The world refuses to stop turning, but Greens usually defy the gravity of our situation

And so, thanks to Jeanette Fitzsimons, Helen Clark and their now powerless fellow travellers, we find ourselves saddled with the Kyoto Protocol. It has produced a bottomless pit of penalties and a “world-beating” emissions trading scheme – the consequences of which we have not the foggiest idea. Fortunately, the ETS is going “on hold”, while our new Government recovers from the shock of its victory, ponders the shattering global recession, and wonders what to do next.

Green lobbyists are bleating about the withdrawal of carbon trading investors from the New Zealand market, following National’s election. One of our leading financial commentators moaned about it, while others complained that local foresters were postponing planting and that one Japanese-based company had cancelled plans to invest more than $100 million in forestry development here.

Well, tough. Foreign foresters and carbon trading companies are unwelcome in New Zealand. They saw a large number of fast bucks coming from a gullible country with a misguided idea that somehow we could lead the world in a field where we actually don’t cause any global damage at all.

Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson: A loose cannon, but he knows where we're going. Picture from the BBC

Instead of dealing with improved water quality and energy conservation, our dead and buried Labour-led greenhouse gas policies seemed to be more focused on getting a nice job at a UN agency for a leading female politician than cleaning up our act in a sensible, balanced and cost-effective way. And still we allow polluting dairy conversions. Still we tolerate the filth pouring down our waterways and ruining our rivers.

The Th!nk City. Think about how we fail to be sustainable

Instead, all we have is the Green mantra of “public transport”, which ignores anyone outside the towns where most Greens live, and ignores the simple fact that improved roading, for example, improves energy efficiency for all vehicles.

The only place in New Zealand that seems to have the slightest idea about what to do with private transport is Wellington, where they are beginning to realise that small electric-powered commuter vehicles will soon be here to stay and they have at least begun to consider how to deal with them.

Of course, the best thing to do is to put a power point on every parking place. Just like they’ll probably be doing in every other Australian town worth the name, within the next five years. In the meantime, New Zealanders who live out in the sticks will not be waving for a bus they know will never arrive.

Instead, they will be looking for the best deal on the next generation of 4WDs.

Internationally, the accepted opinion is that Frank went bananas. Reluctantly, we believe, Her Majesty The Queen agreed. She has not issued any invitations to garden parties to anyone connected with the illegal Fijian regime. This is a heartening and courageous decision that ranks alongside her award of the Afghan service medal to her grandson Harry, pinned on the plucky but highly protected lad’s chest by none other than his Aunty Anne.

But meanwhile…

Frank has become so annoyed at local press coverage of his benevolent interim governance that he hasn’t merely deported two of its leading press executives; he’s now threatening to stop newspaper deliveries entirely by closing down the “unfair” media, which refused to print his press releases without asking questions.

This will further damage Fiji’s economy and worldwide perception of Bananarama’s frankness. Not only (thanks to his clumsy coup and the resulting sanctions) has he lost the lucrative mercenary foreign earnings from sending Fijian soldiers to UN hotspots and a load of valuable aid and some tourists’ money; a large number of Fijian paper boys will shortly be sacked, while Frank has failed to get his “I know best” message across to anyone.

Frankly, the real trouble for Frank is that, for Fijians, he doesn’t put money in the bank. He just means racist repression, freedom of expression, gratuitous violence, probable torture and at least one case of proven murder. He means even more poverty in an already poor nation. He means dictatorship in a country that was handed back its freedom by a flawed but democratic Great Britain.

If that’s how you respect your ancient heritage and plan to bring Fiji into the 21st Century, Frank, good luck. You’ll get no help from us. We’ll get our sugar, bananas and sunshine holidays elsewhere.

In Zimbabwe, nobody can count the number of deaths caused by Robert Mugabe’s Hitlerian obsession in holding on to power. This simian person, who has proudly presided over the utter destruction of Africa’s most prosperous nation, even sports a miniature Hitler moustache and declares that 100,000 percent inflation was all the fault of the British. Rather like Hitler said truckloads of Deutschmarks were all the fault of the Jews. Mugabe’s administration (like Hitler’s) takes longer than anyone imagined to massage the voting figures and then argues about the result.

Interestingly, the only African country to have enjoyed recent military intervention by British forces is Sierra Leone, which happens to possess one of the world’s largest known sources of diamonds and other valuable minerals. Zimbabwe’s balance sheet, political problems and difficult-to-get resources apparently cannot justify such an invasion. Zimbabwe is too hard, and profit prospects are too risky. Tough luck on you, the starving people of Zimbabwe.

There was a time when people such as Fijian and Rhodesian dictators got a swift dose of correction from the Europeans who knew how to create and run a country and exploit it properly. Once upon a time, Fiji was run by white people who really knew how to make a buck from the natives. They imported Indian natives and made them work hard, too. The lazies did nothing, and the prosperous hard workers now face the envy and backlash of the layabouts.

The inheritors of all these post-colonial cock-ups have made a total pig’s ear of their chance to improve their countries, and they have wreaked havoc on their compatriots. Having given all these people their freedom, it is not for the descendants of faulty imperialists to apologise for their own leaders’ failures.

Instead, it is time for our Glorious and Baubled Foreign Minister Winston Peters to step in, step up, and become a true world statesman by clearly defining and declaring a new New Zealand foreign policy that states: “We will not ban any more Fijian footballers. We will welcome expelled Fiji journalists to our shores and, unless I hear from Frank by 11 o’clock tonight, a state of war will exist between this country and Fiji.”

The time looks right for Winston to prove once and for all that he has an interest in helping other people to prosper, run themselves and not take the easy option by fleeing to the immigration desks at Auckland International Airport. Once past that forbidding desk, they are vulnerable to all manner of exploitation and low wages, and will only add to the flood of earned money from this country, as they send their cash to less fortunate relatives who live on islands that New Zealand has failed to develop.

What we need today is decisive leadership that will send task forces to unseat Fijian and Kimbabwean dictatorships. We can leave Darfur and Somalia and Russia to sort themselves out, although oil-rich Nigeria still poses something of a problem. The CIA will take care of Latin American socialists who have stolen ExxonMobil’s assets and helped to increase your petrol prices. You can bet your life that the people who run the world’s oil also run the world’s best secret services.