Five Ways to Torment The Greens

Senator Di Natale’s recent call for Australia Day to be moved from January 26 reveals that he and many of his fellow Greens have seemingly few major issues to occupy their intermittently febrile minds. Clearly they need more topics to fret about, which they will enjoy for the virtue-signalling potential while cheering the sane rest of us by saddling them with so many concerns their monomaniacal minds won’t know how or where to begin.

It is a tactic I came to understand as a callow youth who limped from the cricket field after yet another golden duck. My team’s coach (aka Barry’s dad) gave me some very importance advice. “Michael,” he began “you don’t always want to be on the back foot.”

Forty-five years later that counsel rings true when I ponder how rational, sensible adults of conservative bent have had so little success countering green ratbaggery. Instead of being on the front foot, down the wicket, attacking the next Yorker (or the late turning leg spinner) , we invariably allow the Greens to put us on the back foot. Aided by the media and indulged by Labor allies even when their policies put union members out of work, they take wicket after wicket. All we do by way of response is argue that their latest deliveries transgressed the crease of logic and fact and were in fact no-balls.

If you want to know how well that strategy works just look at electricity prices and the insane policies that have pushed them to their absurd heights (and will soon drive them even higher).

Okay, let’s start with coal, of which Australia is plentifully supplied and whose export props up the living standards of all, even brain-dead hippies who chain themselves to bulldozers and tip trucks. How can we produce enough non-fossil-fuel electricity to keep our population cool (or warm), the lights on and industry working? Below are five proposals, each guaranteed to inspire such apoplexy in DiNatale & Co that matters like the date of Australia Day will slide mercifully from public view.

1.  Create a massive hydro-electric dam in the Blue Mountains’  Jamieson Valley

This project — an extension of Warragamba Dam — would allow Sydney’s power to be generated by a single green and environmentally sustainable project. A very large dam in the Jamieson Valley could feed constant hydro-electric power into the grid and do so on a massive scale.

The Greens’ entirely predictable response will be to scream and yell about displaced wildlife and disrupted eco systems. That will keep them both busy, ideally with your more ardent activists cuddling brown snakes and funnel webs for photo ops. This might not generate the kind of headlines they anticipate.

2. Build the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam in Tasmania

Finally going ahead with a dam on Western Tasmania’s Gordon river would give the Greens an issue they can really get their teeth into. With a bit of luck, thousand Bob Brown’s feral worshippers will camp in the middle of an icy Tasmanian winter to express their disgust while the construction project goes full-steam ahead. It’s hard to keep a decent chant when your teeth are chattering in the final stages of hypothermia.

With completion of the promised-and-abandoned Gordon-below-Franklin hydro scheme, Tasmania would likely have plenty of electricity to share via Bass Strait cable with ailing Victoria.  There might even be enough power to illuminate the penis-tucking troubadours and Safe Schools chorus providing the entertainment at Daniel Andrews’ farewell party!

3. Divert the Snowy west of the Great Divide

Those with long political memories might recall how the outcome of a Victorian state election was effectively decided in 1999 by the Gippsland East independent MP Craig Ingram, who supported Labor’s Steve Bracks on the condition that the Snowy would flow in a major (but wasteful) way through  Gippsland and thence into Bass Strait.

So let’s re-direct 100% of Snowy’s flow, every single drop, to the west via hydro-electric schemes!  Downstream, South Australia will see a bit more flow in the Murray. As this is exactly what the Greens have been whining about for ages, let them then say they oppose it.

4. Put new dams high-up on all the flood-prone rivers of Northern NSW

If you are a New South Welshman like me, you probably went through the long dull years of an Australian primary school, learning by heart the names of our Northern Rivers. This exercise seemed pointless at the time, nowhere near as interesting as blowing little wads of moist paper onto the classroom ceiling with the casing of a Bic pen. That was until you travelled north by car and realized you had to cross every one of those damn rivers before making it to the El Dorado of Surfers Paradise.

Later still, you came to realise that almost every summer one or more of those Northern Rivers will flood. The logical response and progression is to tackle this peril at its source  Build dams in the catchment areas for each of these rivers and, while you won’t catch every drop that falls, you at least will have a better chance of stopping the rivers flooding lower down.

With Greens already chained to trees and rocks in the Blue Mountains and Tasmania, on-the-ground opposition will be inevitably diminished.

5. Build the once-planned nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay

You don’t want coal power anymore, Senator Di Natale?  You want us to phase out all fossil fuel use?  But let’s face it, you don’t really have a plan how to produce all the “sustainable” power that’s needed to replace it. If cliches, half-truths and outright lies had calorific value we could burn them all day long, but such is not the case. Nuclear is safe, carbon-free and proven (at least when drunken Russian technicians aren’t running the control room), so the Greens should love it. But of course they don’t.

So let’s build it and watch the fun as they chant, snivel, mug for the cameras and attempt to explain why this super-clean form of energy generation is in fact, you know, like ‘really, really icky, man’.

They say Old Nick loves idle hands. Let’s give the Greens such an overload of issues to keep them busy that sane Australians can get on with the job of repairing the damage they have already done.