Joe Hildebrand: Australian Labor Party-Greens coalition ‘fraught with danger’

There seems a growing proposition that the Greens and Labor may share power should the latter win the next election - and history tells us that’s not a good idea, writes Joe Hildebrand.

If there were any remaining doubts that the Australian Greens are deliberately plotting to destroy the Australian Labor Party, then leader Adam Bandt helpfully confirmed it over the weekend.

Speaking to the News Corp Sunday mastheads, Bandt said the Greens would push for a power-sharing arrangement with Labor should the major party fall short of a lower house majority.

“Just a few hundred people need to shift their vote and we will be in a power-sharing government,” he said.

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

Greens MP Adam Bandt. Picture: Jay Town

The Greens would use this power to make the ALP go harder and faster on climate change and impose more taxes on business and the rich — as well as a $20 billion plan for free childcare, among other things.

The policies might sound important but in fact this is all about politics.

Bandt has waved the carrot of a Labor-Greens coalition before and it has been roundly, soundly and unequivocally rejected by Anthony Albanese — and rightly so.

The last time Labor was in minority government and did a deal with the Greens to hold power it was the political equivalent of swallowing a cyanide pill.

If they did it again it would be the political equivalent of swallowing an atom bomb.

Let’s just take a quick refresher.

Illustration: Terry Pontikos

Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election with a rolled-gold core promise to introduce an emissions trading scheme — which, never forget, was ultimately blocked by the Greens.

Rudd then kicked his ETS into the never-never and got rolled himself as a result.

Julia Gillard then promised there would be “no carbon tax under the government I lead” only to have said government’s majority obliterated at the 2010 election and go cap in hand to the very same minor party which had done more than any other to wipe it out.

Needless to say the Greens insisted on a carbon tax and Gillard’s minority government duly obliged, only to have even more of its number wiped out at the following election — a loss that would likely have been even greater had Gillard still been PM and not replaced by Rudd in his last incarnation as furniture saviour.

There are two things worth noting here.

The first is that even after Gillard did the Greens’ bidding, with all the electoral carnage that entailed, the Greens still betrayed Labor and publicly both abandoned and denounced the Gillard government midterm.

The second is that Gillard is the only rolled PM in the past decade of destruction to carry herself with any semblance of grace.

Former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Picture: Liam Kidston

She has done more than Rudd, Abbott and Turnbull combined to maintain the dignity of the prime ministerial office after having left it.

This has little to do with the argument at hand but at least shows that whatever her failings as a PM, Gillard was a pretty decent person. And the Greens totally smashed her even after she gave them what they wanted.

In life this is what sociopathic people do and in politics this is what sociopathic parties do.

They push you for a favour and if that favour falls short of indentured slavery they send you to the guillotine. So why is Adam Bandt still pushing for a power-sharing arrangement with Labor even after Labor’s leader has repeatedly and comprehensively ruled it out?

And after everyone who’s ever tripped over the rotten log of Australian politics knows it was that exact same deal that cost Labor power last time? The answer is as simple as it is sinister: The Greens don’t want Labor to win.

There is every chance — arguably an unbackable one — that Labor will get a majority in the House of Reps at the election in a few months’ time and the Greens cannot let that happen.

They want and need Labor to go backwards from where they are in the polls so that they can hold the balance of power.

Why else would Bandt tell News Corp papers — which probably reach both the biggest blue-collar and biggest conservative audience in the country — that the Greens are going to be running the show?

He’s not trying to reassure these readers, he’s trying to scare the shit out of them.

And if swinging and working-class voters freak out and turn a Labor majority government into a Labor minority government he will be holding all the cards in his hot little hands.

And if the Coalition wins again the Greens will be even better off.

The eternal party of protest will be all the more animated to whinge and whine about liberalism and capitalism and all the other isms that consume their otherwise untroubled upper-middle-class minds.

And both scenarios would also leave Labor critically weakened, which would further the Greens’ parasitic agenda of nibbling away at Australia’s oldest political party until they, not the grand old ALP, become the de facto opposition.

Make no mistake, that is the plan.

And, needless to say, it would be fatal for the left because the ideological left needs to be in opposition for eternity in order to meet its primal need for eternal complaint.

People with real problems tend to be more pragmatic and so should park their votes firmly with Labor — or, if they are of a conservative bent, Scott Morrison’s limitlessly pragmatic regime.

Either way they can rest assured the miserable Marxists on the hard left will do nothing to help them and are instead hellbent on sabotaging the party than can.