Joe Hildebrand: Easy lesson in how to undermine Labor hopes

The hard left like to pretend they’re fighting the right. In fact, the only thing they ever damage is their own supposed side, says Joe Hildebrand.

The hard left like to pretend they’re fighting the right. In fact, the only thing they ever damage is their own supposed side.

This is because radicals are actually programmed to fight progress. No step in the right direction can ever be tolerated because it weakens their cause.

After all, you can’t be a revolutionary if there is nothing to revolt against.

Just take a look at the Greens. Over the past week alone we’ve seen the most embarrassing displays and ridiculous claims from their First Nations spokeswoman Lidia Thorpe, who is almost single-handedly derailing the campaign for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament from the left.

The Voice could be the most significant step forward to improving outcomes for Aboriginal people in this country since 1788 but Thorpe wants to blow it up because it doesn’t fit her extremist narrative of “war” and “treaty”.

Thorpe even signed on to a push by anti-Voice Coalition figures to investigate Indigenous bodies throughout the Voice campaign before being forced to withdraw by Greens leader Adam Bandt and blaming it on an “administrative error”.

Seriously.

And this is no stitch up by Sky News or this august masthead. This was exposed by The Guardian. When even the Turnbull Times reckons a lefty has gone a bit off-piste you know it’s time to start battening down the hatches in the Kremlin.

The good news is that if Minns wins the election he will have some say in that process.

But as much as the Greens might now be trying to shut Thorpe down, they can’t. They made her. They promoted and preselected her.

And she is in fact their perfect representative. She just doesn’t have the guile to hide her true colours.

After all, the Greens have a habit of siding with the right to destroy progress. It’s almost like it’s part of their manifesto.

It was only a little over a decade ago that the Greens again aligned themselves with the Coalition to vote down the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme — for which Labor had a full electoral mandate.

They then forced Julia Gillard to sign on to their preferred unmandated carbon tax, too clueless to realise they were forcing her to sign her political suicide note.

Thus the Greens managed to kill off the ETS and Australia’s first female prime minister in one fell swoop.

What champions of progress they are. Perhaps we should call them chumpions.

The problem is that it’s not just the Greens who are scorching the earth of the centre-left and indeed political moderates across the board.

A more jaw-dropping example is the campaign by anti-pokies activist Troy Stolz to try to take down NSW Labor leader Chris Minns in his own seat of Kogarah at the March state election.

Stolz is a whistleblower who obviously has a lot of personal stake in his crusade and good for him. He has every right to run as an independent, as does any other citizen.

Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe is almost single-handedly derailing the campaign for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament from the left.

What is more telling is the forces that have elevated him to prominence and effectively given him the platform on which to run.

It is no secret, for example, that Stolz has previously been heavily promoted by a certain infamous YouTuber with historic links to the left faction of the Labor Party.

It has also been suggested that some Labor operatives have previously leaked information to this individual. I wonder how they feel now knowing that they have indirectly fuelled a campaign against their own leader in the party’s first winnable state election in more than 15 years.

Ironically, under the rules of their own ideological heroes, such traitors would be taken out the back and shot. Fortunately for them the pragmatists of the NSW Right are more subtle.

This brings us to the real story in NSW Labor, which is the departure of General Secretary Bob Nanva for the state upper house.

Nanva, while he has made mistakes, was instrumental in doing one thing — giving Chris Minns a clear run for the leadership and thus giving Labor its first real shot at power in more than a decade.

As Paul Keating once said about Winston Churchill, he got almost everything wrong but the one thing he got right outweighed them all.

The question now is not what he does in parliament but who replaces him as Gen Sec. If it is not an individual from the Right with an outstanding instinct for mainstream Australia then NSW Labor risks losing everything it has gained and once more becoming a plaything of the undergraduate left.

The good news is that if Minns wins the election he will have some say in that process.

The bad news is that the lunar left are already undermining him and Labor in that goal.

These people are more dangerous than lemmings with friends.