Federal election 2016: Faustian deal will damage Lib brand

Greens leader Richard Di Natale’s attack on the US alliance makes a mockery of Michael Kroger’s idea that the Liberals preference the Greens ahead of Labor in the election.

Kroger is an exceptionally effective leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, but his preference idea threatens to do grievous damage to Liberal political culture and the national interest.

It will demoralise the Liberals, it is rightly opposed by elder statesman John Howard, and it does not help a Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who is struggling to achieve a sharp definition on core political values.

Di Natale’s extremist speech to the Lowy Institute yesterday makes a bad joke of Kroger’s earlier justification for his tawdry preferences proposal: that under their new leader the Greens were not as extreme or marginal as previously.

The Greens now oppose the US alliance outright, labelling US foreign policy as a force with “horrific consequences”.

Di Natale demonised the US alliance, calling it dangerous and expensive and blaming it for global conflict, inequality and radicalisation. He also wants to scrap Australia’s plans to build 12 new powerful submarines.

And the Greens support dismantling the strong borders policy that has stopped the flow of illegal immigrants arriving by boat. These are all positions that repudiate bipartisan bedrock policy and values the Liberal Party claims to hold dear.

Labor, on the other hand, supports the US alliance, supports the 12 submarines and, at worst, is equivocal or divided about border policy.

Thus Kroger’s preference deal could help displace supporters of the US alliance with its most deadly enemies in Australian politics, and help establish the radical rejection of the US alliance as a mainstream part of Australian politics.

It is difficult to imagine a more cynical, unprincipled or counter-productive move for the Liberals.

In Batman and Wills, a Liberal Faustian pact with the Greens would be particularly ironic as it would threaten two of Labor’s strongest supporters of the US alliance.

Batman’s David Feeney is opposition assistant defence spokesman and has been a strong proponent of Labor committing to match the Coalition’s goal of defence spending reaching 2 per cent of gross national product — as opposed to the Greens who want to slash defence spending.

In Wills, the Labor candidate is Peter Khalil, a former SBS executive who has worked for the Defence Department and was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He followed this with a stint as a strategic analyst at the Brookings Institution.

Both Feeney and Khalil are orthodox, energetic social democrats on domestic policy and highly active supporters of the US alliance and a strong defence posture in national security issues.

It almost beggars belief that the Liberals could consider preferencing the anti-alliance Greens ahead of them.

Such a, move would take cynicism to a new level and contribute to an ongoing erosion of credibility in the Liberal brand.