Bob Jones: The seedy Green Party

One universal truth about taxation is everyone’s in favour of taxing others but can readily supply reasons why they themselves should be exempt.

Thus the current NZ Green Party, as seedy a mob who have ever graced our Parliamentary benches, have now abandoned Green issues in their manifesto and instead called for wealth taxes, despite the overwhelming evidence of the disastrous consequences of such measures from abroad.

The Greens’ principal problem is they no longer have a monopoly, parties of all stripes accepting the broad concerns which is why Green parties now barely exist elsewhere. Rather, to varying degrees political parties’ differ only in their efforts to balance them with realistic pragmaticism.

For example, we could end motor vehicle and aircraft pollution easily. Simply ban cars and planes and revert to a pre-industrial revolution peasant-type economy. These things are judgement balancing issues.

So left floundering for a point of different raison d’etre, the Greens rely on their name to attract a soppy section of the electorate and have turned to dated and repeatedly proven failing socialist politics of envy to create a new voter base.

A quarter century back, in the days of Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzgerald, Sue Bradford and Sue Kedgley, the party’s MPs commanded a well-deserved public respect, albeit at the time they were viewed as overly idealistic. Like all political parties they still had fringe nutty members, such as for example, the dreadlocked Nandor Tanczos who subscribed to a religion, the Rastafarians, based on the belief Haille Selassie was the second coming, something which hugely embarrassed the Emperor.

Chance saw me alone with Selassie in Addis Ababa a few hours after he was overthrown in 1974 and he certainly didn’t look too bloody God-like to me.

But back to the current shabby Green Party rabble. Currently led by an accountant, James Shaw, who wouldn’t look out of place in a nun’s habit, he initially presented himself as an upright man of principle. That image quickly went out of the window after exposure of the grossly hypocritical New Plymouth school affair on his part.

Then, at your expense readers, he shot off to the annual climate bunfest a couple of years back in Glasgow. Why? To listen to speeches. But, he also felt the necessity to take another 10 unnamed parasites again at our expense in hotel costs and round the world Business Class jet flights, all of this contrary to the Green’s carry-on about jets negative climate impact.

At the time my Glasgow office reported the restaurants and sight-seeing buses were packed day and night with the 30,000 climate attendees, all living it up in that sight-seers delightful city.

Who can forget then Aussie PM Scott Morrison’s (shown on television) stirring speech to the conference. But then the cameras flashed round the auditorium of that splendid building and almost no-one was there.

In fairness, this is the reality of all conferences, now arguably the biggest bullshit business in existence. But for the Greens it constitutes gross hypocrisy.

Maybe the seediest of the current Green crop is the Mexican sponger Ricardo Menendez March, who’s sole credential, seemingly a Green Party requisite, is his homosexuality. In his maiden speech he lied saying how shocked he was on arriving in New Zealand to watch me on television slamming Chinese immigration. When it was pointed out that there’s been no greater advocate for Chinese immigration than me, he made a smart alec response.

The Greens will get up in the coming election debacle, probably gaining disenchanted traditional Labour voters, but my salient point is, as elsewhere in the world, they’re now redundant as no-one’s arguing any more on the climate issue. Nevertheless politically they’re the equivalent of say the suffragette movement still remaining in existence long after the battle has been won.

Sir Bob Jones is a renowned author, columnist , property investor, and former politician, who blogs at No Punches Pulled HERE.