The logic of the 2022 election is going to play out. It will bring to a zenith a rivalry decades in the making. It spells a conflict between a Labor government, elected on a weak primary vote and determined not to appease the Greens, and the Greens, now empowered, lodging across-the-board demands against Labor with a populist rhetoric.
The Greens believe with 12 senators holding the balance of power and public opinion backing more action on climate change that Anthony Albanese must accommodate the Green agenda in this parliament or lose votes to the left. Anyone who doubts this should replay the National Press Club appearance last week of Greens leader Adam Bandt, a conviction politician in full flight. His message is the 2022 election is a watershed – that the pro-climate change sentiment it represented, hostile to the Coalition, sceptical to Labor – is just the start. Bandt wants to turn the 2022 trend into a remake of politics.
At the moment the threat to Labor comes from the left, not the right. The Coalition is engaged in long-run damage repair. “We had a climate alternative and an economic alternative to both the establishment parties,” Bandt said of the election. “Labor’s vote went backwards, the Liberals’ vote went backwards and the Greens’ vote went up. People voted for the Greens in record numbers to help shape this country’s future.”
The Prime Minister and Chris Bowen scored a brilliant political win over the Greens with their bill and its 43 per cent emissions reduction floor – a breakthrough event – but Labor will find the Greens a tougher future proposition from a stronger bargaining position. Bandt said the community had heard the Greens “loud and clear” and they were part “of the biggest crossbench this country has ever seen”.
The Greens intend to wedge Labor, seek to amend its budget, insist Labor make new laws to tax the gas companies, pressure Labor to introduce the popular Greens economic agenda – immediate free childcare and put dental into Medicare – and will wage a relentless campaign against Labor to halt new coal and gas projects.
This will constitute something Australia hasn’t seen for decades – a radical leftist agenda from a strong parliamentary position spiced with the appeal for even stronger climate action, higher taxes on multinationals and billionaires, and freer public services than Labor can finance.
The Greens seem drunk with hubris. But the teals have created an appetite for voter experimentation. Youths, professional women and tertiary-educated voters may continue the surge to progressivism and away from the major parties. Bandt, having voted for Labor’s climate bill, is now unleashing on Labor a retaliation agenda that assumes the public move to the left at the election has much further to run.
“With Peter Dutton as their leader, we expect the Liberals will go backwards,” Bandt said.
“The Greens are now the only social-democratic party in Australia. We see it as our job to get the country back to a fairer place so everyone can have an affordable home, a free education, healthcare that includes our teeth and our mental health. We want to put an end to the outrageous stage three tax cuts and end the billions of dollars of public monies going straight into the hands of big corporations.”
The risk for Labor is that it becomes a sitting duck before this assault, constrained by massive debt, a modest mandate and locked into policy incrementalism as Bandt runs a grievance line claiming working people are going backwards, that wealth inequality is “the worst it has ever been” and that Labor’s stage three tax cuts will ruin our progressive tax system and grant a billionaire such as Clive Palmer a $9000 tax cut – taking this country “a big step closer to US style inequality”.
“Neo-liberalism, privatisation and corporate greed has gone way too far,” Bandt said. “We believe Labor has made too many sacrifices to appease the right to get into power and that might send the country broke. The Greens want Clive Palmer to pay more tax but Labor wants to give him a tax cut.”
Bandt said the climate wars could be ended only by keeping coal and gas in the ground. With the teals in harness, he is convinced public opinion will move this way during the term. He wants to break Labor’s will in keeping open the option of new coal and gas projects – and Labor is already looking equivocal.
The Greens leader said: “At some point in our history we have to say it’s time for no more coal and gas projects. The United Nations believes it’s time now, the International Energy Agency believes it’s time, the Pacific Island leaders believe it’s time, thousands of young climate strikers believe it’s time, even the Pope believes it’s time.
“Labor seems to believe something different.”
Bandt will seek a “climate trigger” in environmental law to veto projects based on emissions criteria. His pitch that Labor must fix the tax loopholes exploited by the gas companies has validity with Labor already under pressure from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission report to move against the gas companies over domestic supply.
The Greens leader said free childcare and dental into Medicare could be financed by taxes on multinationals and billionaires. He taunts Labor, saying this could be one of the “great reforming parliaments of all time” – it just needs Albanese to partner with the Greens.
But Albanese won’t fall into that trap, knowing it would risk the resurrection of the Coalition. Everyone knows Albanese won’t embrace the Greens economic agenda; the issue, however, is whether he pays a price at the ballot box.
Bandt said: “Our working presumption is that Australia will end this term of parliament with Labor the country’s centre-right party, the Liberals a far-right irrelevance, and the Greens the dominant social-democratic party in a country that still has a big beating progressive heart.”
This is the Greens’ age-old dream to replace Labor as the party of the centre-left. It won’t happen. But the prospect of structural change is real – for instance, a re-elected Labor government that loses seats off the cost-of-living trauma and becomes a minority Labor government sustained by an expanded crossbench of Greens and teals.
Bandt said Labor had spent the past three decades and then the past three years adopting the same economic policies as the Coalition. He said Labor assured people “there would be no real difference if the government changed” and “people heard the message and Labor’s vote went backwards”.
Albanese, therefore, has a historic mission this term – to consolidate Labor governance. That means standing on the centrist ground on which he won this year’s election and repelling the Greens’ assault from the left. It will demand all his skills.
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