Relegate Greens to the left fringe

However different their ideas, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton both entered politics to serve their fellow Australians. Regardless of their political futures, they need to unite on an issue that would help the national interest for years – putting the Greens last on how-to-vote cards and encouraging their supporters to stick with the strategy. It would be a valuable legacy.

The Middle East crisis has drawn out the Greens’ immoral anti-Semitism. But for thinking voters that is the last straw of many. In July, in a series of exposes, Joe Kelly pinpointed the Greens’ destructive strategic, economic and social policies that would put Australians on a road to ruin. These include Adam Bandt’s “Robin Hood” economics that would shrink the nation’s wealth; slugging major companies and ending Reserve Bank independence; a housing policy designed to achieve a fall in home values; attacking the US alliance, claiming it compromises relations with Beijing, and; slashing defence spending. The party’s hostility to gas shows its irrationality.

In response to the call by Jewish groups for the major parties to agree on a preference swap that relegates the Greens, the Prime Minister has been too slow to respond. He will try to avoid the subject for fear of losing seats. But he should put principle first. While ruling out Greens support should Labor fall into minority government, he would not commit on Wednesday to putting the Coalition ahead of the Greens on Labor’s how-to-vote cards. Nor did the Opposition Leader commit to placing Labor ahead of the Greens on the Coalition’s election material. But Mr Dutton supported a deal with the government that would put the minor party as the last preference for both major parties. As he says, such an agreement would be in the country’s best interests. It is needed.

The major parties should also address the issue at state and territory level, including in the ACT and Queensland polls. It would cost both of them seats, in different places at different times. But more importantly, it would help put paid to the Greens’ ambitions to be more influential in office and to usurp Labor as the party of the left. Relegating the Greens to the fringes as a protest party, which they are, would be in Australians’ long-term interests.