There was a time when if you said you were not a greenie, you would be treated like a heretic during the Spanish Inquisition. You had to use green shopping bags even though you then went and bought plastic liner bins for your rubbish can.

To me it did not make sense because the green movement took on the dimensions of a cult and cults are irrational by nature and dangerous. The green movement was ripe pickings for teenagers who always need some fanatical ideal to follow. Then there were the disenchanted hippies from the Sixties who were trying to sublimate their fears of aging by adopting a tree or a koala or whatever other species appealed to them over mankind who apparently was the ruin of the world.

The result of all this is that clearing the land around houses became a no-no. So we had the devastation of Canberra fires which were the direct result of green lobby groups opposing backburning.

And since last week Australia has suffered its worst natural disaster ever. It didn’t have to happen that way if people had been allowed to backburn and clear dangerous matter around their homes.

And now we hear of a man who was fined $30000 last year for clearing the land around his home. He paid the fine but his home survived the bushfires last week. Others didn’t.

Well, there isn’t much greenery left in those bushfire areas any more, is there? And how any politicians such as Peter Garrett and Bob Brown can bear to look at their reflection in the mirror, I simply don’t comprehend.