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Sue Bradford, who always knew what was good for you

The only favour that never-elected Green MP Sue Bradford did for New Zealanders (before she spat the dummy and threw the teddy) was to prove beyond doubt that when the Green Party suggests or supports or opposes anything, its stand will be wrong and economically or socially harmful.

Take, for example, the Greens’ immediate knee-jerk reaction to plans for intensive dairying in the Mackenzie Country, where initially upwards of 17,000 cows would spend most of their lives in a covered and cosseted environment on a tiny speck of desert that presently sustains only insects and rabbits. They clearly have not thought the idea through.

These vandals should be in a barn

Intensive battery dairying has advantages that dotty environmentalists have been advocating for years. For one thing, you don’t have all those massive animals careering around the countryside, shitting everywhere, causing water pollution and hillside erosion, and costing fortunes in fencing. Instead, you can keep them all in a small shed, and carefully control what happens to everything that goes into and out of their front and back passages. The poos and wees can be tankered away to enrich poor soils and, because the cows are in an enclosed environment, their methane belches and farts can be captured, sequestered well away from our threatened atmosphere and perhaps bottled to provide an alternative to petrol or natural gas. This avoids the unpleasant prospect of interfering with the poor animals’ genetic structure, in ways that the Greens have quietly and sinisterly hinted they might support.

The creatures could be nourished with recycled fish-meal from accidentally netted, over-quota catches that are currently dumped back into the ocean. Over-irrigated, man-made grasslands presently devoted to inefficient, free-range dairying could instead be cultivated for protein-rich crops of soy beans or lentils, or returned to native bush for people to go native in.

Former Green leader Jeanette Fitzsimons. On RNZ National this week, a journalist fan could say nothing about her undoubted talents. She just called her 'amazingly pretty'.

But Greenies simply cannot think in anything except reverse gear. Take tax reform as another example. The Greens support a capital gains tax, despite overwhelming international evidence that it does nothing to lower house prices or prevent property booms. In fact, all the evidence shows that it increases property prices, leads to the most imaginative tax dodges, and employs vast numbers of CGT bureaucrats who – try as they might not (and why bother?) – have never been able to retrieve quite enough tax to cover their salaries and pensions.

The Greens reject an increase in GST, saying that this will harm the poor. This is hard to understand, since GST is a user-pays tax and rich people tend to consume more than poor people (who will naturally be shielded from gross financial injustice by governments that are invariably scared stiff of their revolting electors).

The Greens reject a lowering of the top tax rates, not saying that the only reason for this is that they dislike wealthy people, have a well-developed sense of envy, and cannot see why anyone should be allowed to prefer Porsche or Prada to a rusty Lada and the local op-shop, where they traditionally buy their recycled haute couture.

Reasonable people, on the other hand, know that intensive animal husbandry is unhealthy for humans and that the real issue (unaddressed for decades by the limp-wristed Greens) is to clean up the damage we have done to our environment. They also know that high personal taxes (no matter what your financial status) make people less interested in working and that “affordable housing” is just code for more social welfare (or rental property, which Greens oppose if a private landlord is involved).

Reasonable people reject the idea of a capital gains tax as a means of dissuading people from buying investment housing, because in New Zealand there is simply nothing else you can trust to put your money into, and there is no evidence that CGT does anything useful. As for the bureaucracy that a CGT would create, well, that’s just another little artificial commune so beloved of Green thinkers – but this time and once again, the rest of us will pay for its failure.

Cambodia: And what can happen when you hand over your life to numbskulls who promise to re-invent the world. Picture from Dreamstime.com

The Greens are anti-capitalist not because they have anything better to offer, but because capitalism is a natural system based on human instinct that creates wealth along with inequality; and in their Utopian world, everyone must have the same no-blame opportunity to fail. The Greens oppose globalisation, although their Utopia seems to be predicated upon some system of world government, and their position on global warming features an unusually intolerant rejection of opposing opinion that verges on dictatorship. Greens tend to live in urban areas; they harbour a deep suspicion of farmers, who are rich, own land and exploit innocent animals. When the more courageous venture into rural areas, they tend to occupy unproductive land, and then simply die of exposure to the weather or market forces.

The Greens are against nuclear power, although it is our only known form of energy generation that produces no polluting products apart from radioactive waste (which a world dictatorship run by Greens could easily control). The Greens hate roads, but they love hybrid cars with two engines instead of one, because they haven’t the wits to invent anything better – and in their heart of hearts, they prefer cart-horses and bicycles. The latest edict from the Greenhouse Gas merchants who like to throw stones states that the whole developed world must cease growing, entirely and indefinitely, to meet their demands for a halt in global warming. More unsustainable hot air…

When you boil down everything the Greens tend to support, oppose or suggest, you end up with something that looks scarily reminiscent of Marx, Mao, Lenin and Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and their equally grotesque and failed denials of human nature and in-your-face reality.

During his more insane years, Mao Tse-tung dictated that all Chinese traffic lights should show Red for Go. He made a crazy point. If you believe what the potty “Alternatives” say, we should change all the traffic lights to show Green for Stop.