Greens push to take government reins in the ACT

ACT Greens Leader Shane Rattenbury is pitching to become chief minister of the nation’s capital, in what would be the first Greens government in the country.

ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury. Picture: Richard Dobson

ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury is gunning to replace Andrew Barr as chief minister of the nation’s capital at the upcoming Territory election, declaring the Greens will one day win government in Australia with Canberra being the “most likely place”.

The country’s most senior Greens minister said his party had the experience required to govern, the “courage and the ambition” to pursue bold policies and was “ready to lead” if Canberrans decided to grant the minor party the mandate at Saturday’s poll.

Mr Rattenbury’s comments came as his party defended a candidate’s social media posts admitting to taking an illegal drug, expressing strident anti-Israel views and calling for politicians to be hanged “in the street”, saying the remarks were “impassioned” but related to key issues for the minor party.

Mr Barr faces pressure not only from the Greens but also from within his own party. Former Labor chief minister Jon Stanhope accused the ACT leader, who has also delivered 13 budgets as Treasurer, of economic mismanagement, citing the Territory’s position as the only jurisdiction not to deliver a surplus since 2012-13.

Urging progressive Canberrans against voting for Mr Barr after his almost a decade in the top job, Mr Rattenbury stressed that while the Greens had had a power-sharing arrangement with Labor since 2008, there was no “formal coalition” and his party could govern in its own right.

Though an absence of formal polling makes predicting the election outcome difficult, Mr Rattenbury said the Greens needed to pick up only two seats from Labor to be equal with the Liberal’s eight Legislative Assembly members, putting the party in reach of minority government. Labor currently holds 10 of 25 available seats, the Liberals eight, the Greens six and one independent.

Mr Rattenbury said the progressive enclave of the ACT – the only jurisdiction to vote in support of the voice referendum which also has most liberal drug decriminalisation policy in the country – was the most likely of all the states and territories to elect the first Greens government.

“It is going to happen in Australia at some point, and I would say the ACT is the most likely place,” Mr Rattenbury told The Australian.

Mr Stanhope, the last ACT chief minister to govern with a majority, and his collaborator Khalid Ahmed criticised Mr Barr for plunging the Territory into $12bn of debt in a column in a local newspaper.

ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury. Picture: Supplied

The pair also raised concerns about the Barr government’s standard of ministerial accountability following a series of expensive bungles wasting public funds.

“Perhaps more worryingly, the notion of ministerial accountability has been redefined whereby being ignorant of a failure has been repeatedly presented as an excuse,” they wrote in CityNews.

“There have been no repercussions and accountability for the wasted hundreds of millions of public dollars.”

An ACT Labor spokeswoman rejected the criticism for containing “extensive factual errors”, arguing that the Barr government had skilfully navigated the pandemic and invested in “infrastructure and public services that makes Canberra one of the most liveable cities in the world”.

After 23 years of Labor government, however, Mr Rattenbury said Canberrans were “frustrated” and looking for a change, remarking that the Greens now had more experience overseeing complex portfolios and implementing policies than the Liberals.

“I think I’ve demonstrated over a period of time an ability to work with people, to take on difficult portfolios, to address the complex issues that come before government,” he said. “And I think the experience of the Greens as a team, and certainly my particular experience, and that means we are in a position.

“If the Canberra community went there, we are ready to lead a government.”

However, the party has been left exposed after a wave of controversial online posts shared by Greens candidates surfaced, including social media posts from Kurrajong candidate James Cruz, who wrote that he wanted to hang politicians “in the street”.

On Monday, the ACT Greens were forced to defend Mr Cruz’s posts in which he admitted to taking an illegal drug, wrote “f. k Israel” and “their genocidal regime” and declared he wanted to “f. king kill politicians” over the treatment of refugees.

Mr Rattenbury has not disendorsed Mr Cruz or fellow Greens candidate Harini Rangarajan, after she reportedly wrote a blog post comparing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden to Jesus Christ.

She said the words were part of a “creative work”.

The ACT Greens have put forward an extensive policy platform including a pledge to build 10,000 public homes, a rent freeze, a plan to accelerate the building of the light rail to Mawson in the city’s south and a promise to establish four GP clinics offering 160,000 free appointments.

“We do have ambitious policies,” Mr Rattenbury said. “We make no bones about that but we know that we have to make these changes to help our community deal with these big pressures they face, and that’s why we’ve put ideas on the table that we’ve thought about really carefully.”

The Greens have also promised to examine options to allow access to assisted dying once a patient has lost capacity, major investment in the bus network and free emergency ambulances.