Hung parliament is unaffordable

Australia’s most recent hung parliament, from 2010 to 2013 was “just ugly”, as Joel Fitzgibbon, Labor’s chief government whip at the time, writes in these pages.

Such an outcome at the 2025 federal election would be worse given the potential involvement of the Greens and teals, with lasting economic and social consequences that would take years to rectify.

Given the pressing need for reform to reverse the alarming collapse of productivity and living standards, a minority government relying on independents with scant interest in growth, strategic policy and defence spending is the last thing the nation needs.

But it looms as the likeliest result, the latest Newspoll suggests, with neither major party at this stage heading towards a position to form majority government.

On the primary vote, Labor has drifted between 31 and 32 per cent while the Coalition has done the same between 38 and 39 per cent.

In middle Australia, political editor Simon Benson wrote in Monday’s paper, there is a “deeply held view that the Albanese government does not deserve to be re-elected” and the Coalition is “not ready to return to power”.

The economic stagnation, social upheavals and chaos that would result from Greens holding the balance of power would set the nation back years.

Some extremist Greens are set to benefit from the support of their new best friends, the Muslim Votes Matter movement.

In Wills in Melbourne’s north, Bob Hawke’s old seat, MVM has endorsed former Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam.

Her agenda, she told The Australian, was “to push Labor to pressure the state of Israel to end the genocide, build affordable housing, stop new coal and gas, and put dental and mental health into Medicare”.

MVM will endorse another eight more candidates, including several Greens, in the next fortnight. Its target electorates in NSW are Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s seat of Watson, Education Minister Jason’s Clare’s seat of Blaxland and government whip Anne Stanley’s seat of Werriwa, all in western Sydney and with high proportions of Muslim voters.

In a bid to influence the election outcome, MVM also is planning to distribute how-to-vote cards in all 151 seats.

Should MVM succeed in backing anti-Israel Greens into a hung parliament, the potential for an expansion of anti-Semitism is clear.

On Friday, Deputy Greens leader Mehreen Faruqi hosted anti-Israel Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah as keynote speaker at an International Women’s Day event in Sydney. In a sign of the Greens’ apparent abhorrence of our multicultural, tolerant society, Senator Faruqi said the nation had to stop using words such as inclusivity, harmony and social cohesion.

But it is the big-spending, low-economic growth agenda of the Greens, teals and other independents that poses the biggest threat to current and future living standards, including the ability of government to support the most vulnerable in society. The major parties should point out that reality and voters need to understand it.