People might be aware of the totally bizarre speech given by previously unnoticed Liberal senator George Brandis, in which he criticised the recent Greens' disruption of parliament during the Bush visit, equating it with Nazism. An odd equation, but some odd stuff comes out of parliament, so whatever. But, if anyone watched Lateline last night, you might have heard Brandis' bizarre defence for his initial comments. This was so bizarre that I'm going to quote some of the highlights below (thanks to the ABC):

GEORGE BRANDIS: "What I was trying to do last Tuesday and what I will continue to do is two things. First of all, I want to change the perception of the Greens.

You see, the Greens have got under the political radar screen in this country and I think they've got most people convinced that they are not a danger, they are not a threat, that they are basically well-meaning oddballs or perhaps they're radical liberals.But they're not that.

They're people who invoke the institution of Parliament but they defy the institution of Parliament as Senator Brown did last week. They're people who claim to be defenders of free speech and yet try to shout down somebody, President Bush, exercising the right of speech."

[Later...]

GEORGE BRANDIS: "The source of the ideas which inspire Green politics, you can trace all the way back to the dark forests of German romanticism two centuries ago.

We're used to the idea of a paradigm in which there's a left, right spectrum in which the Labor Party represents the left, and they're a kind of amalgam of socialism, although they've given up on socialism on the left and on the right you have the Liberal Party which is an amalgam of liberals and conservatives.

My point is that the ideas that inspire the ideology of contemporary Green politics, and that is a debate that is raging in western Europe at the moment, don't fit into that paradigm.

The sources, the mainsprings of contemporary Green politics arise outside the Liberal democratic or indeed the social democratic tradition."

[Later...]

TONY JONES "Do you now believe the Greens represent the same sort of threat that One Nation represented?"

GEORGE BRANDIS: "I think they represent a different kind of threat to democratic politics in this country.

But, if the Liberal Party made a mistake in not exposing One Nation for what it was early enough in the piece a few years ago, then that's not a mistake we're going to make with the Greens.

For a very long time now Bob Brown has had clear air. Somebody, I can't remember who, but somebody last week said that he'd become the de facto leader of the Leader of the Opposition.

There is a lot to be exposed about the Greens, about the ideas that underlie them, about the intellectual traditions to which they are heir and it's about time somebody blew the whistle on them. That was the purpose of my speech in the Parliament."