Preferences of degenerate Greens buffering Labor

Anthony Albanese cannot have it both ways with the Greens. “I rule out negotiating with the Greens,” the Prime Minister told a press conference last week. Yet in his ultra-safe seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner west he is directing supporters to preference Greens candidate Hannah Thomas, who claims Israel is guilty of genocide and demands he blacklist the Jewish state and expel its ambassador to Canberra. While claiming the Greens’ stance on Israel is “appalling”, so is the apparent hypocrisy of Mr Albanese in preferencing Ms Thomas, who claims that to vote for the Greens is to “vote with Palestine”.

On Monday Mr Albanese muzzled Labor member Josh Burns, one of only three government MPs who has refused to preference the far-left, anti-Israel party. Mr Burns represents the marginal seat of Macnamara in Melbourne’s southeastern and bayside suburbs. The electorate is home to a sizeable Jewish-Australian community and the Adass Israel Synagogue that was firebombed in an anti-Semitic attack in December 2024. Campaigning in the seat at St Kilda, Mr Albanese raised his hand and said “Thanks a lot” when The Australian asked Mr Burns about his preference ticket.

Jewish leaders, understandably, are angry with Labor’s vote-swapping deals with the Greens, especially that which applies in Isaacs, the Melbourne seat held by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the government’s most senior Jewish MP. He is preferencing the Greens. In a shameful juxtaposition on Monday, Mr Dreyfus refused to back his own how-to-vote cards while distributing them. He tried to hide behind the mantra “It’s a matter for the party”. Mr Albanese has trotted out the same line. His insistence that it’s a matter for the party lacks credibility, however, when three of his junior colleagues – Mr Burns, Peter Khalil in Wills in Melbourne’s north and Defence Industry and Capability Delivery Minister Pat Conroy in Shortland in the Hunter – are not preferencing Greens.

In a letter to Mr Dreyfus, Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion expressed “deep disappointment” about Mr Dreyfus’s how-to-vote cards. “If you, as a senior cabinet minister, had pressed strongly for an open ticket in your own seat, we find it difficult to believe that the party would have refused your request,” he told Mr Dreyfus.

Preferences matters, both morally and to the election result, especially when both major parties are struggling to lift their primary votes above a third of the total. The latest Newspoll shows Labor’s primary vote on 33 per cent and the Coalition on 36 per cent. The Greens are on 12 per cent, One Nation 7 per cent and others 12 per cent. Among 18 to 34-year-olds, Labor scores 33 per cent, the Greens 28 and the Coalition 23 per cent. One Nation preferences tend to favour the Coalition, if less consistently than the Greens back Labor.

In 2022, more than 80 per cent of Greens preferences benefited Labor MPs, many of whom would not have been be in parliament without them. The world has changed since then, however, as a result of Hamas’s attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1200 Jews died and 250 were kidnapped, at least 24 of whom are believed to be still alive in captivity. After that atrocity, pro-Palestinian protests, some led by prominent Greens, drew out the party’s ugly anti-Semitism. It makes the Greens unworthy to influence policy or receive a major party’s preferences. The outcry would be deafening if a similar right-wing rump preferenced the Coalition.

Peter Dutton needs to make more of Labor’s double standards and the prospect of Mr Albanese sliding back into office on the tarnished coat-tails of the Greens. Aside from the Greens’ anti-Semitism, many voters, for good reason, are alarmed by their extremist high-spending, big-taxing policies that would bankrupt the nation if enacted. Julia Gillard’s pact with the Greens after the 2010 poll was the death knell of her prime ministership. The Coalition also needs to expose the scattergun green-left policies of teals, who have as little to offer as Greens.