Who were they who did this to us? In the end it wasn’t a party or a movement, but a small clique of cronies and bully boys and bully girls, the members and their families and their mates and even their mates’ children, the spinners and the standover men with their large salaries in government agencies. They treated parliament and its perks and positions as their own magic pudding. They lied, they deceived, they sold our soul for a mess of pottage, all in order that they could keep themselves in privilege.
It’s hard to believe that for over eleven years we have let the Tasmanian ALP run our island as if it was a sub branch of Norm Gallagher’s BLF.
But we did.
— Richard Flanagan, The Tasmanian Times, today.
Could Tasmanian Labor be felled by a nine-year-old girl? Today Bruce Montgomery suggests so in Crikey. He says a single event, lasting less than a minute — an ALP robocall telling young Alice Bellamy that a vote for the Greens would be a vote to legalise heroin in Tasmania, the story then splashed on the front page of The Advocate — “represents the nadir of Tasmanian Labor’s appalling campaign …”
Pundits across the board predict that Labor will be cut at the knees at Saturday’s poll. The challenge for the party ahead?
Says Montgomery, it’s time to “bring younger and fresher minds to the incident room of Tasmanian Labor politics, to hold a post-mortem to determine where it unravelled and to start the process of re-education and renewal.”
Enough’s enough.
I think people have finally woken up to it. The big parties run lie and fear campaigns against the Greens and the best policy to do it with is…. drugs!
But finally people are not being deluded as much. Maybe some people are actually getting onto the Greens web site and reading the policy for themselves. (There’s a thought!). Or maybe they see Green politicians and notice that they are good people: people who care about others and the nation and the world.
The Greens drug policy wants to help people get off drugs. Wow. What a revelation. It wants to treat users as people with a health problem who need help (not jail) and it wants to treat pushers as criminals. (If people really want a debate, then lets debate the different ways of helping people get off drugs.)
There you go.
But who lets a few facts get in the way of a good scare campaign! Finally the day of reckoning might just have come. And more and more people are sick of shallow, self-interested politicians who lie and distort and do anything they can to keep their claws into power.
Here’s the policy in question from the Greens web site which suggests more of a decriminalisation rather than legalisation “Drugs Use: support strong criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for the supply of illicit drugs and the possession of illicit drugs above quantities consistent with personal use; introduce disincentives for the personal use of illicit drugs to include diversion programs, compulsory treatment, education programs and penalties.” Make up your own mind on what the policy means rather than letting the media tell you how to vote.