Greens ‘a greater threat than Palmer’, says Morrison

Greens a greater threat to economic and national security than Clive Palmer or One Nation says the PM.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison shares a moment with his wife, Jenny, at The Lodge in Canberra. Picture: Alex Coppel

Scott Morrison has warned that the Greens are a greater political threat to economic and national security than Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and accused Labor of moving ­closer to the minor party’s ­“extreme views”.

As the polls tighten and preferences become vital for the outcome of the election, the Prime Minister has declared Bill Shorten will be “beholden” to the Greens and Labor will be “captive” to the minor party’s “environmental ­activism” and economic extremism. “The Greens represent the greatest threat (to the economy and national security), and the Labor Party only moves closer and closer and closer to the Greens,” Mr Morrison told The Weekend Australian in an exclusive ­interview.

“It’s infesting their economic policy, it’s infesting their national security outlook.”

Mr Morrison said the Greens were “a danger to the economy and they are a danger to national security”. “I think that is a fairly unremarkable statement,” he said. “They want to abolish the US ­alliance and remove every area of co-operation. The Greens’ agenda has only become more extreme, particularly over this last term. They are more unabashed when it comes to activism.

“They are more unabashed when it comes to things like death taxes and more extreme economic views, and the Labor Party will be dependent upon them to pass their high taxes. So I think they will be beholden to the Greens for any agenda they wish to pursue.”

Mr Morrison said on ­national security there was a “purported myth” of Labor’s bipartisanship to prevent any “appearance of cleavage or difference” between the ­opposition and government, but the ALP had to be “dragged along” to make changes to security laws.

“On every occasion we lead, we take the initiative — on the cancellation of citizenship, foreign interference. All of it, we have led every time, and on every occasion they will bog it down,” he said. “There are compromises that have to be made to get their support, which have proven to weaken measures and then we have to go back and fix them.”

When asked if Mr Palmer, the United Australia Party founder and funder, was a greater threat than the Greens on national security and the economy, Mr Morrison said: “I don’t think he represents that threat to the economy and ­national security, absolutely not.”

He also said that, on the economy and national security, he didn’t think One Nation presented that threat.

“This is why I raise the issue that the Labor Party preferenced the Greens over the Liberal Party,” he said. “The great risk of Labor is that it will be captive to so many quite discrete interests.”

Mr Morrison said that, whether it was the labour movement, environmental activists or the Greens, Mr Shorten would be “very beholden to all of those influences”.

Preference deals and debts Labor and Coalition owe to the minor parties and independents for their support have become central to campaign strategies as each side seeks to tarnish the other with the extreme positions of the preference partners.

The Opposition Leader has ­attacked Mr Morrison for agreeing to a preference swap with Mr Palmer, declaring that “no one gets anything from Clive Palmer for nothing” and that the Coalition will have to revisit its $80 billion corporate tax cuts, which Labor blocked.

In Queensland yesterday, Mr Shorten said: “If you vote for those small parties or you vote for the Liberal Nationals who rely upon them — chaos, chaos, chaos.”

He also said Mr Morrison was relying on the people from “the bar scene from Star Wars of the crazy right in the Senate” for re-election.

Travelling with Mr Shorten, former NSW Labor premier Kristina Keneally, now a senator, said: “Scott Morrison is willing to do a desperate deal with Clive Palmer in his desperate attempt to cling on to power. Clive Palmer does nothing for free. He gets other people to pay for it. He got the commonwealth to pay his workers. You can be sure he is not expecting just a handshake if he gets elected. He’s expecting that $80bn tax cut to the top end of town that Scott Morrison has hundreds of times staked his word and his reputation on that he’s going to deliver.

“Well, Clive Palmer is waiting for that payday if Scott Morrison is re-elected.”

Also campaigning in Queensland yesterday, Mr Morrison said that when the Greens visit the seat of Capricornia, “they’ll sneer at your jobs, they’ll say they are not proper jobs, they’re not jobs that you should have any respect in holding”.

Mr Morrison told The Weekend Australian that it was weakening Australia’s investment future when activists turned any mine into a totemic campaign against all mining and industry.

In relation to Adani, he said whether it was an Indian, British or a US company was not the point. “The point is: what’s the investment,” he said.

“Are we for mining? Yes. Are we for energy production? Yes. Are we in the forestry industry? Totally. Are we in fishing? Absolutely. Agricultural production? We are in all these industries. We are also in medical instrument industries and science and research. We are in all of these things.

“So when I talk about having an economic policy, it involves taking all of our industries forward, all of them, not forming some sort of fashionable opinion.”