Greens plan to cancel economy

A generation ago, undergraduate diatribes from placard-waving Greens about playing out Robin Hood fantasies received no more than a passing glance. They hardly mattered. The party was a scrappy protest movement, unlikely to play a role in governing the nation for the foreseeable future. The Greens’ policies are now far worse after irresponsibly jettisoning gas as a transition fuel in the shift to a low-carbon economy, going soft on Hamas and venting their loathing of Israel, a loyal Australian ally for 75 years. Given the realistic possibility of the Greens participating in a minority Labor-led government after the next federal election, due within 10 months, the party deserves intense scrutiny and widespread exposure.

From Tuesday, The Australian will be examining the Greens this week, putting a blowtorch on the party’s ideology, operations and policies at national, local and international level amid the most dangerous strategic environment since 1945. An ideal place to start is leader Adam Bandt’s ambition to see the Greens replace Labor as the authentic party of the centre-left, as he told national affairs editor Joe Kelly in an exclusive interview. He hopes to do so by taking a “Robin Hood platform to the election”, slugging major corporations to fund better outcomes in areas of traditional ALP strength. In his own words, his broad goals are to “ make big corporations pay more tax, fund universal services so that everyone can have a better life (and) stop opening coal and gas mines”. While endangering domestic energy supplies for years, the latter is a blueprint for depleting export and government revenue. Or, as Adam Creighton wrote recently, the Greens’ “No coal. No gas. No nuclear” campaign has a next logical step: “No economy”.

Oblivious to the truism voiced by Margaret Thatcher – “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money’’ – Mr Bandt wants big corporations to do what most do already, “pay their fair share of tax” to fund “universal” services such as free childcare and including dental care in Medicare. The party’s platform also includes free university and TAFE places, and student allowances.

Such populist handouts, long deemed unaffordable by the major parties, would quickly produce untenable consequences. These would include rampant inflation, taxing big businesses to the point that they and their investors moved offshore, and soaring unemployment and dole payments. The politics of envy would force small businesses, professionals, mum-and-dad property investors and successful salary and wage earners into financial straitjackets. Relying on a drip of state support, which Mr Bandt euphemistically terms strengthening the “social safety net”, is how people were forced to live behind the Iron Curtain in planned economies. It oppresses the power of hope, enterprise, aspiration, hard work and independence, and denies families and individuals the rewards of productivity.

Mr Bandt is so out of touch with the strategic and security challenges facing the nation that he criticises Anthony Albanese for agreeing to outsource “our sovereignty and our ability to make independent decisions” to the US, the nation’s greatest and most powerful ally. Australia should be “revising our relationship with the US” in the event of a second Trump presidency, Mr Bandt argues. Prudently, both major parties have made it clear they will work with whoever Americans elect to the White House. Seemingly oblivious to the brutal terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, and the fact the Jewish state is fighting an existential battle against fundamentalist terrorists backed by the tyrannical theocracy of Iran, Mr Bandt naively, or maliciously, compares the war in the Middle East with “the movement against the Iraq War or the Vietnam War”.

It is up to voters to judge if the Greens’ policies serve or undermine their economic interests or the nation’s interests. To do so, they need to be informed. Those voting Greens because they think the party stands for nothing more harmful than trees, cleaner air and water – which polling booth workers from the major parties find is often the case on election day – need to see and hear the full truth. This is why The Australian is taking a lead with this series. In his interview with Kelly, Mr Bandt lists a string of seats the party is targeting in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. The Greens’ likelihood of winning many, if any, seems remote, although the same would have been said about seats such as Griffith (formerly held by Kevin Rudd) on Brisbane’s south side and the marginal seat of Brisbane, long held by the Liberals, before the 2022 election. In the public interest, other mainstream media outlets, too, should dig beneath Mr Bandt’s Robin Hood fantasy to expose the Faustian nightmare that lurks below it.