Entry 881, on 2008-11-03 at 21:51:12 (Rating 4, Politics)
I hear a lot of comments from some of my more conservative friends about the antics of what they refer to as the "loony left" in New Zealand politics, so I think a bit of balance is long overdue. Hopefully I will be able to provide a bit of balance with this diatribe on what I (and others) call the "rabid right".
This morning I listened to Radio New Zealand's summary of their latest election debate, which had participants from all the major parties except the Maori Party (why?) discussing the environment. Obviously some parties (The Greens for example) will be much stronger on this issue than others (Act for example) but surely the environment is sufficiently important that everyone should have extensive policies covering it.
So there was discussion of the comments from all of the parties during the item. National were evasive on if or when agriculture would be brought into the emission trading scheme, for example. Labour were defending what the Greens thought was slow progress on improving water quality. New Zealand First defended the farmers and said it would take time and money to improve the pollution from farms. The Progressives said let's fix the existing motorways before worrying too much about public transport. And the Greens had their usual idealist ideas around the issue.
But I hadn't heard anything from my old friends at Act. What were their thoughts on the subject? Well I only heard at the end, after the main item, where the presenter mentioned that Act disagreed with everyone else on almost everything and that they thought climate change was not caused by humans, that there was no peak oil, and that the emissions trading scheme should be scrapped.
So this really just confirmed my opinion on the rabid right. What a bunch of nutters they are. Denying global warming has been the domain of the uninformed and believers in conspiracy theories for years but I didn't expect to hear it from a mainstream party.
But I suppose Act aren't really a mainstream party. They are so isolated from everyone else that they seem to belong in a little dream world of their own. If they can ignore the facts regarding the environment who's to say whether they have done the same thing in other areas as well, perhaps even in areas like economics and crime, where they have rather extreme agendas.
So, if I hadn't needed further reason, this confirmed my thought that Act are dangerous. It seems that National are likely to be the major party in power and i can live with that, but if they have to team up with the rabid right we're really in trouble!
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