Green vandals

From Nick Cater in today’s The Australian, talking about the Greens; The trashing of the Triabunna pulp mill and its associated port on Tasmania’s east coast offers an insight into their tactics. The mill was purchased from Gunns in 2011 by the Wilderness Society, bankrolled to the tune of billions by Kathmandu co-founder Jan Cameron and Wotif founder Graeme Wood. A Tasmanian parliamentary inquiry that reported earlier this year found the mill to be a viable business and notes the purchasers had a contractual obligation to keep it running.  

Yet Wilderness Society boss Alec Marr set about fulfilling Ayn Rand’s 1970 prophecy of the forthcoming anti-industrial revolution. The old Left merely wanted to take over the factories; the new Left wants to destroy them. In September 2013, a fortnight after Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, Marr recruited three marine welders and an electrician, locked the mill gates, stocked up with food and set about wrecking the logging plant. Journalist John van Tiggelen, who was invited to join in the vandalism, wrote a riveting account in The Monthly. “There was something wild-eyed about Marr, as if he were living a monkey-wrencher’s dream,” he wrote. “Marr had laid out a trove of new hardware: sledgehammers, axes large and small, angle grinders, spanners, pliers, bolt cutters and gloves. ‘For me, the sound of those grinders tomorrow will be the singing of angels,’ said Marr, grinning broadly.” Van Tiggelen decided to lend a hand, sawing through a rubber belt with a hacksaw. “With an ­almighty clatter the rubber flew down the rollers, top and bottom, the violence of it shaking the scaffolding like a truck had hit it … One down, 11 to go.” The denouement of this black-hearted act of sabotage was the toppling of the giant gantry, “the equivalent of downing the dictator’s statue”. So much for workers’ jobs and their families’ prosperity. The little people have never mattered much to the Greens in their single-minded pursuit of a “sustainable” economy, whatever that may mean.

How can anyone vote for them?