You can argue the ALP already is dancing with this particular devil, but a couple of weeks ago news broke that the Greens want Anthony Albanese to sign a public power-sharing deal with them and offer cabinet positions in the event of a minority government at the next election. Can you imagine the likes of Lidia Thorpe (yes, she’s no longer a Green but she was) and Mehreen Faruqui in the federal cabinet? The idea should fill all sensible folk with a sense of impending doom.
ACT Greens leader and Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury is the party’s most senior MP. He argues federal Labor will do better by welcoming the Greens with open arms, formally. And while they’re at it, they may as well throw in a few lazy cabinet roles as well.
Some of you will dismiss this as a pie-in-the-sky kind of deal. I can almost hear some of you saying, “Yeah it will never happen, it’s just politics. Just part of the game.”
Maybe some of you also thought there’d never again be a time when Jewish Australians didn’t feel safe in their own neighbourhoods. Life moves pretty fast, so the saying goes.
Back to the Greens. The elite of the mediocre.
Perhaps let’s judge them for a moment on what they’ve delivered in terms of value to the Australian people. You know, those of us who pay their wages.
Nothing. Not a thing. You see, they can afford to be absolutists; they have the luxury of being able to be as hardwired and hard left as they like. They don’t have to listen to the broader community. They can say and do as they please because there is never any accountability. They don’t have to be inclusive. They don’t have to do anything other than preach to their own choir and bargain with the government for power.
This week’s walkout of the federal parliament in protest against the government’s position on Israel is a powerful validation of this view. Like a bunch of petulant four-year-olds, the Greens stormed out of the chamber, all bluster, piss and wind, because they want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and they can’t get what they want.
Apart from the fact the collective IQ of the federal parliament immediately and exponentially increased, it’s a shame we couldn’t just lock the door behind them and be done with it.
Walking out delivers nothing. Adds nothing. Brings nothing. Proves only that those who take their metaphorical toys and leave aren’t capable of the debate of ideas. Not capable of holding a mature discussion. All it proves is their disdain and disrespect for the parliament and the government.
On this issue, the Greens are, by sins of omission, soft apologists for Hamas. They have nothing meaningful to say about the confirmed testimony and evidence of the massacres. Of women being raped, mutilated and shot. Parents being mutilated while still alive, in front of their children. The absolutely unthinkable, inhuman barbarism perpetrated by Hamas.
Grudgingly, they say: “Well, look it’s wrong – but occupation!”
Spare me the hypocrisy. Did they walk out of parliament when thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by the Syrian regime in 2020? Of course not. Because the Assad regime is not an easy target for the ideologically obsessed.
Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt said on social media platform X this week that he was proud of Faruqi for leading the walkout. Imagine being proud of someone for having a tantrum.
I tell you what, send the parliamentary Greens to Gaza and give them a real chance to live their truth.
The deeper issue here is, of course, the dilemma for the Albanese government. It is a friendly bedfellow with the Greens. Perhaps not yet sharing a marital bed, more like bunking in together. Shared room, shared bathroom, twin-share type situation. Labor can protest as much as it likes but in the pitched battled between perception and reality we know who the winner will be, and for the federal government that’s a problem.
In issues beyond Israel’s sovereignty and its right to defend itself, the problem for the federal government is closer to home. The Greens’ stated policy positions reads like a celebration of victimhood for all, wrapped in delusion fit for a university Trotsky club. I urge you to invest the 15 minutes it takes to read it all. It’s terrifying in its lack of sophistication. Everybody wins, everything, all the time!
The Greens in the ACT where Rattenbury reigns want children as young as 14 to have access to euthanasia. They boasted about “quietly” decriminalising drugs such as MDMA, cocaine and ice. They are, by every metric imaginable, out of step with sensible people of all backgrounds, creeds and colour.
They wrap themselves in words such as diversity yet tolerate no divergent view. They talk about ending violence against women but have nothing to say about the rape and mutilation of Jewish women in this pogrom. They embody ideological hypocrisy. They want to shut down our mining industry, get rid of the military and believe in some kind of universal income paid for with fairy dust.
There is nothing like the cowardice of those who never have to face accountability, and this is the party that fancies itself as the co-pilot of the good ship Australia.
The Prime Minister best be careful. As my Nonna Pina used to say: Gemma, you lie down with dogs, you start to bark.
This is the time for clear, strong and forthright leadership. Not the time for entertaining folly such as this. This government has a choice to make about who it aligns with. For a party that’s defined by the phrase “Whatever it takes” this will be a telling period indeed.
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It has been a wild old time in Australian politics. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more off-piste, we find ourselves in a weird kind of parallel universe in which the Australian Greens want to help run the country. The Greens, regardless of what you thought of them back in the day, once stood for something meaningful under former leader Bob Brown. More recently, though, they have morphed into this country’s most ungrateful, juvenile, destructive and mean-spirited group of underachievers. Yet somehow they think they should be in the starting line-up.