Tony Abbott, going green is the new blue, and a little tree planting and weeding will fix what ails ya ...

(Above: my kind of green army).

The extraordinary always lurks in the ordinary. There I was tucking myself into bed in a quiet way, brooding on how lucky the antipodes were when it came to explosive natural disasters, and then, next thing you know, waking up to the news that the great southern land had suddenly been blessed by having one of the great environmentalists of our time in its midst.

Yep, it was tremendously exciting to learn that Tony Abbott is now more green than an angry Hulk, more green than the lamentably named Bob Brown.

Abbott's speech to the Sydney Institute is full of it, as you might gather by going here to read Full text of Tony Abbott's address to the Sydney Institute.

Stripped of the rhetoric, it seems Abbott is going to take over the Murray Darling river system, in much the same way as the Howard government managed during its reign, and revive an army fighting under a Green Corp flag to save Australia from exotics and turn it back into a wilderness garden (or should that be a garden of wilderness?)

There's nothing like announcing a war on the environment to get Abbott supporters excited, especially a make work one involving an expenditure of $750 million as a way of getting stuck into environmental issues.

And there's a sublime cheekiness to Abbott's way with words - slagging off Chairman Rudd for expensive stunts, then announcing one in a weasel word way, while also announcing something will have to give way, to pay for the stunt, without announcing the something that might fall under the axe:

Over the next few months, I will be inviting relevant organizations to put proposals along these lines to the Coalition for possible adoption as policy in the run up to the election. At, say, an average cost per place of $50,000 a year, a 15,000 strong conservation corps would be expensive – although not on the scale of the Rudd Government’s unfunded stimulus measures. It would be an order of magnitude altogether greater than previous spending on green jobs that would indicate a new willingness to tackle environmental problems that have been festering for generations. Along with its other new policy proposals, the Coalition will announce the savings and revenue measures from which it will be funded in good time for the election.

He'll be inviting relevant organizations to put proposals for a possible adoption in the election run-up ? Wow, what a firm stand and such decisive action. And such an eminently sensible socialist, government-driven solution. Out of work? Join Tony's green army ...

Better still, green is now the new blue:

For at least a generation, a large percentage of Australians have ranked the environment as an important issue; so important that the Green vote is now about 10 per cent. Still, actually working for a better environment is something that people mostly have to volunteer for and that today’s farmers, miners and foresters have mostly grafted onto their principal task of making a living. Rather than being a full-time, permanent job, practical environmentalism has been more of an interest or a hobby. It’s time to give more Australians the chance to make this a career, a vocation, a mission.

Uh huh, practical measures for practical times. By getting the government to form an army. And presumably an end to the notion of abusing people who fancy themselves as green by labelling and reviling them as greenies?

A concern to protect the environment should mean much more than voting Green or joining Greenpeace. It should mean preferring those trying to do good rather than merely to look good on this issue. It should mean preferring a government that will make a practical difference rather than one that strikes poses and breaks promises.

Uh huh, green is good, but Abbott is way more greenie than those poseur greenies who just want to pull the chicks and strut about, rather than making a practical difference.

That means you can still keep slagging off those greenie ponces who couldn't organize a barbeque in an abbattoir. So why not head off to Abbott's blog in today's Daily Terror, where you can read him possum stirring in What Aboriginal people need to get ahead, wherein he gets upset about 'green preference deals' and 'green tape' in relation to those Queensland rivers.

But what will Abbott's new green army do in its war on the environment? Seems like 'things':

This new conservation corps wouldn’t be a traineeship programme or an employment programme with mere spin-off benefits for the environment. It would be Australia’s first deployment of large numbers of people on behalf of the environment and the first time that we have approached environmental remediation with the same seriousness and level of organization that we have brought, say, to dealing with bushfires or other local and regional emergencies.

Yep, the environment is an emergency, like bushfires, and it needs an army to tackle it, in the Australian way. But what of the Howard government's previous war on the environment?

Over 11 years, the 18,000 people who cumulatively participated in the Howard Government’s Green Corps planted more than 14 million trees, erected more than 8000 kilometres of fencing and undertook more than 5000 flora and fauna surveys. The main problem with the Green Corps was that it was too small – there were never enough Green Corps teams to deal with all the environmental restoration projects submitted by councils, landcare groups, and national parks. Too many of them involved studying a problem rather than fixing it. As well, the original Green Corps format, individual teams of ten young environmental trainees with a supervisor/trainer, did not lend itself to tackling larger restoration projects.

So what's needed is an even bigger lettuce leaf with which we can flail away at surveys, and fencing and tree plantings?

What's that you say?

The environment might actually need a more substantial approach, especially if all this chitter chatter by scientific types and boffins about climate change is true? Evidently you fail to understand that it's the Warringah peninsula that's the real issue:

On the Warringah peninsula, for instance, Middle Creek between Oxford Falls and Narrabeen Lagoon flows through an area of extremely degraded bush alongside the Wakehurst Parkway. Nearly a hundred years of exposure to garden run-off, sewerage overflow, and the seeds which birds, animals and passing traffic have deposited has turned the valley floor into a tangle of morning glory, elephant ear, privet bushes and asparagus weed in which a few remnant gums and palms struggle to survive.

Such a nasty environment, and so full of nasty exotics - eek, asparagus weed and morning glory and elephant ear and privet - and so needing to be turned back into prime bushland of the kind still to be found in the wild rivers of the York peninsula.

Yep, what we need is an uber team of native gardeners:

Over the past 15 years, the intermittent attention of a Green Corps team, a few Work for the Dole crews, local volunteers and council bush regenerators have largely failed to make a difference. There just hasn’t been a sufficiently large, sufficiently motivated and sufficiently sustained workforce to get such a big area of weeds under control. This is just one example of the thousands of locations where riparian vegetation, urban bush and degraded farmland needs the sustained attention of a large labour force in order to be restored to something like original condition.

Ugh, yucky weeds. God how I hate the way they ruin the grass behind my picket fence.

Well it sounds exciting, especially if you think degraded farmland needs to be restored to its original condition. Err, was that as farmland, or as original bush?

Never mind, it's great that the opposition has declared war on the environment with its new army, and luckily it's nothing like the wars that Chairman Rudd declares:

Announcing that climate change is the “great moral challenge of our time”, as if war, injustice, poverty and man’s inhumanity to man are somehow second order issues, is typical of the Prime Minister’s rhetorical overkill. If it’s the subject that he’s currently talking about, it must be the most important one in the world. This is the conceit which explains how he can have several “number one” priorities and how the announcement of a mere campaign (against obesity, binge drinking or executive pay, for instance), if it’s his, is tantamount to Australia declaring war.

Oh dear, that's a tad unfortunate, that wording. That does rather raise the issue of climate change. Well we know - and are told once again the standard line which the likes of Bronwyn Bishop seemed to have mastered - that there's no point going down the path of

... a great big new tax on everything that merely masquerades as a programme to improve the environment.

Not when there's so much weeding to be done!

I know, I know, I promised to scream when I next heard this parrot line parroted - a great big new scream about everything - but that was before I was being swept along by the gushing river of Abbott words in praise of green thinking:

In the next few weeks, I will outline the Coalition’s thinking on how to foster environmental improvements that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Reducing emissions matters because many scientists think that they are having a serious impact on climate. Australia should be a good international citizen and play our part in any effective international campaign to reduce the risk of man-made climate change. In the wake of Copenhagen, though, not even Mr Rudd thinks that the world is likely to heed so-called moral leadership from Australia. Australia, he now says, will do no more and no less than other countries which has been the Coalition’s position all along.

Oh dear, does that mean the end of "climate change is crap"? What will the commentariat columnists make of this? Well thank the lord we'll be doing no more or less than anyone else, though remarkably we have thus far managed to do less than those devious, deviant Europeans.

Perhaps what we need is a good bout of Australian exceptionalism. Bugger the world, we can roll up our shirtsleeves and tackle it all ourselves. We don't need those black helicopters when we step up to the battle lines:

Despite its importance, the Murray-Darling basin is unlikely ever to be the subject of an international conference because it’s a problem that only Australians can fix. Australians alone can make a difference here. We shouldn’t wait for the international community to reduce its emissions or rely on the drought to break. In paying so much more attention to climate change than to the Murray-Darling basin, Mr Rudd has focused on problems that are other people’s responsibility as much as our own and on possible solutions that other countries must embrace as well as ourselves. Global problems might be more interesting than domestic ones to a former diplomat but governments which want to make a difference know where their most pressing responsibilities are and where their real power lies.

Yep, as warriors, it's so much wiser to fight in our own back yards. Imagine the presumption of trying to fit into a world which just doesn't care.

Well I'll spare you the sight of Abbott going misty eyed over the return of whales to Sydney's coastal waters (remember to hate those poseurs in Greenpeace, all show), or his love of the bush as a trekker canoeist surfer and volunteer firefighter, or his other credentials designed to establish that he's an uber practical environmentalist. You can read them yourself if you want a read of political dissembling at its finest.

Oh what the heck, just one grab:

The political left shouldn’t be seen as “owning” the environment (it’s too important for that) and I am determined to challenge any assumption that it does. Conservative political parties and the conservationist movement both want to preserve what’s best in our heritage. Different emphases notwithstanding, they have a shared respect for the natural order of things. It was, after all, the Fraser Government (not the Whitlam or the Hawke governments) that protected the Barrier Reef and Fraser Island, established the Kakadu National Park, ended Australian whaling and saved Antarctica from development. It was the Howard Government (not the current one) that led the campaign against Japanese whaling, established mandatory renewable energy targets for the power industry, and committed $10 billion to restoring the Murray-Darling basin.

Little did you know that under John Howard you were living in the best of times for green environmental awareness. But you were. Oh heck another grab:

It’s high time that the green movement rethought its habitual preference for Labor because actual environmental improvements are more likely to come from conservative governments (that get things done) than from Labor ones (that have a tendency to lock land up without maintaining it). The environmental movement would be challenged, I think, to nominate any substantial achievement during the Rudd Government’s first two years besides the formal ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, compliance with which was actually the work of John Howard rather than Kevin Rudd.

You see, you see, Chairman Howard was more green than Chairman Rudd, when you were just thinking they were two green peas in a very green pod. So pod-like it was hard to tell them apart.

Well as a green make over, I was suddenly reminded of Homer Simpson trying to cover his balding pate with three strands of hair, combed and re-combed, but never mind that. How did the commentariat columnists react to the news that green is good?

Well Andrew Bolt is on holiday, presumably still brooding about the way The Times borrowed his review of Avatar and the notion that green is no longer minty cool, it's sludge-brown boring.

As for Tim Blair, he's more excited by the news that Scott Ritter is inclined to talk about sex on line (Pervert for Peace), though he does take the time to slag off Danny Glover's gaia-ism, and marvel at the way the URL for "My Emissions Exchange" can also be read as "My Emission Sex Change". Oh yes, but I'm sure Tim Blair will be very excited about Abbott going green when he catches up with the news because Tim himself is a top notch caring environmentalist in the Tony Abbott style.

It's not entirely a drought or a wasteland in the world of Chairman Rupert's minions, as David Penberthy dons his Adelaide 3D spectacles and advises Abbott goes green with one top idea, one dodgy gimmick.

Happily Penberthy realises that the issues facing the Murray Darling have nothing to do with drought or climate change or anything like that greenie folderol and idle inner city sav blanc sipping specious nonsense:

This is Australia’s food bowl and its viability is under threat. And it’s not because of climate change, it’s because of petty state-based politics, rampant self-interest, and the sustained failure of Canberra to exercise its authority by stepping in, with a referendum if need be to give it full constitutional authority to manage water.

But what if there's not enough water to manage? What if the greedy guts humans along the banks of the river are part of the problem, but the problem has been caused by climate change? Will waving a federal wand suddenly fix state based politics and rampant self-interest? Will Canberra make it rain if we do a rain dance and shower money on the hapless crow eaters?

Well excuse me, I have a young 'un who needs to learn the benefits to be had in putting a tooth out for the tooth fairy ...

Meantime, there's little awareness in The Australian that Abbott's turned into an incredibly hulking greenie. Apart from publishing Abbott's speech, few seemed to feel the earth move at the news Abbott had turned environmentalist. Instead the top insight on offer is that Greenpeace activists are likely to prolong the Japanese eating of whale meat by making the Japanese more nationalist. (Something fishy in whaling debate). Never mind that the greenies now have a top convert to the cause at the highest Liberal level! Their fearless leader. And he's going to be more activist than those poseur Greenpeace ponces, and he just loves to see the whales off Warringah. Watch out Japanese nationalists.

As usual, you have to shuffle off to that den of socialists and lefties at Fairfax for a different response, and it's by Ben Cubby in Combative Abbott turns green message on its head.

Well say no more, you know what to expect:

It is a pitch to what he perceives as a sensible, middle-ground environmentalism that is more concerned with preserving parks and planting suburban nature strips than transforming the economy to run on renewable energy.

It relegates climate change and environmental politics to a second-order issue, a view many people familiar with the four terms of the Howard government will be comfortable with. Abbott is betting his credentials on the theory that most people don't think climate change requires serious action.

Oh dear, Cubby the recalcitrant:

The Coalition is now way out on a limb, sharing the trembling branch with some US Republicans, Canadian Conservatives and Saudi Arabian princes. And Abbott's speech would have received the stamp of approval of Coalition climate sceptics.

He acknowledges that ''many scientists think'' that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a good idea, but does not follow through the logic that this admission entails.

Human-induced climate change is a binary issue: it's either happening or it's not. If it's not, why bother reducing emissions at all? If it is, there's little point in half-serious solutions.

Oh dear, is he saying that Abbott ducked the hard yards by leaving the issue of "emissions" to a later date? And instead preferring verbal emissions of a blander kind for the moment?

Abbott's new take on environment is an attempt to straddle this divide, simultaneously dog-whistling to climate sceptics while foreshadowing ''direct action'' to reduce emissions. There is no mention of tackling the source of emissions and no hint that the appeasement of heavy-polluting industry will end.

His speech perpetuates the fiction that Australia is in danger of leading the world in climate change action. In fact, Europe has a well-established emissions trading scheme that has little or no impact on jobs and wealth.

And then Cubby ends his piece with what sounds like a prophesy, or a premonition or a curse:

The public can expect to hear more about Abbott's practical, hands-on, tree-planting persona in coming weeks.

Oh no, Tony Abbott as a greenie, concerned activist environmentalist week in, week out. Can't we just trash the wild rivers until they end up like the Murray Darling? It'd be so much easier, and so much quieter.

(Below: next week, green hulking environmentalist Tony Abbott goes feminist in a big way. More First Dog here).