NO BRIDGE FROM GREENS TO SANITY

ON THE 75th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge,
ask yourself one question: would the NSW Government have built it today?

The answer is simple. The current Government's dismal record on
infrastructure has almost certainly ensured that it would NOT be able
to raise the funds.

Investors are running away from the Labor Government following its
appalling handling of the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove Tunnel
developments, as worthy as they may be in the long term.

Further, now that Premier Morris Iemma has cosied up to the Greens
with a sleazy preference swap, one can only imagine the myriad
objections the power-peddlers in both the ALP and the Greens would
have to creating such a bridge.

The unions could claim their members employed on the ferries would
suffer as greater vehicular access was offered, and the Greens could
object on the basis that they are opposed to private transport, let
alone transport that relies on fossil fuels.

The reality is that only the Liberals and Nationals would not be
forced by minority ideological interests to reject building the Harbour Bridge.

That analogy should send a clear message to those thinking about how
to vote in the NSW state elections in 10 days time but it is apparent
that neither Labor nor the Greens want voters to be thinking clearly
about the choice.

The decision by some Labor candidates to drop all reference to their
party in their campaign literature accurately reflects the dismal
party's standing in the minds of many who have endured the past 12
years of Labor mismanagement in almost all areas of NSW's public service.

As stupendously ridiculous as Labor's advertising campaign is,
however, it does not compare with the Greens' breathtaking claim to
hold the solutions to the state's many woes.

State Greens MP Lee Rhiannon may have dropped a bombshell on her
party's naive and emotional supporters when she told The Daily
Telegraph that the NSW Greens are not an environmental group. No one
else would have been surprised.

"It's an old idea that we are an enviro group," Rhiannon said, and
indeed it is. The Green label has always been used to mask the fact
that the Greens have a grab bag of bizarre policies, which, when
allied with their political ambition, leave them in contradictory situations.

How else can their decision to preference the ALP in Menai and
Miranda, where residents are determinedly opposed to ALP plans for a
desalination plant, be explained?

Though the Greens claim to be misinterpreted with the same frequency
as Lakemba's "Cat Meat" Sheik Taj el-Dene Elhilaly, it is possible to
get their drift by looking at the public record.

Like the shifting sheik, they are concerned about Christianity. They
want to ban the Lord's Prayer in Parliament at the start of each
sitting day and they want to force Christian churches and schools to
employ transsexuals, transvestites and homosexuals, but first they
want to cut off their government funding.

They want to dump the idea that marriage is defined as being between
men and women and, perhaps to make it easier for those who aren't
sure who they are, they want to make sex-change operations free (that
is, they want you to pick up the bill).

Their plan to decriminalise dangerous drugs including ice was aired
in The Daily Telegraph yesterday but their agenda is far broader.

In the truest expression of lunatic libertarianism they want illicit
drugs permitted for personal use, they want to ban the use of sniffer
dogs and even the use of helicopters for the detection of drug crops.

Their radical plans to limit mining exploration would cripple the
national economy, if it wasn't already damaged by their desire to
halt and reverse economic growth both nationally and internationally.

And, not surprisingly, the Greens have rejected every piece of
industrial legislation introduced since 1996.

Greens national leader Senator Bob Brown, who launched their state
campaign at the weekend, wants to end coal exports, which would
effectively send the nation into bankruptcy, if the Greens' plan for
a four-day working week and the guarantee of an adequate income
without a need to work, hadn't already done so.

Premier Morris Iemma, who learnt his whatever-it-takes brand of
politicking at the knee of former senator Graham Richardson, is
following Richardson's strategy of duchessing environmentalist voters
by cosying up to the Greens.

Rhiannon's disavowal of the Greens' environmental tag not
withstanding, there will still be thousands of voters silly enough to
believe that the party's agenda was primarily about making
tree-hugging mandatory.

That Labor is prepared to embrace the party despite its broader
agenda is among its more cynical decisions but in keeping with the
ruthlessness which has produced ministers of doubtful ability such as
Frank Sartor, Joe Tripodi and Michael Costa.

The ill-conceived marriage between the ALP and the Greens is about
wresting more power from the population and can only cause further
damage to a haemorrhaging state.