ABC NEWS

Greens leader Christine Milne has resigned, announcing she would not contest the 2016 Federal election

Richard Di Natale has been elected unopposed as the new leader

Larissa Waters and Scott Ludlam have been elected unopposed as co-deputy leaders 

goodness me, what happened to that delightful lady Sarah Hanson-Young??  I would have thought her hat would have gone into the ring very quickly.

Crikey This bloke could be dangerous he talks common sense

The Greens are promising a fresh look at major budget savings after the sudden installation of Richard Di Natale as the party’s new leader signalled a dramatic shift in power to a new generation but stirred internal rancour.

A new approach to petrol excise and pension reform is in prospect as Senator Di Natale says the Greens partyroom can look again at policies to “get outcomes” rather than fight ideological battles.

Some within the Greens — the third force in federal politics, with 10 senators and one lower-house MP — see the transition as a chance to end the party’s blockade of last year’s $2.2 billion budget proposal to restore indexation of petrol excise, acknowledging they should support a small increase in the tax on the fossil fuel.

Senator Di Natale said he wanted to meet Tony Abbott next week to see if there could be any “common ground”c

“If you want to know about my general philosophy, I’m not an ideologue, I’m not going to say we want small or big government, you’re not going to get that from me,” he said.

A good move at the right time. Greens present our best option for breaking the two party stranglehold and keeping a semblance of ethical integrity in government. People like me who vote Green are not watermelons. We are people who care vey much about environment, social justice, ethical governing and real quality of life for the Australian people. 

I'm afraid that my cynicism about politics/politicians, created over a lifetime of hope dashed by disappointment, leads me to believe that this change will only represent more of the same. Still, we can only hope......and prepare for the disappointment.

After listening to him being interviewed in the early hours on ABC I am quite impressed with this new Leader.  I am not a Greens voter.

He appears to want to get things done and he is as sick as the rest of the public by the no, no,no to all legistation that has been put up to the Senate.  He said and I quote "I felt like tearing my hair out as I listened"..or similar words to that.

Cannot help but think that Christine Milne saw the "writing on the wall" and may have been given a nudge towards the door. 

Di Natale and Scott Ludlum have  really been quite impressive in their reasoned approach in holding the Liberal members to account on various issues. The Green Politicians too don't appear to be "career Politicians" but more about concerned individuals taking a path in politics for benefit of the future and others rather than just lining their pockets for themselves. Glad we managed to get 10 Senators last Election a force to be reckoned with.

Australia does not have a good record of supporting parties of protest the Democrats had a similar number of Senators to the Greens now none..

"The Australian Democrats were in the vanguard of environmentalism in Australia. From the early 1980s they were unequivocally opposed to the building of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania and they opposed the mining and export of uranium and the development of nuclear power plants in Australia.

While the Australian Democrats thus had very strong ‘green’ credentials they also encompassed a broad range of policies and issues. As well as the protection of the environment, the party stood for reconciliation with Indigenous people, homosexual law reform, gender equality and multiculturalism."

wiki 

Having listened to  Di Natale I would describe him as a man Australia needs - a man of intelligence, compassion and good views on equality... he seems to be someone for the people. Unfortunately those traits have been sadly lacking in Australian politics recently and although I am not an avid Greens voter...I do think he will make an impact.

As a former GP I expect Di Natale is likely to make health one of his priorities...at least I'm hoping so.

The Greens like to differentiate themselves by describing the major parties as obsolescent, but their push for Senate voting changes show they too have become part of the mouldering establishment, writes Paula Matthewson.

Have the Greens become part of the establishment? It would appear so, judging by their push to deny micro parties the use of preference harvesting to get elected to the Senate.

The Greens, along with the major parties and Senator Nick Xenophon, have recommended in a parliamentary review of the 2013 federal election that party registration and Senate voting rules be changed. These changes will make it more difficult for micro parties to run and almost impossible for their candidates to be elected.

Reform of Senate voting has been on the Greens' agenda for a while, with former party leader Bob Brown unsuccessfully calling for such changes in 2010. Brown advocated the scrapping of group voting tickets, the mechanism used for preference harvesting, because allowing "parties to lodge ... their choice of preference flow has led to the dark art of manipulation of preferences for unwarranted electoral advantage".

But what is "unwarranted electoral advantage" exactly? Is it an election result that is not truly reflective of voters' intentions, such as being elected with only a small amount of the primary vote?

At the last federal election Motoring Enthusiasts' Ricky Muir was elected with 17,122 votes, or 0.51 per cent of the state's vote. In 1996 Bob Brown was elected to the Senate having secured 26,830 votes, or 8.68 per cent*, of the less populous state's Senate vote. Both MPs made a start that fell considerably short of the 14.3 per cent quota. Obviously other parties' preferences helped Brown get over the line, yet he describes the current system that allows parties to dictate preferences as "corrupting".

Perhaps the issue is more that while the Greens rely on leaching the disenfranchised progressive vote from Labor, they are unhappy that a similar splintering of the right-wing vote away from the Coalition has delivered the balance of power to arch conservatives on a number of occasions.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-27/matthewson-the-greens-have-become-the-very-thing-they-hate/6423420

"On trade policy, the Greens policy platform calls for Australia to withdraw from existing bilateral trade agreements when possible and supports the abolition of the WTO, IMF and World Bank ..

It's worth having a look at the German Greens' manifesto. The trade and foreign policy sections look much more moderate than that offered by the Australian Greens.

The aim of sustainable development has to be anchored in the statutes of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and reflected in the programmes they adopt.

Globalisation opens up the historic opportunity to realise the humanist ideal: human beings are viewing themselves in a worldwide context of responsibility for and solidarity with each other – and acting accordingly.

An important step towards a more equitable global economic order is the dismantling of tariff barriers in the industrialised nations."

Posts by Andrew Shearer and Malcolm Cook on some of the more eccentric foreign and trade policy positions adopted by the Australian Greens invite comparisons with one of the most successful Green parties in the world, Germany's Alliance '90/The Greens.

The peak of the German Greens' influence came under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, when his deputy (and foreign minister) was the Greens' leader, Joschka Fischer.

http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/?COLLCC=3126116936&COLLCC=3092513921&d=D%20-%20Greens%20foreign%20policy/

FORMER Greens leader Christine Milne’s decision to quit the senate at the next election was greeted by a chorus of blindingly hypocritical hyperbolically overly polite humbug. The political class was doing what it does best, protecting its own.

The real monument to Milne, and her predecessor Bob Brown, is the economically wrecked island state of Tasmania, the putrid petrie dish of the failed Green experiment. According to the ABS figures released yesterday, seasonal unemployment in Tassie last month was 7.3 per cent, more than a full percentage point higher than the national average. That, in large part, is due to the lunacy of the Green leadership in the state and nationally.

With the willing assistance of former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and his political fixer, former environment minister Graham Richardson, the Tasmanian economy was effectively torpedoed when the Greens (still in their formative years) launched their first successful major anti-dam campaign, around the Franklin River.

The dam, which would have supplied the island state with cheap, non-fossil fuel-based hydro-electric power, was killed to please left-wing voters living in inner-urban Labor seats on the mainland.

The campaign cost Labor support in Tasmania but the emergent Greens knew that it was electorally more pragmatic to save a Tasmanian river than Tasmanian jobs.

There were echoes of those early Tasmanian campaigns in the recent NSW state election where the tree-hugging Greens won seats campaigning against the safe extraction of natural gas in areas where there was no CSG extraction.

In areas where gas extraction or forestry provides actual employment — that is, in areas where workers do more than turn on a power-hungry computer — the Greens don’t fare too well.

Milne’s political career was launched with another employment-destroying campaign, the blocking of the Wesley Vale pulp mill, a mill designed to meet standards more stringent than any other similar project in the world.

Throughout the dysfunctional Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government she distinguished herself with wild claims on climate change and was rewarded with billions of dollars’ worth of unproductive alternate energy projects which taxpayers will be bankrolling for generations.

Though no reputable scientific organisation in the world has linked a specific weather event to climate change, the former schoolteacher (English, history and social science) has never failed to drag extreme weather events into her unreal vision of an impending apocalyptic warmist fantasy.

“Global warming is driving extreme weather events around the world and the debate needs to be on the impacts of global warming,” she told a press conference after a typhoon devastated the Philippines in November 2013.

“Tony Abbott has created a phony debate in Australia. He never is prepared to talk about the connection between extreme weather events and global warming because he knows that tugs at people’s heartstrings,” she said.

“He knows ... that the Australian people will start joining the dots.”

If people did actually join the dots, they would have realised long ago that Milne was just plain dotty.

“Do you want death or do you want coal?” she asked late last year.

“Coal is bad for humanity and Tony Abbott is bad for Australia.”

Coal actually remains the cheapest source of energy in the world and has been responsible for markedly lowering the gap between the richest and poorest people in the world in recent decades.

The hope is that the new Green leader, Richard Di Natale, is a little more grounded.

Reading his maundering maiden speech, there is little to believe he will offer anything more than any other textbook inner-city sandalista, despite donning a three-piece suit for his first press conference.