QUEER-BASHING and CLIMATE DENIAL : related ?

Gay-friendly Tassie !

Australian politics perhaps shows best how closely related are the strident opposition to both Gay marriage and the reality of Global warming .


In that Antipodes nation, the right wing of the socialist party joins with the capitalist parties in opposing both : and that adds up to about 70% of the voters on Election Day, though polling on these issues alone shows a much more even split among the  population.

Electoral systems that favour the two biggest parties give the "paranoid" voter the final say on every thing.

Clearly the parties are well behind current public opinion. This is because both main parties need to get as many of the "paranoid" voters as possible, to form government in a distorted electoral system that wildly favours the two biggest parties - by design.

(The left wing of the socialists joins with the Greens in favouring gay marriage and the reality of climate change.)

At the federal level, the governing Labor (socialist) party is trying to straddle the fence, knowing it appeals to both queer-bashing Labor activists and gay-supporting Labor activists..

But in Tasmania, the governing Labor party will use a small loophole in the Australian constitution to allow gay marriage in the tiny island state - heartedly supported by most Greens but opposed by some Labor activists.

(By contrast, the Libertarian party and its rural and far right fellow travellers are undivided in roundly opposing gay marriage.)

Much the same for global warming ; the right denies it 100%, the Greens support it 100% and the centre-right socialists tries to have it both ways.

Switching to America , a life-long active Republican worker and professional denier for Big Tobacco and a host of other big rich unpopular industries, Frank Schubert , is leading the richly financed anti-gay marriage movement in the United States , further cementing the arguments that all denier movements are intimately connected......

Aussie papers ask "Would you let your daughter marry a Green - they drink the blood of children you know"

"Earned Media", by the tonne, for Aussie greens

If a political party sells its soul to the rich and greedy, it can afford to obtain lots of "paid media" , by buying newspaper ads.

If the newspapers talk about your party without you paying for it, then it is called "earned media" .

Normally Green parties worldwide can't get either form of media.

But not for the Australia Greens for last few weeks - or for a few weeks more apparently.

It has been a two party punch-up on the Greens - the Labor party has teamed up with the Coalition-supporting daily media to go at the Greens on every possible point around the compass.

Far more extreme than the Communists, far more loonie than the Tea Party seems the thrust of the hundreds of articles against the Greens.

Millions of Australians are waking up, drinking coffee and reading papers and listening to radio and TV and learning for the very first time that the Greens are one of the serious parties - serious as in "feared".

I think the Coalition and Labor are going to regret this punch-up :
parties that are joked about or ignored, go no where.

Parties feared by the rich and powerful tend to be seen potential governments-in-waiting by the resentful non-rich and the non-powerful.

And there are lots of them about ......