metre Blackbutts?

And what impact do you think all those clonal monocultural Israeli plantation forests are having on the Palestinian's ground water supply in the lands below? Do you seriously believe that Israeli Planning Policy has provision for consideration, let alone compensation, for the adverse environmental impacts of proposed developments on the Palestinians down stream?

Are there lessons there for sustainable catchment management?

Your pathetically simplistic ideal world can only represent a favourable view if the vista is severely restricted by the cheeks of your own backside.

And while we are at it, Remco. Get me more desperate, Palestinian labourers on day visas that I can ever use so I can bargain down their pay rates to little more than peanuts, and I'll show you a bloody economic miracle too, you ignorant sack of scheiser gestalten.

Peter's critique of Labor and Liberal bankruptcy is right, but the Greens are not capable of filling the huge vacuum in the mainstream centre of Australian politics.

They remain too trapped in an old left economic and social agenda that is barely changed since the 1970s. Their faith in the public sector in education, health and welfare is untouched by the creative thinking that has accompanied the Noel Pearson critique of big-government service delivery in indigenous affairs, and is out of step with how citizens/consumers are voting with their feet in selecting the services they want. Ironically, the Greens rhetoric about grass-roots participation in political matters is undermined by their advocacy of top-down public sector service delivery in education and welfare. Most of the 'doctors wives' who vote Green in leafy affluent suburbs send their own kids to high-fee private schools and wouldn't contemplate doing without their private health insurance - this contradiction looms at the heart of the Green's temporary role as a protest vehicle for the affluent.

And there is a philosophical hitch, too. Environment issues are important. Global warming is important. Clean air is important. But human relationships are actually more important - and the Greens don't have a language, or a conceptual framework, with which to speak about relationships between humans. Nor do Liberal and Labor. At the centre of the Liberal world view stands the isolated individual. At the heart of Labor worldview stands the trade union. In the middle of the Green worldview stands a ... tree.

None of our parties have a language with which to speak about relationships, social capital or civil society. That is the really big hole in the centre of Australian politics.

Vern Hughes
vern@peoplepower.org.au

Trees, Perseus, is what you can not see for the forest when you refer to regional politics (of Israel).

This is about getting smart in production and that is what the anti-greenies like you are poor at. This is why Australian dairy farmers go to Israel to find out why they can get twice as much milk per cow than we can. That is why Israeli irrigation technology and know how is imported. That is why their productivity on a sustained basis is far greater than ours. We in Australia subsidises (including by alcohol excise exemption) sugar production which produces one tenth the value of tourism at the Barrier reef which is damaged by nitrogenous fertiliser run-off from its burn, slash and undescaled, overfertilised protected activities produce.

Fear is what the old traditional rural sector uses to resist change (hey dont they still talk "bags of wheat per acre"?).

It's time we thought smart and looked more objectively of HOW we farm and practice rather than the impact on old timers.

It is time we acknowledged the real cost to say the Murray River of producing effectively subsidised cotton, and produced higher value crops in smarter way, and if not, get out. It is only regional politics and not real economics, that stands in the way. The Netherlands, if Israel is not acceptable to you, points the way.

Vern

The Greens sure do have a major problem with human relations.

“They remain too trapped in an old left economic and social agenda that is barely changed since the 1970s.”

Yes and they remain trapped in the growth agenda that rules out lives, when it is of fundamental importance that they denounce it and promote a steady-state paradigm. We can’t have sustainability without it and we can’t have true environmentalism without sustainability sitting at its core.

The Greens have managed to present such an awful impression to the majority of the community that most people don’t want to be associated with them, despite sharing a lot of common philosophy. This lessened to some extent over time but then the momentum stopped. They are not gaining ground any more and haven't been for a long time.

One of the main sectors that they managed to severely offside was the rural sector. I talk to graziers, canegrowers and other rural people on their properties very regularly. So often I hear people say;

“I’m not a greenie but….”

They go on to talk about all sorts good environmental initiatives that they are practicing or that they agree with and nearly always express concern over continuous population growth, coastal development, ever-more pressure on already stressed water supplies, and so on.

Where did the Greens go wrong?? There is a huge amount of environmental concern out there that needs to be drawn together into a powerful political force. But the Greens just aren’t doing it and seem to have taken themselves right out of contention.......... unless they make some very radical changes. And the most important changes are to concentrate on peak oil, ie getting us off fossil fuel dependency and onto biofuels with the greatest of urgency, and promote real sustainability along with it, including zero population growth and an end to the continuous economic growth paradigm.

Unless they make some very radical changes? No. Unless they make some very large eminently sensible and absolutely necessary changes.