The Project Monitor's Project Notes, Can the Greens learn to love mining, December 21, 2011 is divisive, unhelpful and foolish.
It accuses the Greens of living in a “fairy tale economic world” of intending “to bury the resources sector” and of promoting energy solutions that “would cause [the nation] to close down within a couple of days”.
This is exactly the sort of misleading rhetoric and outright falsehood that leads to political grandstanding and the kind of gutter level name calling that has become the hallmark of the old political parties.
The facts are that the economic fairytale of enfettered and infinite growth promoted by Wall Street is directly responsible for the unfolding of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In addition, the cavalier approach to resource management that was the hallmark of the oil-fuelled Bush administration’s approach to foreign policy in the middle-east was one of the GFC’s root causes.
The Greens, on the other hand, promote the simple old fashioned values of nurturing the available resources, fixing things rather than throwing them away, and limiting greed with a good rap on the knuckles. This, quite sensibly, involves putting governments back in charge of corporations rather than the other way around.
The Greens are the natural mainstream progressive party of this century, just as the labour/social democrats were the mainstream progressive party of the twentieth. Protesting against this inevitable fact of political evolution is the response of a petulant teenager refusing to acknowledge parental authority.
We can work together to create a sustainable future that ensures our grandchildren have some hope of enjoying a degree of affluence similar to our own, or we can squabble amongst ourselves as we consume the dwindling resources that should be their heritage.
It is not reasonable to expect the denizens of Canberra, Washington and Beijing to cool their rhetoric, that should be the role of journals such as Project Notes.
I call on the editors of all such journals to show some real leadership and work with the emerging political forces to solve the very real problems that we face, rather than throwing rocks at the only political party that has a long-term plan for the future.
Giovanni Ebono is the general manager of environmental consultancy Simmonds & Bristow and a good friend of many miners. He stood as the Greens candidate for Richmond in the 2007 and 2010 federal elections.
