Yet as a loyal ALP senator she put her own feelings to one side in the 2010 election campaign when she was questioned about gay marriage in a Channel 10 interview. ‘‘The party’s position is very clear that this is an institution that is between a man and a woman,” she said. ‘‘I am part of a party, and I support the party’s policies.”
The backlash, such as it was, was muted. The Star Observer labelled Wong a hypocrite and Bob Brown declared he was “horrified”. Yet his horror was not so great as to prevent the Greens leader from signing a coalition agreement with Julia Gillard five weeks later when the election didn’t go as well as the prime minister had hoped.
Brown was inclined to be passionate, but he seldom let his passions get the better of him. He understood politics offered no solutions, only trade-offs. “Here is a very good example of us saying, ‘we accept what the people of Australia say, and we’re moving to get them a good outcome’,” he told the ABC at the time.
Anthony Albanese is unlikely to find Adam Bandt as accommodating if the 2025 election results in a hung parliament, as conventional wisdom tells us it will. The Greens stopped playing by grown-ups’ rules about five years ago when the pragmatic Richard Di Natale resigned as leader and was replaced by the hardline Bandt.
The election of three new Greens MPs in 2022 and three more senators was seen as an endorsement of Bandt’s uncompromising radicalism. The Greens are no longer satisfied with incremental gains in bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice. The new regime’s strategy is not to persuade but to conquer.
For Bandt, legalising same-sex marriage wasn’t a victory but merely the elimination of “one part of a system that bombards LGBTIQ people from every angle”. Trans rights are non-negotiable, Bandt assures his followers on social media. Gender-affirming healthcare should be free on Medicare. The carbon tax Brown persuaded Gillard to adopt was a sellout. Now, the Greens demand the immediate cessation of coalmining and gas extraction.
Bandt calls for “radical, nonviolent civil disobedience against big corporations backed by the state”. He supports Extinction Rebellion’s tactics of shutting down the streets but says “there needs to be more … more protests, more rallies and more power and wealth back to the people”.
His rhetoric in recent months signals his intention to draw Labor into a governing partnership if neither major party achieves a clear majority at the election. If Albanese were to accept an agreement on Bandt’s terms, the country would be in deep trouble.
The contraction of the resources sector would constrain Australia’s wealth-earning capacity for decades. The adoption of Bandt’s fiscally incontinent policies of including dental and mental care in Medicare, waiving students’ debt and the wholesale construction of public housing would entrench a suicidal level of recurrent public spending. Yet Bandt, believe it or not, is the acceptable face of today’s Greens. Wealth redistribution and climate change justice are merely the beginning.
The Greens no longer are content with changing institutions. Their goal is to pull them down.
The ideological ambitions of today’s Greens extend far beyond the preservation of the natural environment. Their goal is a full-scale cultural revolution replacing individual rights with group-identity-based rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth and power, the silencing of dissent and the collapse of the old order.
The path the Greens have taken towards a racially charged, new Marxist agenda mimics the transformation of the US progressive left analysed by Christopher Rufo in America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, one of the most important books published since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Rufo traces the revolutionary left’s conscious strategy from the 1960s onwards of the long march through the institutions starting with the universities. The embrace of critical theory and the high-minded condemnation of “isms” – capitalism, imperialism, sexism and colonialism – were the means for radicalising academe. The strategy is set out in the writings of the movement’s intellectual leaders like Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paula Freire and Derek Bell, none of whom were squeamish about declaring allegiance to a Marxist cultural revolution.
With the BLM movement, America’s cultural revolution reached its endgame, Rufo writes. Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory of society, which he developed in near obscurity, has embedded itself in every major institution from Ivy League universities to Fortune 100 corporations.
Anti-racism has become a substitute for morality. Society is divided along a crude moral boundary of “racist” and “anti-racist”. The Greens have been captured by this subversive narrative, particularly in the Senate under Bandt’s deputy, Mehreen Faruqi. Faruqi fell for the BLM line and its crazy conclusion that the way to fight racism was to de-fund the police.
“In Australia, we should be having the same conversations about the viability of a so-called justice system that perpetrates violence on Indigenous people,” she said after attending a BLM rally in Sydney in June 2020. “We should not be afraid of a conversation about rethinking the very idea of policing and incarceration.”
Faruqi says the country that welcomed her as a migrant from Pakistan more than 30 years ago is beset by racism.“We must proactively dismantle the racist system we live in, a system that oppresses and silences people of colour.” When the Senate passed a motion congratulating the King on his accession to the throne, Faruqi switched to full victimhood mode, declaring it “a painful reminder to people of colour like me, who migrated here from a place that was colonised, ravaged and looted by this very British Empire”.
Faruqi’s essentialist view of race, and claim to special status as a “person of colour”, is not shared in the wider community. Her demand for the abolition of horse racing on cruelty grounds and her ritual petulant performance on Melbourne Cup day is further evidence of a Senator who is off with the fairies, wholly unsuited to the administration of public affairs. A Labor-Greens partnership should be unthinkable while Faruqi remains deputy leader, controlling the passage of legislation through the upper house.
As leader of business in the House of Representatives under Gillard, Albanese would be aware of the damage to Labor’s reputation from its 2010-13 alliance with the Greens. By comparison with today’s Greens leaders, Brown stands out as a moderate and eminently reasonable.
The Prime Minister would be well advised to rule out negotiations with Bandt and Faruqi in the event of a hung parliament, together with any suggestion of an exchange of preferences. He might contemplate the Bible’s message in the Book of Proverbs: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.”
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