Andrew Bolt: Adam Bandt has failed by not dumping Lidia Thorpe as Greens MP

By not sacking Lidia Thorpe from the party, Adam Bandt has reminded Labor why it can never share real power with the Greens.

Yes, the appalling Lidia Thorpe has finally quit as deputy leader of the Greens. But why is Adam Bandt still leader?

Thorpe obviously had to go after being outed having an undisclosed affair with a former bikie boss while on parliament’s law enforcement committee, getting confidential police briefings on operations against outlaw bikie gangs.

But Bandt has failed by dumping Thorpe just as deputy leader, and not as a Greens MP, too.

After all, we only have Thorpe’s word that she didn’t leak any police information to her then lover, Dean Martin, ex-president of the Victoria chapter of the Rebels club.

I have zero evidence that she did, but also no explanation for what one of her staff members noted in her work diary after warning Thorpe last year the “risks are catastrophic” if her relationship with Martin was discovered.

Greens Leader Adam Bandt.

The staffer wrote Thorpe assured her she was being “really careful”, because she and communicated through the encrypted messaging app Signal and “clear their conversations once a week”.

But what was Thorpe “really careful” about? Hiding their relationship, or the topics they’d discussed?

By not sacking Thorpe from the party, Bandt has reminded Labor it can never share real power with the Greens, or lift the ban on Greens MPs on parliament’s powerful Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

This is not just because his deputy leader was so reckless. Nor because Bandt weakly claims his chief of staff never passed on a warning from Thorpe’s staff that she was sleeping with the ex-biker boss.

The bigger question is Bandt’s judgment: why he ever trusted Thorpe with any authority.

Thorpe is a notorious race-baiter who gloated when protesters, many Aboriginal, burned the doors of the Old Parliament House, tweeting: “Happy New Year everyone.”

Green Senator Lidia Thorpe.

She’s falsely accused prison warders of killing Aborigines in jail and in May screamed at police: “You are the criminals in this country.”

In August, Thorpe made a mockery of her official swearing of allegiance to the Queen, holding up a fist and falsely accusing the Queen of “colonising”. On the day of mourning for the Queen, she wiped her hands, covered in fake blood, on an Australian flag and yelled “the Crown has blood on their hands”.

Last year, she berated an elderly Aboriginal activist, Geraldine Atkinson, so viciously that Thorpe’s then chief of staff said he was “scared and in shock”.

How did Bandt trust her? And how can anyone now trust him?