Don’t label me more moderate, I back Adam Bandt’s Greens
A series of US presidents, from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Eisenhower, warned about corporations taking power from the people by buying political influence. Corporate power now rules the world, and the Greens, who are not beholden to the organised rich, have become the new focus of rage for the extreme right of politics. News that the right’s shadowy offset, Advance Australia, will spend millions attacking the Greens in the run to this year’s election highlights that anger.
Adam Bandt has solidified the Greens as Australia’s third political party. He has the intention to help shape future government direction, but the Greens’ policy of taxing the rich to help the poor (via such things as public education, hospitals and housing) is as attractive to the Gina Rineharts of the world as coalmining is to Vanuatu. Bandt has my full backing. One angle being peddled is that I was a more moderate leader than Bandt (“Bob Brown’s Greens wouldn’t recognise their own party”, The Australian, 6/1/2025). That’s rubbish. We are different people sharing the same Greens credo of social justice and environmental protection.
No contemporary Greens MP has stood up on a visiting US president as senator Kerry Nettle and I did when George W. Bush addressed parliament during the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Nor have I seen a current mouthpiece of the right, like its iconic Alan Jones, rail against a current Greens MP as he did against me and prime minister Julia Gillard when we were working to tackle climate change in 2012: “Quite frankly they should shove her and Bob Brown in a chaff bag and take them as far out to sea as they can.”
Perhaps remembering that nastiness influences Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to shirk environmental responsibility now. Though some 80 per cent of Labor voters want an end to native forest logging in NSW and Tasmania, not least to protect what’s left of the koala and swift parrot populations, Albanese is so terrified of being seen to appease the Greens that he has given the loggers rousing support.
That will cost Labor votes.
Likewise, he has mollycoddled the foreign companies who have taken over the industrial Atlantic salmon industry that is polluting Tasmania’s once-pristine seas. In this, Albanese is being shepherded by Coalition leader Peter Dutton, who wants to expand the polluting industry as well as abolish “green tape” – that is, federal environment laws.
Adam Bandt’s trips to Tasmania’s threatened forests and seas have drawn much less media attention. As destruction of Earth’s biosphere by the resource-extracting corporations accelerates and the economic and social impacts of global heating grow, environmental coverage has taken a back seat. The ongoing death of the Great Barrier Reef gets far less front-page coverage than the fortunes of corporations or the stock exchange.
No wonder the electorate of Australia is restless. In 2022 the vote went roughly a third each to the two old parties and “others”, with the Greens the largest and most influential party of those others. Expect that vote to grow in 2025 despite a historic effort by the big end of town, already under way, to stop it. More and more voters, especially young Australians, want to see governments tackle the growing gap between rich and poor as well as the threats to life on Earth, which this generation is handing to the next.
The current powerbrokers seem oblivious to predictions that real incomes may be halved within a lifetime by the impacts of runaway heating of the planet. And the rich have rocks in their heads if they think that informed swinging voters are not blaming climate change for the 14 per cent per annum increase in Australian insurance premiums in the past year alone. No effort to attack Bandt and his Greens team, who have policies to address these looming problems early – and so more cheaply and effectively – will drive informed Greens voters back to either Dutton or Albanese.
Expect more teals or conservative lifestyle-defenders to be elected in 2025 too, in the wake of the old parties’ expansion of coalmining, gas fracking and native forest incineration – though the teals split ranks on the Greens’ plan for a “climate trigger” to rein in the most polluting corporations. It will worry some breakaway voters that the more conservative teals may give Dutton the leg-up he may need to form a minority government after the imminent election. The rise of Dutton is fostered by Albanese’s feebleness, but Dutton has handicapped himself by advocating nuclear power stations in the mainland states (Tasmania will forgive him for leaving it off that map). How many voters want to risk their power bills going nuclear?
The Bob Brown Foundation is pulling out all stops to bring an end to native forest logging, as New Zealand’s Labour government did in 2002, and plans rallies for the forests across Australia in March. Like New Zealand, Australia has millions of hectares of plantation forests to supply wood needs, and could redirect some of the massive amount of our timbers currently being exported to China, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The year will begin with new logging in the takayna rainforest in Tasmania and in the forests proposed for the Great Koala National Park in NSW, backed by both Labor and the Coalition in Canberra.
Schoolchildren could tell those holding Labor or Coalition portfolios that ending native forest logging is the cheapest and easiest way to help offset both global warming and the biodiversity crisis (almost three-quarters of Earth’s wildlife has been destroyed in the past 60 years). But Albanese and Dutton aren’t listening.
If the success of the Greens is to be measured by either the billionaires’ resources being deployed to attack them or the number of schoolchildren wanting to vote Green for their future, then Adam Bandt’s team is doing very well.
Bob Brown is the former Australian Greens leader who has set up the Bob Brown Foundation.
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