The greening of Australia

Drive south of Sydney, and after years of intense drought, suddenly the miracle of a green countryside is evident. Steer a little to the south-west and you come to another place which is newly green as well. We call it a parliament.

What has become painfully evident in the post-election weeks is that we did not elect a government with a significant policy framework, we managed to put into power (and we are about to discover how much power they have) a group who will use their political will -and the weakness of an established party- to take this country to a supposedly glorious green future where everything is friendly, the earth made new and those nasty people who dig holes in the ground are made to pay for the “sin” of extraction.

All in the name of “fairness”. “We must get our fair share is the mantra.

Not only that, when the water from the Murray runs into the sea rather than to the food producers we should be able to eat expensive blue cable. But we’ll be precluded even from that because we would have to dig for it and that would hurt “Mother Earth”

Where does advertising come in to all this? We’re there because clever, targeted communication has convinced just the right percentage of people that all this is a good thing.

Whether we are “greened” or in fact “Browned”, and how it plays out in the long term will be a matter of communication. Hand it to the greens. They’ve played the game expertly. And we’ve bought it. Curious thing is we never got a money-back guarantee.

Geoff Holt