Greens MPs like Bandt and Thorpe narcissists who can’t read a room

Greens MPs like Bandt and Thorpe are narcissists whose speeches are more about them than the issues or people they claim to represent.

On Monday, Greens MP Adam Bandt held a press conference to announce something or other.

Beforehand, a staffer placed the Australian flag in the corner so that his employer would not be photographed with the offending symbol.

Bandt later explained this decision. He rejected the flag under which he represents Australians. Let’s move on, he suggested.

But Australians didn’t want to move on. Bandt lay low for a few days. Perhaps he was busy with a manifesto. On Thursday, he found time to clarify his position.

He said he felt pride in presenting flags to new citizens and so on, in ceremonies which appear to have been expunged from Google, perhaps by the same staffer who moved the Australian flag on Tuesday.

Bandt claimed to represent Indigenous dispossession and pain. He preened as a self-appointed lightning rod for action.

Indigenous leaders united to respond to Bandt’s offer of support. They said: “Please, Adam, please don’t.”

By now, Greens colleague Lidia Thorpe felt left out. Why should Bandt get all the attention? She, too, wanted to throw smoke bombs aimed to offend as many people as possible.

Her parliamentary career, so far, has been marked by such moments.

Adam Bandt.

She told a Liberal senator “at least I keep my legs shut”, though she later got around to properly apologising.

She made light when Old Parliament House caught fire by observing that “the colonial system” seems to be burning down.

Thorpe also protested against the removal of detainees to Christmas Island. Some of these detainees were sex offenders. To be fair, Thorpe didn’t appear to be fighting for the rights of sex offenders, but something far dearer to her.

Footage showed her calling police officers “criminals”, in what played like a confected moment of misplaced outrage. The footage, it should be noted, was posted on one of Thorpe’s social media sites (or borrowed from the character of Lindsay, and her self-serving protest scenes in the US comedy, Arrested Development).

The pattern, with both Bandt and Thorpe? Their utterances seem to be more about them than the issues – and the stakeholders – which they claim to represent.

On Tuesday, Thorpe was on TV, to explain that the flag was an “obscenity”.

Her militaristic rhetoric was later likened – again by the kind of Indigenous voice Thorpe claimed to represent – to a naughty five-year-old in the classroom.

When Thorpe spoke of “infiltrating” the “colonial project”, she appeared to be reciting lines from an airport potboiler.

“I don’t want people to get upset by what I say,” she said. Too late. Lots of Australians were upset, especially Indigenous people who have served under the flag.

They didn’t want to embark on her journey to “mature” and “unite” the nation. Why would they? Thorpe did not sound very mature or uniting.

Many articulate and thoughtful people bathe debates in Indigenous injustice and climate change and energy alternatives. They win hearts and minds.

Sensible voices, they persuade rather than protest.

Lidia Thorpe. Picture: Getty

They do not preach obscure political dogmas to be feted by tiny choruses.

Instead, they seek to build rather than tear down. These are the people who stand to change the world.

Greens policy shows no such wisdom. For example, free child care and education are fine ideals – once you accept that they rightly belong in a letter to Santa.

The party’s policy platforms, otherwise, are largely about banning this or that. They are about saying no.

Let’s rush to renewable energy, and never mind that the electricity will run out. Let’s ban horse racing and greyhounds, and so what that 10,000 people will lose their jobs?

Sideshows, with names such as Bandt and Thorpe, don’t aspire to a better world. They promote ideologies, not people, which may explain their shared inability to read a room.

They have trampled on the flag and its institutions which reward them well and – this appears to be the important part – gets them noticed.

That they seek to overthrow systems, that they hate what most Australians uphold or cherish, invites judgments.

Narcissism figures, along with vanity. Hypocrisy rages, as does intellectual fraudulence – as well as an urgent need for their immediate resignations from parliament.

The bigger question is this: Who do people such as Adam Bandt and Lidia Thorpe represent except themselves?

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist.