Australia is now engaged in a dangerous political experiment – a radical left-wing party assaulting the Albanese Labor government to achieve a deeper fracturing of the parliament and a 2025 minority government with the Greens empowered and more influential than ever.
Greens leader Adam Bandt is Australia’s version of the former US presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders. Bandt has long since replaced Pauline Hanson as Australia’s most lethal populist. He pioneers a new brand and a new ambition: progressive populism is the brand and selling the Greens as the nation’s authentic social democratic party is the ambition.
The Greens have contempt for the Coalition. But Bandt’s real target is Labor. Every move by the Greens is designed to delegitimise and discredit the Labor Party. Bandt’s aim is to steal Labor votes on the left, increase the Greens’ primary vote and win more seats in the parliament.
His ultimate cause is unmistakeable – to terminate Labor as a majority governing party and drive Labor into permanent minority governing arrangements with minor parties and independents, the Greens being the main beneficiaries. This would constitute a structural change in our parliament and governance with vast consequences for public policy and the Australian people.
The 2025 election will see Albanese Labor fighting on two fronts – against the Peter Dutton-led Coalition on the right and against the Greens on the left. It is a more intense version of the dilemma faced by the Rudd-Gillard government, where it succumbed to these pressures.
Such pressures are now far greater. The key is Australia’s cultural and economic fracture as a nation. It is far harder for the major parties – Labor and the Coalition – to hold the loyalty of their voters. Fracture is the story of the times – promoted by the Greens, the teals, the Muslim vote campaign and independents.
At the 2022 election the primary vote for the major parties sank to a low 68 per cent. Much of the public is not voting to form a government; it is voting to express a personal preference.
The Greens and the teals brilliantly exploit the grievances of people impatient with the compromises, flaws and competing priorities of incumbent governments. There is no evidence their self-interested solutions will deliver, the upshot being weaker major parties, more timid leadership, redistributed power to minority groups and a great voice for radical and extreme demands. This is the road to Australian decline.
Yet the appeal is potent. Bandt calls the Greens the only social democratic party in our politics. He brands Labor a centre-right party and the Liberals as a far-right irrelevance. “It’s time to reject politics as usual,” Bandt told the National Press Club last week. “It’s rigged.”
He delivered a passionate, grievance-laden, destructive pitch, assailing the Labor-Coalition power structure and demanding that it be dismantled in the name of the people – the battle-cry of populists from time immemorial. Bandt called for a “new politics which puts people first”.
His supreme pitch is to persuade people they are being ripped off and trashed by big business, fossil fuel companies, Coles and Woolworths, banks, white billionaires, climate deniers, property investors, the Reserve Bank and the established political parties.
“People are angry,” Bandt said. “They’re right to be.” That’s because “the economy is rigged”. Who rigged it? That’s easy – “It’s been rigged by politicians from both Labor and the Liberals.” And, of course, “it’s been rigged by design”.
Indeed, it’s a conspiratorial situation. Bandt said: “People who were struggling to keep their head above water are going under, pushed down by billionaires and big corporations that make massive profits which are driving up inflation in the economy and the prices of things everyone needs. Since 2020, the wealth of the three richest people in this country has gone up 50 per cent.”
Coles and Woolworths have increased their profits while supermarkets prices “keep going up”. Bandt said: “It’s price gouging. Profiteering. Ripping people off. It’s immoral, but under Labor, it’s lawful.
“Millions of people are being robbed, fleeced and plundered by big corporations and billionaires in a heist facilitated and enabled by the politicians from Labor and the Liberals. You’re being ripped off at the supermarket, ripped off on your power bill, and ripped off on your mortgage.”
Don’t think Bandt is a lone voice. Many right-wing populists would agree. He said since Labor came to power “things have gotten a lot worse” – but the Liberals would be no better. “We can’t keep voting for the same two parties and expecting a different result,” Bandt said. ”Labor has lost themselves. People tell us it’s getting harder and harder to tell Labor and the Liberal apart. They’ve betrayed everyday people by refusing to take on the big corporations’ excessive profits.”
Bandt said Labor tried to wash its hands of the Reserve Bank’s actions but “this pain people feel was part of Labor’s plan”. Labor wasn’t running the economy in the cause of wiping student debt, providing affordable housing, expanding Medicare to include dental health, achieving a safer climate or helping people on income support.
What is the cause of the problem? “Big corporations do not pay their fair share of tax,” Bandt said. He claimed almost two in three coal and gas companies pay no tax, proving “the system is rigged”. Hence his policy: a $514bn big corporations tax over a decade with three elements: a 40 per cent tax on excessive profits; a revamped tax on offshore oil and gas; and a 40 per cent tax on the super profits of mining projects.
“Housing is rigged too,” Bandt said. He called for a rent freeze, said the Greens believed that ensuring “everyone has a home is the government’s job” and that at the next election the Greens would be “the party of renters, the party of first-home buyers and mortgage holders.”
He attacked Labor and Liberal, saying they “have not done anything to prevent” a genocide committed by Israel despite thousands of people protesting every weekend in our cities. Bandt said: “The problem is not the people, it’s the political class.”
Bandt’s populism is powerful. It will attract people beyond the Greens, including the populist right. His language reflects the sort of discussion the Greens will have in their door-knocking and direct campaigning. Polls show their national vote fairly stable around 12-13 per cent but this disguises their real threat.
It will come in targeted inner city or nearby seats. Bandt won’t carry the nation or the suburbs with his populism and may turn some electorates hostile. But inner city, highly progressive seats will be susceptible to this pitch with Bandt casting the Greens as the party of “moral clarity” and appealing to young people. Don’t expect him to win five new seats from Labor. That’s a dream.
Have no doubt, however, that Bandt is a serious problem for the Albanese government. It hasn’t learnt how to fight on two fronts and it hasn’t learnt how to effectively combat the Greens. Its dilemma is that many Labor loyalists, let alone voters, are susceptible to the pull of Green populism.
However, there is a far bigger problem. The Bandt agenda is a recipe for weaker investment, fewer jobs, higher prices and lower living standards. It reflects the shift in Australia’s economic policy debate to the left, apparent in the Albanese government, increasingly evident in the media, manifested in a distinctly more populist mood and being turbo-charged by the Greens.
Australia’s economic debate was once intelligent. Not any more – the nation is in danger of forgetting completely the national interest reform policies that will actually deliver growth, real income gains, strong investment and rising living standards. If so, it’s a tragedy.
More Coverage
Trump may be best bet to take on China’s DeepSeek
China has shown the world that it’s now game on in the artificial intelligence race, sending markets into a massive tailspin.
Who saw that coming? Not Wall Street
The Chinese start-up’s model stuns Big Tech — and Wall Street — and is proof that David can take down the tech Goliaths.