Green Misconceptions

A LIKELY very biased survey of self-selectors undertaken by the Australian Conservation Foundation has found that a large chunk of women (up to a third) are considering not having children because of climate change. Yes, really.

This finding is, of course, of little surprise on reflection.  The ACF, once a serious and benign organisation chaired by that old “radical Tory” Sir Garfield Barwick, has not unexpectedly drifted leftwards and greenwards over time.  It is now dripping with post-1989 environmentalism and is inhabited by the virtue-signalling woke types who not only demand “we all do our bit” to save the earth, but lobby actively for transformative social change and diminished freedom for the non-woke.  The means used by ACF-type groups to effect social change include tradition-shaming, infiltration of organisations not normally on-side, social media mis-truthing and bullying, infecting young minds through curriculum change, and all the other familiar tools of Left activism.

There are only two surprises with this ACF survey.  One, that it has taken them so long to get onto this.  And two, that it is only a third of women (members) bent on remaining barren.  In view of the left’s now blatant, Margaret Sanger-inspired march towards infanticide in the US and elsewhere (Victoria, Queensland), getting women to merely avoid having children rather than having them killed as they approach birth might be regarded as progress. The particular new front and new ideology under examination here might usefully be termed “fertility change”. 

For woke women, taking one for the team in relation to climate change dovetails nicely with the ultimate feminist act of not having children.  A win-win, you might say.  Green feminism.  The defiant act of turning oneself (like men have done for centuries) into a wage slave while creating an entire new industry, viz. outsourced domestic services, naturally supported by both the child-bearing and non-child bearing taxpayer, has taken on an entirely new significance, post the mass discovery of global warming in the 1980s.

But there is perhaps an added bonus for the woke post-global warming feminist in this new development.  If we don’t have our own children, we will have to import yet more people from overseas: massively increase immigration.  Well, even more massively increase immigration.  The globalist dividend, you might say.  More multiculturalism.  Vibrancy! Cultural enrichment! Bollards of peace! Stop the world having new children and simply rotate existing people around the globe with no borders getting in the way.

Unearthing new things said to be caused by global warming is a favourite, amusing pastime of the fun-loving climate denier, of course.  Some great web sites have created lists that cause endless mirth, as critics such as Tim Blair and others have noted and detailed over time. Just as much fun might be to unearth new, previously unaired activities to impose on all of us, now required to “take action” on “climate change”.  Stop having children?  Why not when we have already come up with the following:

• Destroy entire economies for no apparent reason;
• Waste billions of dollars on subsidies of forms of energy that do not work;
• Create useless yet interfering new supra-national organisations to meddle in nations’ internal affairs;
• Uselessly employ and fund myriad academics who might otherwise be engaged in either useful research or in teaching;
• Create new make-work opportunities for thousands and thousands of public servants at all levels of government;
• Provide new opportunities for local councils to screw their communities and ratepayers through regulations that cause stress and cost innocent people substantial real money;
• Make every social institution, including the corporation, a slave to green ideology and virtue signalling;
• Corrupt, and therefore lock in, the youth.

These things are all pretty much done and dusted, and indeed are grandfathered, since incoming “conservative” governments only ever occupy the seat of government as meek tenants, rather than the owner-occupiers of the levers of power.  Sometimes so-called conservative governments actually press the foot on the green-socialist-globalist accelerator (see under Liberal National Coalition).

What else is there to do, actually, for the activist minded, earth-focused do-gooder? 

Well, target and drive out of public life anyone politically resistant to the coming total victory of the Malthusian left, and do this using Soros money, GetUp foot soldiers and useful idiots who come hot from the ski slopes and now pretend to be “grass roots” politicians.  Finish the job of corrupting the youth, in a very non Socratic way, by getting them to wag school so as to march in the streets for action on climate change. Beyond that, corrupt the justice system by creating ersatz courts (the Land and Environment “Court” in New South Wales, has just stopped a coal mine) that will help embed climate ideology through non-elected arms of the state.

But the news isn’t all bad. Fresh from the Eastern Europe resistance has come the news that the already legendary Viktor Orban has decided to make four-child (or more) families income-tax free.  This brilliant policy change has the triple benefit of addressing the demographic time bomb first identified by Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips, Bruce Bawer, Bat Ye’or and others, reversing the ageing of the population which creates a budgetary crisis wherever it occurs, and encouraging stable family formation with all its many, widely recognised concomitant benefits for the welfare of children and society as a whole. 

Such a policy is gutsy and will serve as a reassuring filip to those non-Malthusians among us who, with Julian Simon, regard Malthus’s modern day disciples like Paul Ehrlich as altogether loopy, and see only upside in increasing the home-grown populations of the West. To use a Bill Buckley Jr phrase, Viktor is, above all, standing bravely athwart history and yelling “Stop!”  This is reminiscent of that other vocal critic of Sangerian philosophy who currently occupies the White House.

The demographic time bomb in Europe results from the coincidence of the reverse-colonialist march of the Muslims to, and then across, Europe and the decision by the current generation of European women to stop having their own children. The Muslim march has amounted in hindsight to something that resembles a blitzkrieg which makes the Third Reich’s old-school movement across Western, then Eastern Europe look limp and amateurish, despite its immediacy and brutality. And the collective decision of women to be sterile, itself the ultimate Maslowian act of self-actualisation and at the expense of family life, is just plain dumb in a societal sense, unless these countries just don’t care about being “countries” anymore, which apparently they don’t.  Otherwise why would they have done this?

Orban’s new policy, just revealed in his State of the Nation address, wants to back up the truck.  More than that, to reverse the truck at speed.

According to the great man:

“We have to understand that the European peoples have come to a historical crossroads.

“Those who decide in favour of immigration and migrants, no matter why they do so, are in fact creating a country with a mixed population.

“Europe’s left wing has become the gravedigger of nations, the family and the Christian way of life.”

Well, yes, Viktor. 

When added to his stand on immigration, the new policy is powerful stuff.  Even using terms like “mixed population” in these multi-culti times would have the Fitzroy and Newtown brigades reaching for their incense and patchouli.

How could we in Australia simultaneously address concerns, justly felt, about the impact of mass immigration and multi-monoculturalism while doing something about our too-low natural  replacement rate.  Hence Australia’s felt need to increase our population via immigration, once sensibly wedded to needed skills and at a measured pace (only latterly dramatically inflated), and increasingly sourced from countries with which we have little cultural affinity and consisting largely of individuals who, at worst, wish to do us harm and, at best, inflate our already too high welfare budget.

Our anaemic rate of natural increase and its decline over the past half century has been widely documented and is well captured in a graph sourced from the data analytics company, the Knoema Corporation.  Read it and weep, as they say.

Such a dismal performance presumably is of little concern to those who completed the ACF survey and who, reversing Peter Costello’s famous injunction, wish not to have even “one for the country”. Whatever the newly sterile Malthusians of the ACF think of ideal national population targets and the immigration component of our population, Gaia and its sensitive health must come first.  Creating any more emitters simply ain’t on.

Orban’s stand, deeply counter-cultural in a green, post-modernist, post-Christian world and no doubt to be pilloried by occupiers of the cultural commanding heights, may or may not be a straw in the wind, another Brexit or Trump-like signifier of the rise of the Deplorables, and may or may not turn the tide of history in favour of family-loving and tradition-protecting societies.

What Orban’s policy should do, though, is to remind the Discons among us what is at stake and what leadership looks like, in the face of brutal cultural domination by those who wish to finish the job of embedding climate change ideology in our country, bending our minds and making them submit to climate orthodoxy

In re-orienting priorities, focusing on altogether different concerns and in effect ignoring the alleged climate “crisis”, Orban has given the “bird” to this ideology, and simply doesn’t care what the beautiful people think of him or his methods.  Until about eight seconds ago, his “stand” would simply have been seen as sensible centrism.  Now, he looks like a brave warrior.

Would that we in Australia had political leaders who gave the vague appearance of even knowing what is at stake.