‘Pale’ Labor needs Greens, says Bob Brown

Bob Brown says Labor must accept the two parties will need to share power for either party to form government in the future.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown. Picture: Eddie Safarik

Bob Brown has encouraged Labor to move beyond its hostility to the Greens and accept the two parties will need to work together and share power if either party is going to be able to form government in the future.

Dr Brown, Australia’s foremost environmentalist who led the Greens in the Tasmanian and federal parliaments, said his ultimate aim was still that the Greens replaced Labor as the main party of the left, but in the meantime they had to collaborate.

“Labor has got to get over this idea that it is going to have solid majority power in the future,” Dr Brown told The Weekend Australian. “It is going to need to share it with the Greens.

“It is going to need to do that on the basis of the Greens promoting both the environment and social justice.

“Labor just needs to get away from the old thinking that the Greens and Labor cannot work together. I did – we did – with Julia Gillard, and came up with the world’s most advanced policies for tackling climate change at the time.

“If you look at the (Labor-Greens Coalition) ACT government, it is leaps and bounds ahead of most other state or territory governments. You see this happening in many countries in Europe, including in Germany, and with a sensible Labour team in New Zealand.”

At the last election, 1 million Greens votes flowed to Labor as preferences, representing 80 per cent of Greens preferences overall. Labor won just 14 of its 68 seats on primary votes. A further 44 seats were won with preferences after leading on primary votes and 10 seats were won by Labor after polling second on primary votes.

Dr Brown, who was a Greens Senator from 1996 to 2012, said the Greens were instrumental in Labor winning seats. He said the Greens was a growing party and Labor was declining. He noted the Greens now had MPs in every state parliament and in a coalition government with Labor in the ACT.

“The Greens are in a consolidated and powerful position in the parliament,” he said. “They will win more seats at the next election. Labor is treading water and the Greens are going to continue to grow. The Greens are the party of the future.”

Dr Brown said Labor’s lack of commitment to taking substantial action on climate change and other environmental initiatives was the reason for losing votes to the Greens. He said Labor would have won the last election if it had opposed Adani’s Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland.

Dr Brown led the anti-Adani convoy during the 2019 election campaign.

“Labor is now a pale shade of the Liberals when it comes to most things, and on the environment – whether it is forests or coal mines or gas fracking or oil drilling off the coast – show me the difference,” he said.

“Had Labor opposed the Adani mine and come out strongly in favour of ending more coal mines, they would have lost the same number of seats (in Queensland) but won more seats in Melbourne and Sydney, and would have won the election.

“The climate emergency and extinction crisis require the Greens in power very quickly, not just in Australia but in a global sense. We are in a very threatened position globally because (of) the human destruction of the biosphere and we have got to turn that around. You cannot do that with business as usual, which is where the Labor Party and the Coalition are at the moment.”

Dr Brown’s comments come after Greens leader Adam Bandt told The Weekend Australian last week that Labor would not win an election in its own right and he welcomed the two parties agreeing on a “power-sharing” arrangement.

Anthony Albanese, who has ruled out forming a coalition with the Greens, said he intended to “lead a Labor government in its own right”.

“We’re a party of government, they’re a party of protests,” Mr Albanese said at the National Press Club. “Labor is about real change in the interests of working people: working with people, bringing communities with you. Not lecturing them, not looking down on them.”

Mr Albanese noted that, in the second instalment of Kevin Rudd as PM, a deal with the Greens was never struck.

Additional reporting: Greg Brown