Labor says the Greens aren’t Bob Brown’s party any more. He disagrees

“I don’t think the Greens are the party of Bob Brown any more,” Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said last week.

Her insult plays to a clear Labor theme: that the minor party – having stymied the government’s agenda – has morphed into something ghastly.

“Adam Bandt has changed the way that the Greens political party operates,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese agreed. “They don’t talk about the environment any more. They talk about some extreme agenda.”

Bob Brown retired only to crusade for his party’s causes just as intensely.Credit: Andrew Meares

Bob Brown, who helped found the party with a platform stemming from his protest against the construction of a dam on Tasmania’s Franklin River in the 1980s, has heard the extremism claims before. He says Plibersek and Albanese are the ones who have abandoned nature and left-wing politics.

“Anthony Albanese is turning out to be the least environmentally minded Labor prime minister in a long time,” says Brown, 79.

On fossil fuels, fish farming and native logging, Albanese had let down environmentalists, Brown says.

“It’s a bit tragic that even Tanya Plibersek, who hasn’t turned out to be a strong environment minister, is having the ground cut from underneath her repeatedly by the prime minister,” Brown says, going so far as to say Albanese is “sounding like a right-wing National Party apparatchik” when he talks about the Greens.

Brown’s intervention has weight. Unlike many political leaders, he went out on top in 2012 with the party in a formal pact with Julia Gillard’s Labor government. And where the Democrats and a run of personality-focussed minor parties have come and gone, the Greens have grown in strength since, especially at the last election when it went from one to four lower house seats and positioning itself for a key role in any future minority Labor government.

“The electorate accepts that the Greens are the best party for the environment, but I’m what I’m seeing now is the electorate seeing more and more that the same applies for social justice,” Brown says. “It’s an evolution of understanding.”

However, the Greens’ practices are coming under more scrutiny from their rivals. The party has deployed inflammatory rhetoric, blocked housing bills, claimed Labor is “complicit in Israel’s genocide”, castigated changes to make the NDIS sustainable, and adopted the same policy on interest rates as former US president Donald Trump.

Days of parliamentary debate last month were dominated by Labor and Coalition claims, sometimes backed by experts in policy fields, that Greens proposals and talking points are either misleading or false.

One progressive Labor MP said: “There is a new vitriol with the Greens, a sharpness, a nastiness, that wasn’t there before as a younger generation take control.”

In one example that drew headlines, Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather spoke at an August rally defending the CFMEU after reporting showed the union, who had several leaders accused or convicted of crimes, had been widely infiltrated by bikies and underworld figures.

Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather sided with the scandal-plagued CFMEU at an August Brisbane rally.Credit: AAP

The name of the party derived in part from green ban strikes led by the precursor to the CFMEU, the deregistered Builders Labourers Federation, in the 1980s.

“[Former CFMEU boss] John Setka’s out there saying men have lost rights because Rosie Batty has been too successful in her campaign to reduce domestic violence,” Plibersek said. “What is Adam Bandt doing to pull Max Chandler-Mather into line to reject that sort of misogynist rhetoric?”

The Peter Dutton-led opposition has seen an opening: highlighting the risk of Labor adopting left-wing policies if it is forced to rely on the Greens. It is a play that has worked before. Brown’s convoy protesting Indian mining giant Adani’s Queensland plans was a factor in Scott Morrison’s 2019 election win.

Albanese desperately wants to avoid that, trying instead to tar the Coalition with the Greens’ brush as the “No-alition”.

Labor has reason to worry. Its primary vote has hovered in the low to mid-30s for more than a decade and it won government with a record-low primary vote of 32.5 per cent in 2022. For all the conflict, Brown argues the Greens and Labor should work together.

The last time the Greens and Labor had a governing agreement, things ended poorly. Then-opposition leader Tony Abbott used the arrangement as a weapon against Labor, branding Brown the “real prime minister of Australia”, on his way to a 2013 election victory.

But Brown cites power-sharing arrangements in the ACT, New Zealand and Germany as successful examples. “The progressive populace voting Labor, Green and the teals want a progressive government, and it’s not up to Anthony Albanese or Labor to, for personal reasons, deny the [will of] the Australian populace.”

“There’s just this peculiar Labor Party hate for the Greens … which has got to be overcome in the interests of progressive politics,” he says.

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