The reason why the Commissioner’s report was rejected was because the new Iemma Government wanted a 3rd terminal to attract a 3rd stevedore. We were supposed to know the outcome of the selection process in August this year but it has been postponed – shipping and stevedoring are in the doldrums. The Government is spending $1billion on the Port and will need to support it with infrastructure upgrades such as an ‘enhanced’ (the word is in the Ports EIS) M5, the M4East, the F6, additional ramps to the ED and duplication of the Botany Rail Line. All these add over $10billion to the project. Port Botany will slowly strangle Southern Sydney if these don’t happen. Because of the problems at Port Botany (it was referred to in a National Freight Inquiry years ago as the bloodclot on the eastern seaboard) NSW has been losing business to Queensland. The Port there is east of the CBD and warehousing generally north and south. Qld does have problems but to be expected given the SEQ has been growing at around 2.3% pa while Sydney was around .8%. If the States weren’t competing but specialising we could have a national freight policy with opportunities to construct the long debated Inland Rail which would benefit centres like Moree and Parkes. Instead we have had the Victorian Government approve the controversial channel deepening of Port Phillip Bay (including the toxic dump) and NSW, Port Botany, because both are competing against each other. In the media debates on transport freight movements are nearly always overlooked but emissions from freight movements are growing much faster than from private cars. Within the next 10 years around 40% of emissions will come from moving goods not people. It is instructive to read reports from the National Transport Commission, Productivity Commission and DOTARS.

But I agree, I don’t understand the desire to call people fascists (bit Rick – The Young Ones – for my liking). And as I’ve tried to argue before, alot of inner city Greens I know don’t oppose for the sake of it (and approve of alot), just think there’s a better way to do things.

But our Greens NSW policy *is* to oppose the criminalisation of possession. That seems to me to be a rational position given the negative individual and social effects of criminalising possession, especially when compared with the unrealistic, utopian idea that criminalisation decreases overall social harm.

Criminalisation doesn’t even necessarily decrease consumption that much: even the US Prohibition, one of the most spectacular criminalisation “experiments” ever tried saw per capita alcohol consumption return to almost the rates of pre-Prohibition by the time it was rescinded, but with huge additional social harm created: widespread serious illness due to poorly produced moonshine (mainly hitting the poor) and the rise of the mafia (a marginal organisation before Prohibition).

Furthermore, a law-and-order approach to the illegal drugs trade in general is pretty ineffective. The larger busts we see at the border seem to still only represent around 10% of what’s coming in: it’s just that more is getting in. And the rise of complex webs of organised crime in terms of drug production and distribution has barely been dented despite recourse to draconian legal measures like the recent bikie laws.

The real question is why people use drugs. But that raises uncomfortable social questions. Better to blame the users than think about why they are getting hammered.

My experience is that those who end up being brought to our hospital often have significant social or personal problems that explain why drugs become such an out of control part of their lives. But more broadly, the problems parallel the problems that our patients with alcohol abuse have. One poison is illegal, the other legal, but little else is different. And the worst violence and self-harm is almost always alcohol-related.

This also calls into question the arbitrary division between the two most harmful drugs (tobacco and alcohol) and the rest. Some types of drug abuse can be legally advertised and promoted, but others are off limits. I say arbitrary because the risk-benefit ratio of different drugs doesn’t match how illegal they are before the law. Stupidly, ecstasy and ice are considered equally bad before the law, when a case can probably be made that the former is less harmful than alcohol.

But also consider that in practice (rather than some imaginary fair society) the authorities are more likely to crack down on drug use by certain social groups, and that other social groups (if caught) have greater wherewithal to get themselves out of trouble. There is an element of social control and discrimination at the heart of drugs policy (and, indeed, about the current binge drinking hysteria).

None of which is to say that I think that “drugs are harmless”. That is clearly not true, and I see the awful results every day at work. But the law-and-order option plays well for politicians because they appear to be doing something quite simple about real but complex social problems. And the yardstick they can set is not a decrease in drug-related harm (that doesn’t seem to happen) but the number of arrests or imprisonments or busts. It looks like they are “getting results” when these items hit the news.

Here’s a link to the policy: http://nsw.greens.org.au/policies/drugs-and-harm-minimisation

BTW, I haven’t lived in Newtown since a few months in the mid-1990s.

I think you are exaggerating some minor cultural differences which may have been more significant in the past. Certainly, the Greens I know on the north coast today are hardly a homogeneous bunch, and most have no trouble at all identifying with your so called ‘inner city’ crowd. Indeed, if anything, the people I know who I think best fit the tag ‘north coast environmentalist’, are probably not the same people you would characterise as such, and are arguably the ones who find more common ground with your so called ‘inner city’ Greens.

My impression (and as a non-member I don’t have extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the Greens, so may be wrong) is that any schisms that do occur seem to have much more to do with personalities than ideology, and that happens in any organisation, anywhere.

But really, I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of the ‘Newtown Greens,’ if I may use that term, are protesting for the sake of protesting, or perhaps opposing for the sake of opposing. Not long ago I had a debate with a noted young Green from Newtown who believes that possession of all drugs should be legal, which I don’t believe is the official Green position, but it’s more the person than the organisation that irritates me. I argued that that was not a good position and that all he had to do was walk around Redfern with me to see the effects of widespread drug use and that decriminalising drugs would only worsen the situation.

Anyway, this guy, who is prone to calling 90% of the population fascists, is what irritates me about inner-city Greens. Not a lot, but enough of them are oppose everything, smash-the-system pseudo-anarchists; whether they actually believe this or are just doing because they’re trendy Uni students is a moot point. Now, I’m a realist and, despite popular opinion, I think that most of Green ideology is based on realism rather than idealism (climate policy etc), but I think this is largely reversed in the inner city where there’s a drive to oppose everything for the sake of being in the opposition. And frankly, I don’t do that. Call me a unrealistic north coast hippy if you will, but that’s how I feel.

Anyway, yes, made sense. Only real comment is that it plays both ways in respect of finding some “undergraduate” or maybe “unrealistic” or “holier-than-thou” or whatever. Could say the same for some environmentalists, but this doesn’t stop me working with them and cheering on their victories.

Oh, and if you’re feeling disenfranchised and marginalised I’d like to hear why and how you thing that might be ameliorated or mitigated (or is it tied to something less tangible like a sense of belonging?).

I’m not trying to split the Greens into the red-green green-green cliche, I’d hope you’re all too smart for that one, just simply saying that I don’t connect with the inner-city Greens the way I did up the coast and that to say that there aren’t different types of Greens is being naive; there’s different types in all parties and location has a big part in each of these.

Hope that made sense.

Re inner city types, as a person who used to live in the ‘gong where do I fit into this? As a person who used to run youth-based environment programs am I an environmentalist or social activist? I think the characterisation of “inner-city Greens” is quite misleading, and certainly misrepresents the diversity of life experiences you might find. The dichotomisation into inner-city types and north-coast environmentalist is also a furphy. Ian is perfectly able to represent inner city concerns in Parliament (and has done), but also chooses to focus on other issues. The same goes for most other Green MP’s I’ve met from across Australia (and they’re not all urban-based MP’s I might add) in respect of what they choose to focus on.

As someone who spent his Uni years as an ardent north coast environmentalist, I must say that since moving to Sydney that I’ve become rather disenfranchised by the inner-city Greens, who are more and more not representing what I, and I believe people like Ian Cohen, pushed for.