By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
THE Greens of Western Australia are bragging that they are likely to hold the balance of power in the Upper House of the WA State Parliament. The latest vote count on March 25th confirmed this.
The Greens’ relative success in WA appears to be the result of lazy “above-the-line” voting for the Upper House which guaranteed them the bulk preferences from Labor. The WA Nationals won only two Upper House seats and One Nation, one of the 37 seats. Australian Christians are likely to get one seat.
So Labor with 16 seats, the Greens 4 and Legalise Cannabis 1, will give the leftist parties a clear majority with 21 of the 37 seats.
This will simply pull the WA Labor Party further to the left and reinforce the status quo of another state government lurching into anti-carbon insanity and woke social policy such as transgenderism.
WA is already planning to shut down its two coal fired power stations by the magical year 2030 and spend an estimated $3.8 billion on its South West Interconnected System (SWIS) with solar/wind generation and storage, that the government says will “ensure continued supply stability and affordability.”
As the South Australian model has shown, wind and solar are inherently unstable and expensive but the new Greens-controlled Upper House will be beating their “renewables” and “sustainability” drums to drown out any objections.
Before this month’s WA state election, the Greens had only one sitting MP, Dr Brad Pettitt MLC, who has been re-elected alongside former ABC journalist Sophie McNeill and former East Metropolitan MLC Tim Clifford.
“While counting for the Upper House is still underway, the Greens are highly likely to pick up a fourth seat and elect forest campaigner Jess Beckerling, who was instrumental in leading the campaign to end native forest logging in Western Australia,” a Greens media statement noted.
So in the Greens’ twisted, anti-industrial mindset, timber milling is evil along with coal-fired electricity generation. They, like their multi-billionaire mentor Bill Gates, are also anti-livestock farming. But will they object to vast new areas of mining for rare-earth minerals for their beloved batteries? Unlikely.
Of course not, because WA Labor has starry-eyed plans to attract “new manufacturing industries” such as “battery and wind turbine manufacturing, hydrogen, green cement and minerals processing”.
So WA would have us believe they can do what China is doing already. But China, with its more than 1100 coal-fired power stations has massive manufacturing capacity based on cheap energy. WA will soon have none.
Sadly, the state may have to learn the hard way that you don’t foster economic development or even a modern, functioning economy with a fragile renewable energy supply.
But WA’s Greens, like their comrades in South Australia and Victoria, are only too happy to lead their state down the path to economic dysfunction, claiming that they saw significant swings towards them across the state.
“While counting is still underway and the result still in doubt, the strong swings to the Greens and community independents show that Western Australians urgently want the government to take stronger action on climate,” they say.
“The Greens with likely four MPs in the Upper House appear set to hold the balance of power and are ready to get to work from day one to push the re-elected Labor government to scrap unfair evictions, ban fracking in the Kimberley, end mining in native Jarrah forests and legislate strong action on climate change.”
If WA people are really that stupid, we can only say good luck WA, because you’re going to need it.
“Meanwhile, WA’s emissions continue to rise and our precious natural environment is under threat because this Labor government failed to take science seriously and act on climate and biodiversity,” Dr Pettitt said.
“While the count continues and we don’t yet know the final result, a clear take away from this election is that hundreds of thousands of West Australians have voted for progressive change. Roger Cook’s Labor government will have a choice of either working constructively with the Greens in the Upper House, or siding with the Liberals and far-right parties.”
