Greens to push Palestinian statehood in hung parliament

Adam Bandt reveals the minor party will elevate the recognition of Palestine as a key issue in any negotiations for minority government if the election returns a hung parliament.

Greens leader Adam Bandt. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Greens leader Adam Bandt has made clear he will elevate the recognition of a Palestinian State in any discussions for minority government should the election return a hung parliament, fuelling opposition concerns about the prospect of a Labor-Green coalition.

NSW Liberal MP Julian Leeser expressed alarm early on Wednesday that a hung parliament at the next election could see the Greens making the “unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and the weakening of the Western alliance a price of government.”

Following the comments, Mr Bandt told The Australian that “in any future minority parliament, the Greens will use every lever at our disposal to push for an end to the invasion of Gaza and the occupation of Palestine, as well as for Australia to recognise the State of Palestine”.

However, Mr Bandt said it “shouldn’t have to be a point of negotiations after the next election, as Labor has the power to recognise Palestine today.” He also clarified the Greens would continue to push for progress for Palestine in the current parliament.

On Wednesday morning, Labor and the Coalition teamed up to oppose a Greens motion in the House of Representatives recognising the state of Palestine, with Mr Leeser telling The Australian after the vote that Labor needed to take key steps to distance itself from the minor party.

“It’s time Labor stopped preferencing the Greens on their ballot paper,” he said. “It is bad enough that Labor foreign policy is made on the floor of their national conference where they sell out one ally – Israel – to placate the Corbynites from attacking AUKUS,” Mr Leeser told The Australian. “But how much worse would it be if Labor allowed the Greens to dictate our foreign policy as the price of government?”

“This is not an environmental party,” he said. “This is party that is obsessed with Israel and Jews.”

Only five people supported the Greens motion, including the four lower house Greens MPs and Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie, while 80 MPs voted against it.

Mr Bandt also clarified his position on Israel, telling The Australian that the Greens were “not questioning any state’s right to exist, but no state has the right to be an apartheid state or commit war crimes and genocide”.

Speaking in support of his own motion in the House of Representatives, Mr Bandt said that recognition of Palestine was long overdue and was not “just a symbolic move”.

“It is a critical step towards peace and towards ending the slaughter we are seeing with the invasion of Gaza,” he said. “It is a concrete step towards peace.”

“As the Prime Minister of Norway said last week, there cannot be peace in the Middle East if there is no recognition.”

Mr Bandt said the “scale of the slaughter and the genocide that we are witnessing is now topping 36,000 people”.

“A health system has been destroyed. There are mass graves in hospitals. Aid has been blocked. Children are now dying because they do not have enough to eat or drink.”

He warned that a “human engineered famine” was now taking its toll on the civilian population in Gaza that “amounts to collective punishment of these people”.

Mr Bandt said that Labor’s credibility was also on the line, declaring that a two state solution could not be realised if you “recognise just one side”.

“Labor backs to the hilt a genocidal war that is destroying the possibility of a state of Palestine,” he said. “Labor has stood with the extreme Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Assistant Foreign Minister Tim Watts took aim at Mr Bandt for the motion, arguing it was a stunt and an exercise in politics that would divide the community.

“Why he would be deliberately setting up a vote on Palestinian recognition to fail is something that only he can answer,” Mr Watts said.

“Simplistic wedge motions in the House do nothing to advance the cause of peace,” he said.

“Wedge politics only divides the community,” he said. “Anyone who is serious about peace knows that that requires a two state solution … but the Greens aren’t serious. They prefer slogans to policy. A two state solution requires working together and the recognition of each other.

“On the question of recognition, we have made clear that we will be guided by whether recognition will advance the cause for peace. Like many countries Australia has been frustrated by the lack of progress in this regard,” he said. “Australia no longer sees recognition as only occurring at the end of the process. It could occur as part of a peace process.”

But Mr Watts said there would need to be serious governance reforms, noting that Hamas was a terrorist organisation. “We see no role for them in this,” he said. “A Palestinian state cannot be in the position to threaten Israel’s security.

“We want to see a reformed Palestinian governing authority … We want to see a commitment to peace and how the Palestinian authority leads its people.”

Mr Leeser, who spoke against the motion, told the parliament that recognition should only occur after a peace agreement with Israel had been reached and negotiations on the ground had concluded.

“This motion … sends the message that Hamas’ violent terrorist attacks, its murders, its abductions, its gang rapes, and its dismemberment of innocent children and its torture of people should somehow be defendable,” he said. “This motion means recognising a Palestinian State when Hamas refuses to release more than 130 Israeli hostages.”

He also took aim at the Greens, saying that it was a party that promoted women’s rights and those of the LGBTI community but which was also advancing the “cause of organisations like Hamas which are among the greatest abusers of women (and) LGBTI people in the world”.

Mr Leeser, who describes himself as a proud and public Jewish MP, also said that anti-Semitism had “become a central plank of Green philosophy”.

“The Greens voted against the bipartisan motion that condemned the 7 October terrorist attacks that passed this House on 16 October – even before Israel had begun its operations in Gaza,” he said. “They refused to condemn Greens MP Jenny Leong for her comments that said Jews have tentacles and that Jews should not be able to participate in the public life of this country.”

Mr Leeser also noted that Mr Bandt, when directly asked on the ABC’s Insiders program about whether he supported the idea of a Jewish homeland state, would not answer.

Reflecting on the Greens motion, Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said the minor party had exposed “how hateful their ideology is and why the major parties should both pledge to preference this despicable party last”.