TASMANIAN Premier Lara Giddings this week declared peace for the forests. I trust she wasn’t waving a piece of paper from the foot of the steps after stepping off a plane. Green peace is an elusive concept, since the Greens can never be appeased. They have no concern for the pieces of people’s lives they leave behind.

When I was eight, green activists became active in Dorrigo, in north-eastern NSW. It was not the flashiest place on earth, but most had a job until the greenies put an end to the timber industry.

This week I have been in Tasmania, a state full of potential, but neutered by a philosophy that puts trees first, frogs second and families last. The Greens’ undergraduate pop-up-book philosophy promises the fairytale but delivers economic privation to those living many miles from the Manic Monkey Cafe in inner urban Nirvanaville.

If you really want to see what Green economic policy looks like, try Scottsdale in Tasmania. You won’t find many greenies or the green jobs they keep promising, but you will find economic misery left behind by Green policies.

One of the greatest attributes of Australian life is the expression of individual freedom. I can say, basically, what I like, pretty much write what I like, worship who I want, or not at all, and start whichever business I like. These freedoms are being curtailed by the inspired morality of the Greens, who are placing righteous caveats on the freedom of our economic development, expression of thought and even which science we can research.

The Greens have given the term "environment" an omnipotent, all-encompassing quality.

Whenever they utter the word it is a precursor that demands blind, unquestioning obedience.

Their cause always follows this path: find the high-colour issue, beatify the cause, then never be satisfied as they ride the horse called Insatiable Nihilism to the town of Shut Down.

The Greens started by opposing the Gordon-below-Franklin dam, but now the Wilderness Society in Tasmania opposes all dams, even small farm dams. The outcome is that it takes two years or more in Tasmania to get a farm dam approved.

The Greens have then been central in shutting down the other major industry in Tasmania, forestry. At the 2004 election the Greens were all about stopping the logging of "old-growth" forests. Now we have another forestry deal, old-growth forests have morphed into all native forests, including regrowth, and the Greens want to shut the whole industry down.

Global warming has morphed into climate change. A $23 carbon tax will, at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, morph into a $131 carbon tax to shut down the entire coal industry. How do the Greens achieve these results when nine out of 10 don’t vote for them? Don’t be fooled by the complexion of their kaftan; their thuggery is different. Recently the Greens have put pressure on a large retailer not to sell products made from Tasmanian native forests.

The tactics of commercial boycott, because you don’t share the culture of the targeted merchants, have historically been abhorred.

But we seem to let the Greens and GetUp! get away with it.

The victims of these cultural pogroms are hidden from the ABC audience of Q&A. Like the consequences of a conquering army, the fruits of a green victory are depression, unemployment and loss of property values and rights for the defeated people.

The results are there for all to see in Scottsdale, where the economic rug has been pulled out from beneath the town. For the people who stayed, their house values have halved and the Greens think a fair economic prospect is an unemployment cheque.

Last week Greenpeace activists used whipper-snippers to destroy a CSIRO experimental GM wheat crop. A local Greens politician gave his endorsement to this holy crusade to destroy scientific research and public property. He absolved his flock, saying "You have to stand up for what you believe in sometimes." I’m glad he doesn’t believe in capital punishment.

For the Greens, sometimes they like the science, sometimes they don’t. Ask questions on the science of climate change and you are a denier; destroy a research crop and you are a crusader.

Would we endorse the same action for others? There is neither grace, nor charm, nor style from the person otherwise known as a bully.