Article item posted on Friday, July 24th 2009 at 12:21 pm

Basil Fawlty had an excuse when he embarrassed himself and Fawlty Towers.  He’d banged his head and was suffering concussion.

But it’s doubtful concussion lies at the centre of the antics of the Liberal Party of Australia lately, yet Senator Nick Minchin, like Mrs Fawlty and the maid Polly, has called for the Liberals to stop talking about the war Climate Change obstruction in the Senate and stated:

“It’s better to shout it in the shower.”

Senator Nick Minchin

But, like Basil Fawlty, the Liberals can’t help but blurt out their disharmony, shine light on their internal schisms and broadcast their deep divisions on Climate Change.

What value, Prime Minister Rudd and Labor, would you put on a few Australian Democrats in the Senate now?

You know – those men and women who negotiated laws on their merits, rather than as a subset of craven political advantage?   Or obstructed simply out of spite – which is the only political strategy the Australian Greens have managed to date?

The Greens were elected on environmental populism and are yet – despite panicked attempts to re-write the history of the Senate to show they’ve done anything at all – to achieve anything beyond voting against every bill that enters the chamber.

The party who ripped bleeding chunks of policy from anywhere handy with the skill and foresight of an adolescent plagiarising for a  junior high school examination. A laughable attempt to appear as anything other than what they are – a single policy party engaged in an agenda of political sequestration.

Conservative Self Flagellation?

Where are those Senators that actually tried to strike a balance?   They’d be democratically useful right about now, in the Senate, negotiating and assisting Australia itself smoothing out the wrinkles in your Climate Change legislation, Prime Minister Rudd.

This legislation isn’t radical,  Leninist, damaging or childish enough for the Australian Greens.  The legislation which is now causing the Liberals to engage in self flagellation?

A bill that, while certainly not A grade, is at least a start toward climate mitigation.  A step forward is a positive thing – even when it’s tentative and wary, which is a fair assessment of the Rudd government’s climate change legislation.

Surely it would be better to have had a party of negotiation than the two steps backward to the Nineteen Seventies that the Liberals and The Greens are setting up the people of Australia for in August when the vote on Labor’s Climate Change bill goes up again?

What price, Mr Rudd?  Indeed – what price Australia?

What price political idealism for a trio disparate factions united only by their determination to stop progress?  This mishmash of ideologues never had a hope of working together for the benefit of Australia.

Would Labor Seek To Use The Conservative Tool Of  Choice, Normally Reserved To Defeat Democracy?

Does Labour now covet the very parliamentary tool that has run shivers through the spine of Labor leaders since the nineteen seventies Whitlam government dismissal?

Covetous to the point that you would truly force the country into a double dissolution merely for political gain in the Senate?

Would you, Mr Rudd, really cost the Australian tax payers the tens of  millions required for an early election?

The uncertainty that only a double dissolution can cause?

You’d do that simply to spitefully lash out at the Conservatives?

You’d run the terrifying risk for Australia for potentially electing even more Greens into the Senate – or, gasp!, the House of Representatives – in a school boy act of one-up-manship?

You’d lay out the picnic, sprinkle around the bread crumbs and hope political scavengers like the Australians Greens wouldn’t come along for the munchies?

It would be economically healthier, politically more stable, constitutionally safer to have real balance in the Senate you seek to own.  People you really could work with.  People your party and the Liberal party have successfully worked with for thirty years.

But now you’re back, potentially, to the sick and sorry days of 1975.  Only – it’s worse.

There is a gaggle of Greens hell bent on disrupting the parliamentary process for their fundamentalist touchy feely belief system – that we should all live in caves, eat beans and bananas and reduce a proud, fine, economically stable country  – to what?

A story even a sitcom writer wouldn’t dream up…

Scott Kane

Tags: alacrity, Australian Democrats, Australian Greens, australian liberal party, change legislation, Climate Change, concussion, disharmony, extremist, fawlty towers, junior high school, laughable attempt, nick minchin, obstructionism, political idealism, populism, rudd, schisms, self flagellation, senator nick minchin, sequestration

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