The record vote by the Greens in Saturday’s federal election in Richmond has encouraged candidate Dawn Walker Greens to keep the ‘Green’ momentum going across the northern rivers.
A successful grass-roots campaign by Ms Walker and the Greens involved doork-nocking on thousands of homes, making 25,000 phone calls to voters which she said were ‘all made possible by hundreds of people giving thousands of volunteer hours, because they care about the northern rivers.’
The Fingal resident, at her second tilt in Richmond, secured 17,186 primary votes (as of Monday), a swing of 5.28 per cent for the Greens.
She said there were positive swings in ‘every single booth from Ballina to Tweed, it is extraordinary,’.
Ms Walker took a swipe at the coalition and Labor parties, saying that while the Greens had ‘the strength in numbers, it is difficult to out-compete millions of dollars in campaign donations that the old parties receive’.
‘The Greens do not accept corporate donations from the fossil fuel, or any other industry,’ she said.
‘With the average donation to the Richmond campaign being $92, our campaign has been people powered, not fossil fueled. We’re not beholden to big donors, we act in the communities interests.’
The former (Victorian) government adviser in small business, who moved to the tweed with her family 10 years ago, said the campaign’s ‘thousands of conversations’ was its ‘most extraordinary aspect’.
‘The community offered us the greatest gift; they took our calls, considered our questions, and shared their struggles, dreams and hopes for the Northern Rivers.’
Ms Walker said with support for the Greens continuing to grow, a federal member ‘is a natural progression’.
‘We have two Greens mayors, NSW’s first lower House MP in Tamara Smith and an Upper House member in Jan Barham. With support for the Greens continuing to grow, a Federal member is a natural progression.
‘We will turn the Northern Rivers Green. Momentum is on our side,’ said Ms Walker.
The Greens success and influence is growing. Their campaigns highlighting the importance of protecting the environment everyone should be grateful. Businesses today have change for the better, primarily due to the Greens. A simple measure is the number of Environmental Engineers and Scientists in the workforce.
The Greens success can be a “double edge sword” as this can generate the belief they have the answers. Politicians predicting technology and or creating recipes for a particular outcome have a very poor success rate. Ideas like subsidizing a technology forever prevents the necessity for innovation. The Dutch have concluded they are in an infinite spiral with their energy policy. Carbon tax and emission trading end up exporting emissions.
In engineering the most successful technological developments are ones evolved from competition. Look at mobile phones, computers etc.
We need a commercial environment to promote or reward lowering emissions rather than installing zero emission generators. Poorly installed or design zero emission generators may have little offset to emissions as they often cannot meet demand and if coupled to a coal power generator which cannot be easily turned down has little effect in emissions. This is why the huge amounts of money spent on renewables in Europe have not had the impact on emissions that once was promised.
Competition between all energy types generates cost effective achievable solutions which is important as we need to lower emissions as fast as possible.
With “two Greens mayors, NSW’s first lower House MP in Tamara Smith and an Upper House member in Jan Barham.” when will wee see some action on the development of an integrated active and public transport in the area?
And there is disappointment in the Greens elected. They have not created much action. Jan Barham is still putting two bobs worth into the area because she needs to push the Greens who were elected.
And Jan Barham makes a lot of sense.
The Health Australia Party has a policy platform that promotes natural health, home birth, health freedom and vaccine choice. This election, it was very sad to see Richard di Natale describe them as ‘quacks.’
https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/31954780/health-australia-party-dangerous-greens/#page1
At that moment, the Greens lost my support.
Perhaps he was convinced by dodgy NHMRC reviews of 17 natural therapies that concluded a general lack of evidence of efficacy. These excluded randomised controlled trials in favour of systematic reviews, thereby bypassing ‘Level 1’ evidence. Another strange decision was to limit evidence to a narrow 5-year time window.
Another issue was that the bar for ‘high quality’ evidence was set deliberately high, and while some ‘moderate’ evidence of benefit was found, this did not deter the News Corp wing of the Australian media from dubbing these therapies as ‘useless.’
It’s interesting how the Echo spins these pro greens stories. The fact is the Nationals candidate got nearly twice as many vote as the Greens, despite the CSG issue, and in the Page electorate, where there has been CSG exploration, the Nationals won. The Greens have got great ideas, there is no question about that. However 89% of the voting population do not support them. Does that mean that all of those 89% of Australians don’t believe the science behind climate change, don’t understand the importance of stopping habitat and species destruction, don’t understand the need for renewable energy? Of course not, what it means is the very obvious point that Greens supporters are in denial about: that the vast majority of voters understand that the Greens, in their current form and with their current ideology are incapable of running the Government and therefore incapable of Governing the country.