The Green mile
The Greens under Adam Bandt have dropped any pretence of being merely a tree-huggers’ convention. By Nick Cater.
For those longing for a hung parliament, Anthony Albanese’s horror week was the right degree of bad. It reduced Labor’s chances of governing outright while shortening the odds of a partnership with the Greens.
“A minority government sounds like a bad thing,” a video on the Greens’ website explains. “But with a hung parliament, it’s not size that matters, it’s how you use it.” Adam Bandt staked his claim as Albanese’s governing partner in his National Press Club address last week. He listed the lower house seats where the Greens hope to finish second, giving them a chance of winning on preferences.
Bandt says he is counting on the full support of Climate 200 candidates. He hinted that the Greens would not be fielding candidates against any of them except in Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong. At the very least, Bandt assumes his party will control the upper house, guaranteeing it the role of kingmaker in what the video describes unsubtly as “a fully hung parliament”.
The prospect of Gillard-style minority Labor government in partnership with the Greens is miserable enough. The prospect of partnership with a party that’s captured by the fruitcake left is positively scary. The party has dropped any pretence it is merely a tree-huggers’ convention since Richard Di Natale resigned as Greens leader at the start of 2020. Under Bandt, the party has adopted a hard-left socialist agenda that advocates a state-run economy, punitive taxes, restrictions on free speech and the appeasement of tyrants.
Its platform blends the familiar policies of the old left with the postmodern nonsense of the new. It advocates a cradle-grave welfare system in which dentistry and mental health are bolted on to Medicare. Welfare will be raised to a minimum of $1232 a fortnight, pensions increased and work for the dole and the cashless welfare card abolished. If these uncosted hikes in recurrent government spending aren’t enough to choke the private sector, the Greens have other policies that will. They include the nationalisation of health, education, energy and transport. The way the Greens tend to look at the world, the only body that can be trusted to run things fairly is the state.
The proposed 6 per cent wealth tax on billionaires suggests unfamiliarity with the role of capital investment in the production of goods and services and creation of jobs. Taxing companies according to turnover rather than profits is a recipe for mass bankruptcy. The disastrous consequences of the Greens’ economically suicidal emissions reduction target are well understood.
In place of the productive economy, the Greens promise an ever-expanding woke economy, providing pointless, unnecessary or pernicious employment for graduates with blathery degrees. It promises funding increases for activist groups and government quangos like the Human Rights Commission. The ABC will be given a $783m spending boost and the Australian Communications and Media Authority will be beefed up so it can better police the Murdoch press.
The anti-racism industry will receive funding to further the causes of intersectional and critical race theory. Federal MPs, senators and employees will be forced into training encouraging them to “unpack white privilege and white fragility, in the context of personal, professional and community spaces”.
Taken as a whole, the Greens’ platform will bring about an unprecedented distribution of wealth from the middle class to the laptop class. The first and sometimes the only beneficiaries of government programs are those who administer them.
There is a reason the Greens are strongly supported in Canberra and the party hopes to take an ACT Senate position away from the Coalition. For all the altruist rhetoric about economic justice for the disadvantaged, its policies are calibrated to assist its core constituency: younger university-educated professionals with comfortable prospects who rely on government for their income in whole or in part.
Six out of 10 (59 per cent) Greens voters have a university degree and almost half (49 per cent) are under 35, a survey of 6000 voters by Compass Polling has revealed. Fewer than one in five Greens voters (19 per cent) are 55 or over. By contrast, 44 per cent of Coalition voters have degrees and the age profile is almost exactly reversed: a fifth are under 35 and almost half (47 per cent) are 55 or over.
Labor falls somewhere in the middle on education (46 per cent are graduates) and age. Roughly a third of Labor voters are under 35 (32 per cent) and another third (34 per cent) are 55 or over. This age profile may explain why the Greens promise to forgive some $69bn in outstanding HECS debt, abolish uni fees and pay student grants to cover cost of living.
It would be wrong to accuse the Greens of having no plans to cut spending. The party pledges to reduce defence spending to 1.5 per cent of GDP, a level not seen since before World War I. They will save money by buying fewer guns and tanks, and promise to get rid of US bases on Australian soil and renegotiate the ANZUS agreement. Why? Because the object of the agreement with the US should not be defending ourselves but “making us a better global citizen”. On top of everything, the Greens will strengthen Russia’s hand as an energy superpower by shutting down production of coal and gas. On strategic grounds, the Greens should not be let anywhere near the levers of government.
Albanese’s only credible course is to distance himself from the Greens and their Climate 200 proxy candidates with a rock-solid guarantee he won’t do deals. Such a display of moral courage might answer the question many are asking. By what right, other than hubris, does he call himself the alternative prime minister?