Answer to vocal pressure groups; more government.

Cartoon: Bill Leak.

The Courier Mail has an article listing many of the ratbag campaigns that have gone on during the last decade which they refer to as the “Noughties.” Some of the things they list are those we rail about on a regular basis:

Sadly, it was also the decade of the vocal minority group - small, special-interest factions of society whose decibel levels usually far surpass their real level of popular support.

These are the mobs who often want to "save" something or other, be it the lesser-speckled lesbian tree frog, the planet, the suburbs, the children, our souls . . .

And if they're not trying to save things, then they're trying to ban them: everything from four-wheel-drives to glass in pubs, hijabs, same-sex marriages and the scourge of sausage rolls in school tuckshops. …

Firstly that the climate-change evangelists are right and we're about to turn the world into the planetary equivalent of a crock-pot (and personally here I'm an agnostic who doesn't pretend to understand the science, but is sick of being yelled at by both sides of the debate).

And secondly, let's assume that in the process of tackling global warming we don't want to end up living in caves eating tofu and organic mung beans by candlelight as we watch the glaciers grow back.

Let's put nuclear power on the policy agenda.

It's clean, proven technology and we have plenty of uranium - which, by the way, we seem perfectly happy to dig up and send offshore.

The alternative is a wind farm in every back yard (although that would have what some might regard as the added advantage of keeping the flying fox population down).

As you can see there is some good stuff here, but unfortunately the author goes on to complain that this creates what he sees as a political malaise. His answer to that political malaise is courageous politics:

As the new decade dawns, what Australia (and Queensland, for that matter) could really use is an industrial-strength dose of political spine, for courage and common sense these days are too often supplanted by cowardice and political self-preservation. It's time to transfer the contents of the "too-hard" basket to the in-tray.

I have never really understood why the left and the far right have this thing about wanting government to be really effective, especially after seeing first hand the results and unintended consequences of ‘effective’ government. I mean getting ‘affordable housing’ to the poor who could not afford a mortgage sounded great to liberals, and effective government did it, but the global financial crisis it created is not generally applauded.

During what appears to be the most severe recession in living memory, it is only the paralysis of politics that has prevented the implementation of an energy rationing system that would lead to the destruction of masses of jobs in favor of ‘green energy’ which has not proven that it is even technologically possible, let alone economical.

Lets be realistic and keep the bastards paralyzed.