Hey Bob, where's your apology for this? (photo via Bolt)
A favourite trick of the Left – brand your opponents as “extremists” and then you can avoid actually engaging with their arguments. Thousands of ordinary Australians protested in Canberra yesterday, angry at being lied to by Julia Gillard before the election about her policy for a carbon tax. But the Left’s smear machine is in full swing this morning, rubbishing the genuine concerns of ordinary people:
Labor backbencher Nick Champion says the protesters are extremists.
NICK CHAMPION: A rally that has all the credibility of a Dungeons and Dragons convention – full of fantasists, full of people who think we can just avoid this problem – and we can’t.
It’s a serious problem. The world has to deal with it and Australia has to do our part.
REPORTER: Does that mean you think that they’re extremists, the people at this rally?
NICK CHAMPION: Yes.
SABRA LANE: Labor MP, Michelle Rowland:
MICHELLE ROWLAND: Some of these people, you objectively analyse their positions and they are extreme. They are extreme. (source)
She said it twice just in case you didn’t get it the first time. Greg Combet also used the word “extremists”:
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said some people in the rally crowd were extremists.
“We had the Lavoisier group – a group which, as one commentator points out, warned the Kyoto protocol was part of a new imperial structure that would relocate Australian sovereignty to Germany,” he said. (source)
WTF? And one Labor MP has gone even further:
FEDERAL MP for Bendigo Steve Gibbons has been caught on social media website twitter comparing anti-carbon tax protesters to the notorious Ku Klux Klan.
But Mr Gibbons has defended the tweet, saying one of three anti-carbon tax rallies yesterday had been infiltrated by right-wing groups with a racist agenda.
Bendigo man Tony Hooper, a key organiser in Victoria of the No Carbon Tax Protest Group, says he is absolutely disgusted at the comments and will demand an apology.
In his tweet on the pro-carbon tax “noCTrally” Twitter feed, Mr Gibbons said: “Looks like all the extremists were having a day out. Was the Ku Klux Klan represented?”. (source)
Bob Brown even went as far as to write to Julia Gillard, apologising to her for some of the signs, which admittedly went too far: the words “bitch” and “witch” were undignified. However, when did Brown ever write to Howard about some of the disgusting treatment he received from the thugs on the Left? Never, because it’s OK when the target is from the Right of politics.
Australian Climate Madness 
I attend the Carbon Protest Rally yesterday – see below letter sent to Greg Combet this morning:
Fiona Murray
To Greg Combet Climate Change Minister, Barnaby Joyce, Paul Fletcher, Bill Morgan
Dear Greg,
It’s a bit rich of you to be hurling insults at those of us who attended the Carbon Protest Rally yesterday when YOU were responsible for organising a number of protests which were both violent and unruly; I refer of course to your involvement with the Maritime Union during the years of the Howard Government and the Waterfront Dispute. Not forgetting, of course, Ansett, Jamies Hardie and other stoushes.
Greg, those of us who attended the rally yesterday were decent, hardworking Australians. We represented mainstream Australia and are NOT extreme. We were both orderly and peaceful.
When people like us, most of whom have never protested in their entire lives, are prepared to let you know how angry and betrayed we feel by this Government, then you can justifiably feel concerned.
We represent the MAJORITY and have a democratic right to voice our concerns.
If the best you and Julia Gillard can do is resort to name calling then I suggest you have the intestinal fortitude to tell the people of Australia EXACTLY how a tax is going to (a) change the temperature of the planet and (b) transform our Country.
As a former Head of the ACTU, you OF ALL PEOPLE, together with your Labor Colleagues, should not be treating us with the contempt you clearly showed us yesterday.
Kind regards
Fiona Murray
[address withheld]
Bravo Fiona – exposing the hypocrisy.
Hear hear Fiona, keep up the good work.
Very well said Fiona. I eagerly await to hear of the response you receive from the hypocrite Combet, who hides behind Parliamentary privellege, in his denigration of those who held a very peaceful and powerful rally
I’m a skeptic.
I question that mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous and increasingly rapid global warming.
I question that a complex system of taxing emissions and subsidising lower income groups will in any way alter the naturally occurring changes in our climate.
And I maintain forcefully that our parliamentarians have no idea on how to monitor the effects (if any) their taxes will ever have on the climate.
So now I’m an extremist?
“So now I’m an extremist?”
According to Vladimir Ilyich Gillard and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Combet – yes you are.
Make sure you tell all your friends, won’t you?
The warmists have nothing! So they scrape the bottom of the barrel looking for something to defame their opponents and continue their goal of silencing all opposing views.
However their knee jerk criticisms will now undermine their own credibility and they will have their noses rubbed in their own rich history of unkind statements.
I couldn’t be more delighted by this. Ecstatic, in fact.
I can’t think of any time in our recent history where the incumbent government took a position where they actively, enthusiastically and smugly insulted and villified people for simply not agreeing with their received wisdom. I know people who have been Labor voters all their life that are absolutely horrified at being basically verbally abused by the PM and her attack dog for having the timerity to question the “party line”. I help them with their thinking by pointing out that Stalin and Hitler basically adopted the same strategy – and that all their statues were long ago pulled down.
An example of the right to freedom of speech (and belief) – Australian Labor Party style.
Heil Julia!
HEIL…HEIL…HEIL
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/nsw-election-2011/ban-on-nsw-labors-carbon-critics/story-fn7q4q9f-1226025689754
And further:-
It may be without precedent here, but it’s not without precedent. Ask any German or Russian who is old enough to remember this form of ideology.
Good. Good.
“Animals shall not sleep in beds … with sheets.”
Breaking News.
Footage just released of Greg Combet denouncing Climate Change Deniers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-6H4xOUrs
Yes, I like the way he raises himself on his toes to emphasise a point.
Very effective.
So, we have a tax the majority of Australians don’t want, a PM that lied to gain office, an extremely unpopular Green party running the federal agenda and now a ruling party that verbally insults the electorate. If that isn’t enough to bring down the federal government what is? With every mistake they make, more and more people turn against them.
From ABC this morning:-
According to the above they were asked to take the signs down by the organisers.
Were those sign wavers green moles?
What better way to discredit and attempt to portray the rally attendees and Abbott as a bunch of extremists than by having those signs right behind Abbott and then broadcast Australia/World wide by a complaint media?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised personally.
Completely consistent with leftist green form.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/24/3172317.htm
Hey blokes somebody break it to Julia that Ken Salazar just said the USA will increase production of coal. Yes that is right c o a l.
Ken Salazar says
“Coal is a critical component of America’s comprehensive energy portfolio as well as Wyoming’s economy,
http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_da5c2486-556e-11e0-a89e-001cc4c03286.html
The easiest way to win an argument is to ridicule your opponent, without addressing the real facts. Avoid the real issue and go for the jugular with personal attacks. A favorite tactic of the Labor/Green coalition. Just don’t allow the truth to get in the way of a good story.
Call anyone who opposes the carbon tax a ‘denier’. Climate change denier … similar to Holocaust denier … get the picture.
Maybe us skeptics should start wearing a big green D on our clothing.Using their slurs against them.It would be interesting to see their reaction if they started popping up all over the place.
It would be good to do on polling day.
Point to the “D” when they offer you their How-2-Vote Card.
Something different from throwing it on the footpath and scuffing it with your shoe, I guess.
Bernie Finn, Victorian MP has revealed in Parliament that a petition presented by GetUp was fraudulently obtained with many of the signatures being from the mentally ill and their families.
How low can you go? This indicates that the Labor/Green/ Independent Alliance will stoop to any level and bodes ill for any future election.
“a petition presented by GetUp…many of the signatures being from the mentally ill”
A self-evident truth, I would have thought.
Obviously Combet does not subscribe to the ideals of free speech………..neither did Joseph Stalin.
Slightly off topic. Combet and Gibbons are trying to link this to racism. However, in the Green’s Party manifesto, it explicitly states the Greens are Anti- Israel. This was made council policy in Marikville NSW by the Greens.
The Greens are Labor’s friends. And the Greens are explicitly racist? I thought that was illegal.
I resigned from my Union two years over this Greenie stuff.
In the US, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues tried to characterize the Tea Party as extremists and racists here in the USA. It worked so well she won the title of House MINORITY Leader only a few months later. Liberals KNOW they are smarter and better than everyone else, they just haven’t figured out yet how to communicate that to the great unwashed electorate.
Fiona – you inspired me to write a strongly worded missive to both Combet and Gillard. Australia Post is finally making some money out of me.
This is very interesting, people who are ant-climate change and anti-carbon tax also have are anti Islamic, anti Muslims and anti multiculturalism.
This is enough for me to say that carbon tax could actually be a good thing.
Welcome to the smear brigade, Dave.
That would be the same Lavoisier group that counts Peter Walsh, ex- LABOR Finance Minister of the Hawke government, as a foundation member ?
How extreme.