Lidia Thorpe and Pauline Hanson’s failed alliance

After being outed for her appeal to Pauline Hanson, Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe has shown the hard left and hard right are really the same.

For many years now I have been arguing that all extremists are the same. That the hard left and hard right not only enable and fuel each other but that they also often end up in the exact same place saying the exact same things.

Indeed I said precisely that in this column a fortnight ago when I warned that Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe’s ranting against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament not only sounded like the arguments of the right but was also being used by the right as a weapon to campaign against it.

But even I did not in my wildest dreams foresee that Thorpe would be revealed as having actively pleaded to Pauline Hanson herself to block constitutional recognition for First Nations peoples.

For those who are just joining us from another planet, it was revealed this week that in 2017 Thorpe tweeted directly to the One Nation leader: “Pauline help us stop the constitution changes. Aboriginal people say no to constitutional change.”

Yes, the Greens’ deputy senate leader and spokesperson for First Nations peoples proactively and personally sought an alliance with Pauline Hanson to kill off constitutional recognition for First Nations peoples.

If I or anyone else at the myriad News Corp stables had reported such a thing it would have been dismissed by the Greens and the usual other affluent leftist elites as a conspiracy conjured by the “hate media”.

Indeed, that very term was coined by Greens founder Bob Brown after he coerced Julia Gillard into breaking her cornerstone election promise of never introducing a carbon tax and whose government’s response to criticism of that broken promise was an attempt to muzzle the media itself.

But unfortunately for the Greens the revelation of the would-be Thorpe/Hanson unity ticket was exposed by the highly urbane and progressive former Fairfax press now known as Nine Newspapers.

Senator Lidia Thorpe. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Appropriately enough for a party populated by countless closet communists they have been caught red-handed. And indeed this hard-left/hard-right social media reach-around is kind of like a pissant 21st century residual dribble of the Nazi-Soviet pact that saw Hitler and Stalin both invade Poland in 1939.

Obviously both the scale and extent are astronomically different, but the formula is the same. Hardliners and nutbags have an uncanny knack of coming together.

And so let’s come back to the issue at hand.

After being outed for her appeal to Hanson, Thorpe said that her bizarre plea merely referred to the previous Coalition proposal for constitutional recognition.

Oh, okay then. And yet she has been even more vocal in her condemnation of Labor’s more robust and practical plan, dismissing it as a “waste of money”.

But apparently this is a “waste of money” she now supports, because after being inundated by a flood of Green tears and a seeming fracture in her own party’s protection racket for her, Thorpe now says she will not campaign against the Voice.

Of course this doesn’t mean she will campaign for it — how could she? — so presumably she will just do nothing.

And so there we have it. The most supposedly “progressive” party in Australia whose First Nations spokesperson will run dead on the most groundbreaking reform for First Nations people in more than half a century.

These people are chumps of an embarrassingly high order, all the more embarrassing because they are of the most over-educated and overprivileged constituents ever to elect people to parliament. Say what you like about One Nation, at least some of their members are working class.

The Greens, by contrast, are campus crusaders who think they are the smartest of the smart. Just don’t ask them to do maths or relate to everyday working Australians.

Senator Pauline Hanson. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Indeed, Thorpe’s original plea to Hanson to block constitutional recognition was in response to a statement from the One Nation leader about penalty rates and tax cuts, which tells you all you need to know about the Greens’ priorities — not to mention their lucidity.

It is true that the Greens did very well at the last election. This is because Labor sensibly pursued a small target strategy while the Greens amped up the anger and hysteria against a deeply unpopular government.

Their candidates were also indirect beneficiaries of the Teal wave that did the exact same thing but with much more money and a slightly different shade.

Yet the end result of that self-satisfying inner-city revolution will be close to zero. Labor has a safe majority in the House of Representatives where Teal votes mean nothing and the Greens in the Senate have now been exposed as so revolutionary they are in fact reactionary.

Were Anthony Albanese to call an election tomorrow Labor would probably command a majority in both houses. And while his popularity will inevitably fade as harder decisions have to be made, the Coalition remains bear-trapped in an existential crisis and the Greens and Teals are crippled by their silly ideological peccadillos.

William Butler Yeats apocalyptically wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

And yet, amid a world that is lurching from the hard left to the hard right, Albo is somehow holding the centre. And as long as he does so his government will be rewarded.

The lunar left will suffer and the raging right will too. Lidia and Pauline will both fall by the wayside.

And so, just like the first sentence of this article, remember where you read it first.