Anthony Albanese scores housing win over Greens as he seeks to avoid election result he dreads

Anthony Albanese on Monday. Picture: NewsWire / David Beach

Anthony Albanese has unleashed a ferocious election campaign attack designed to simultaneously damage the Greens and dispel the entrenched belief that Labor is on a predetermined, power-sharing path to minority government with Adam Bandt next year.

While the Prime Minister is famous for saying he loves to “fight Tories” the lesser known – but even more embedded – hostility is towards the inner-city Greens he has fought from street to street in council elections since he was a teenager.

Albanese’s attitude toward the Greens has developed into a take-no-prisoners and give-no-quarter approach in federal parliament based on a belief that in the end the Greens will not back the Coalition against Labor.

In short, the PM believes he can refuse to do deals with the Greens, including entering a formal power-sharing agreement if he loses Labor’s majority at the 2025 election, and still rely on them not helping Peter Dutton to bring down a minority government.

Albanese simply believes in giving the Greens nothing and expecting everything.

The Greens’ crushing defeat over the government’s Help to Buy and Rent to Build housing proposals after months of opposition is proof positive Albanese’s hard strategy is a winner especially when coupled with the Greens’ falling electoral support, and the fatal potential of a campaign depicting Bandt voting against the interests of renters and house buyers.

It was the third major policy win over the Greens in as many years.

Albanese had linked the Greens with the Opposition Leader as a “No-alition” opposing Labor’s Help to Buy plan in which the Liberals “never want to help and the Greens never want to buy”.

The linking of the two vastly different political parties was particularly harmful for the Greens but was also aimed at flipping the deadly political assumption among Labor MPs and voters that Albanese will be forced into a minority government with the Greens’ support after the next election.

While there are people falling over themselves to say this is the worst Labor government, or at least the worst since Gough Whitlam’s, no one thinks a minority Labor government bound to the Greens or a handful of so-called teal independents would be better.

This is the vision Dutton promotes and the one Albanese dreads.

But it is the vision Bandt wants to be fulfilled because he sees a Greens-dependent ALP delivering the Greens’ agenda.

In defeat, Bandt declared on Monday: “We’ll wave the housing bills through and take the fight to the next election, where we’ll keep Peter Dutton out and then push Labor to act on unlimited rent rises and tax handouts to wealthy property investors.”

Albanese can pocket his victory in the dying days of the 2024 parliamentary year but he is going to have to do more to dispel a Labor-Greens coalition in 2025 with the chilling fear of all the property, superannuation and wealth taxes that go with it.