>The good news is they're stupid and inept. The bad news is they're
>stupid and mean.
No! Stupid is always good in a politician. In practice, the government that is too stupid to do anything is a much safer bet than the one that is all fired up with bright ideas.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
PS: thought you might get a laugh out of this article from a couple of days ago, so I dug it out of the Age's archives. I recall having a similar feeling of uncertainty to that mentioned by Terry Lane a few years ago when newly-elected Tasmanian Green Christine Milne rang me up after the election and started asking me what my local community needed. I told her I voted for her so she could save the planet, not so she could fix potholes. Unfotunately she couldn't accept this, a few weeks later she wrote an article titled "saving the planet AND fixing potholes."
I guess the other people she rang must have taken up her invitation to nominate time-wasting local issues. Which just goes to show what the consequences can be if you don't challenge people's premises. I notice she didn't ever get around to saving the planet either.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/30/1038386359521.html
It's not easy voting Green
Melbourne Age December 1 2002
If any candidate had come along promising nothing except to deal with issues on their merits, and with intelligent reflection as they arise, I would have voted for her, writes Terry Lane.
Look, don't blame me. I voted Greens. Mr Doyle reckons that we Greens voters have to decide whether we are looking for "a serious party in their own right", or just a hidey-hole for disaffected old lefties who have been abandoned by the Bracks Laberal party.
The Greens do provide refuge and solace for us unreconstructed old lefties who think that there is more to life than acquiring things.
But no, we definitely do not want a "serious party". Heaven forfend.
I was shaken when I read in the paper on Thursday that the Greens have policies! Their candidate for Richmond, Gemma Pinnell, says she has policies on all sorts of things, ranging from freeways to schools to pokies. She damn near lost my vote. I do not take kindly to parties with policies.
Policies are bogus promises, cobbled together by reading the opinion polls, picking over the chicken entrails and adding up the number of one-legged lesbian Macedonian Buddhists in the electorate and then playing the electorate back to itself as though we are a bunch of kiddies who still believe in Santa.
If any candidate had come along promising nothing except to deal with issues on their merits, and with intelligent reflection as they arise, I would have voted for her. What's more, if any candidate had been bold enough to promise fewer police and softer sentences, he would have been assured of my vote, simply as a protest against the opportunistic law-and-order policies of T-Dum and T-Dee.
It was with heavy heart that I read that the Greens have policies. As far as I am concerned, they should make just one promise - to do their best to see that not one more tree is felled in our native forests. Ever. And, as for the rest, they should make it up as they go along, with the overriding proviso that they do all in their power to see that whichever Tweedle party forms government cannot actually do anything.
Mr Doyle has been flogging a dead horse with his chorus of complaint about the inaction of the Bracks Government over the past three years. What voters in their right minds find the notion of a government that does nothing unappealing? It is almost too good to be true. Remember how we used to say, "Well, you've got to say this about the old Jeff, he gets things done" - little realising when we said it that more than half of us were saying under our breath, "More's the pity".
For a minute there yesterday my hand trembled over the ballot paper. The ALP candidate in our electorate is a really nice man. When the Spouse wrote to him whingeing about how hard it is to make a left-hand turn into Springvale Road because of the level crossing at Nunawading station, he wrote her a very nice reply. He rules out grade separation as too expensive (but a monstrous freeway extension is not?), but he spent a page or two describing an alternative route that he himself takes to get into Springvale Road, which only involves going 10 kilometres out of your way and zipping down seven side streets, which gets you in at the end of the traffic tail-back. It's hard not to warm to a chap like that but, in the end, he will be part of a government that will hack down trees until they are all gone and will do nothing about ridding Melbourne of its greatest traffic obstacles - to wit, the numerous level crossings that limit both public and private transport. I tell the Spouse that Mr Doyle has promised to do the grade separations on our line, but she is not persuaded.
So, in the end, I cast my vote for the Greens, but they shouldn't take me for granted. If I see anything that looks the least bit like a policy they will have lost me.