Brown still Green, and a bit red

Anyone pining for the good old days of the Greens under Bob Brown, when the party was about trees not Trotskyism, has been given a reality check by the former leader himself. Rather than lamenting a slip away from an environmental focus to deep red socialist tendencies under Adam Bandt, Dr Brown has doubled down. He was writing in The Australian on Wednesday in response to a column by Nick Cater that said Anthony Albanese was unlikely to find Mr Bandt as accommodating, if the 2025 election results in a hung parliament, as Julia Gillard found Dr Brown after the 2010 election.

By comparison with today’s Greens leaders, Cater said, “Brown stands out as a moderate and eminently reasonable”. Certainly, this was the view of the World Socialist website in 2012 when Dr Brown quit as party leader. It said he had built the Greens into one of Australia’s “three main bourgeois parties”. “Brown, like a rat deserting the sinking ship, has exited federal politics on the eve of the most savage budget in decades, leaving his colleagues to help enforce the program of austerity being dictated by global financial markets” was the World Socialist view. The Australian, for the record, wished him well in retirement.

To put the record straight, Dr Brown said Mr Bandt’s agenda to soak the rich has his full backing. And lest we forget, Dr Brown turned his back on George W. Bush in parliament over the second Gulf War and was attacked by shock jocks, who said he and Ms Gillard should be shoved “in a chaff bag” and taken out to sea. Schoolchildren will vote for Mr Bandt, said Dr Brown.

The young can be excused; the rest should remember what happens when a protest party is allowed too close to the levers of power.