“The Greens, and Senator Brown in particular, have been having a great week,” Bob Brown’s shameless spinner Ebony Bennett tells Crikey (see today’s comments section).

Sure – but that doesn’t change the fact that he said back in 1999 that the legislation that has made his week was “an environmental disaster” that “sets the nation’s environmental laws back 30 years.”

If you forecast the apocalypse on a regular basis and it never comes, you end up looking like the crazy cultists played by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and the other jokers from Beyond the Fringe in their The End of the World skit:

(Chanting) Now is the end – perish the world!

A pause

It was GMT, wasn’t it?

Yes.

Well, it’s not quite the conflagration I’d been banking on. Never mind, lads, same time tomorrow. We must get a winner one day.

Saint Bob, the Elder Statesman of Complaint Politics, doesn’t just have egg on his face. It’s the whole bloody omelette.

His court win was achieved under the 1999 Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The Greens, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society opposed the legislation.

The work on getting it through was done by the Democrats, the WWF and the Human Society International. Will Saint Bob acknowledge their contribution?

His grandstanding in 1999 was yet another triumph of Green political naivety – up there with Ralph Nader’s decision to run for the Presidency of the United States back in 2000 and attract enough votes away from Al Gore to ensure that George Bush wound up in the White House.

A very inconvenient truth indeed.