Peter Garrett
I’ve been planning to comment for a while on Peter Garrett’s decision to join the Labor Party, so here it is: I think it’s a risk for Labor to embrace someone with such extreme views. Garrett is anti logging, and while he mouths rhetoric that new jobs have to be created in forest areas, I’ve never heard him suggest what those new jobs will be.
The people who think like Peter Garrett would almost certainly vote Labor anyhow, or at least direct their preferences to Labor, so I can’t see the political gain for Mark Latham in this?
I won’t waffle any further, but would like to endorse the comments made by Merrill Boyd in her newspaper column for the Murray Valley Community Action Group. Here’s the column:
“It’s all in the game” as the Footy Show song says. You can see the similarities in last week’s Labor Party recruitment of the former Australian Conservation Foundation President and Midnight Oil musician.
Peter Garrett, the high profile celebrity recruit just oozed the “trust me” lines when questioned about how committed he was to the Australian political process.
After 25 years in the conservation movement as an active media player he shows qualities new recruits don’t normally expound. He wants us to believe he will become a team player — he will compromise and go with the majority in the party room” well I must be Cinderella!
Peter Garrett was never prepared to listen or compromise on the issue of the environmental flows for the Murray River. He expounded from river boats and the banks of the Murray that the river was “sick” and he has never swayed from expecting 1 500 000 megalitres (1 50 gigalitres) be returned to the river for its health. He has said it without seeing the agreed science or expected outcomes from this release of water.
Garrett had a single focus — he was unable to see the social dislocation and economic security needed by our rural communities. He is expert at bending the truth for his own ends. Some might say a primary requirement in the brash world of politics.
I am sure he will find that statements made in his former life will haunt him and his new party if he is given a seat in Canberra. Labor might find that their star recruit Garrett could become a liability because of the stance he has taken on issues in the past.
The tragedy for us here in this Farrer electorate is that so far, Labor hasn’t announced a candidate to stand against sitting Liberal member Sussan Ley. They were however, able to chose a celebrity recruit for the safe Kingsford-Smith seat — says something about where we in the Murray Valley sit on Labor’s political barometer.
As they say: “its all in the game”…
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
