As one love match ends, an old schism opens up

THE political love affair between the Gillard government and the Greens has come to a screeching halt. Now into the middle game of the electoral cycle and with the carbon tax through federal parliament, Labor has started publicly dissing the Greens.

Public posturing by Labor against the Greens and Bob Brown is certainly a great spectacle. Yet there is a more critical issue for the ALP. Labor must muster the courage and conviction to return to being a more centrist party. If the ALP is to be a long-term competitive force in Australian politics, it must first eschew its internal, decidedly Green-like constituency.

To be sure, the tryst between Labor and the Greens started as it had to start. During those early stages of a minority government, there were public smiles and handshakes to seal deals between Labor and the Greens, then friendly weekly meetings in the Prime Minister's office between Julia Gillard and Brown.

We watched public announcements of policy bequeathed to Green senators instead of Labor ministers when Christine Milne fronted the cameras to announce the Gillard government's new Australian Renewable Energy Agency, charged with spending $3.2 billion.

And the expedient liaison was always going to end like this. Right after the Senate passed the carbon tax legislation last week, Energy Minister Martin Ferguson slapped down the Greens as fantasy-land dwellers for suggesting that Australia could move to 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade.

Ferguson wasn't done. He also attacked Green hypocrisy for opposing new dams when the only baseload source of renewable energy presently deployed in Australia is hydro.

"The Greens like to demonise those who tell the truth on these matters," Ferguson said. "However, they have a responsibility to stop fuelling misconceptions.

Then it was the turn of Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who mocked the Greens for their predictable criticism of a new joint Australia-US military base in Darwin to be announced by President Barack Obama during his visit to Australia this week.

Rejecting Brown's demand for a parliamentary debate, Rudd said, "The Green party does not direct Australian national security policy. The Green party does not direct Australian foreign policy."

And yesterday the Greens received the ultimate cold shoulder from Labor when the Prime Minister announced that the government would move to dump the ban on selling uranium to India.

It's the most sensible move by Labor since it returned to power in 2007. It would be grand to imagine it signals a return of a centrist Labor. But let's face it. Gillard has never displayed any conviction on this issue. And she would never have made that announcement until she had secured Green votes to pass the carbon tax legislation. In other words, it is yet another shift by Gillard, the political opportunist.

In the same vein, we should expect to see the government continue to poke the Greens in the eye. It's true, of course, that plenty of sensible Labor MPs have long been privately scornful of Greens policy. But the political imperative to pass the carbon tax demanded that they remain shtum. Now, all bets are off. Labor's new mid-cycle political priority is to distance itself from the Greens.

Alas, voters have many reasons to be sceptical of Labor's increasingly public attempts to disparage the left-wing Greens. Last weekend, Assistant Treasurer -- and leadership aspirant -- Bill Shorten rejected claims that the Greens had been dictating the government's agenda by comparing Labor's relationship with the Greens to that of former prime minister John Howard with the Australian Democrats.

"No one ever said that John Howard was a member of the Democrats even though he used the Democrats' political party to support the passage of the GST and aspects of Work Choices," Shorten told Sky News' Agenda.

Nice try, Bill. You get one mark for trying.

But Shorten's argument is a ruse. When the Howard government was negotiating with the Australian Democrats over the GST, Howard dragged the Democrats over to the Coalition's policy agenda. On the carbon tax, the Greens pulled Gillard over to the Left. Shorten's contortions can't hide the dishonour among political thieves so evident when Gillard ditched her black-and-white election promise not to introduce a carbon tax. By contrast, Howard received a mandate from voters to introduce the GST. The Democrats recognised that reality and entered into negotiations to secure the passage of Howard's GST reforms.

As a member of the party's Victorian Right faction, Shorten knows only too well Labor's biggest problem is not the influence of the Greens on Labor policy since August last year.

Labor's real problem goes back four decades, when two clashing constituencies first emerged within Labor. Philosophical confusion has been tearing at Labor's brand recognition ever since.

On one side is the inner-city, highly educated, so-called progressives who share many policy positions with the Greens.

When Gough Whitlam galvanised this voting bloc more than 40 years ago, he laid the seeds of a damaging divide Labor has yet to resolve. On the other side sits Labor's traditional working-class base. Bob Hawke became Labor's most successful PM by moving the ALP back towards the centre.

Hawke's base was the traditional blue-collar families supplemented by a new middle class of contractors, small-business workers and non-union workers. The Hawkies prevailed over the Whitlamites.

No Labor prime minister since Hawke has had a similarly clear vision for Labor. Under Gillard, the Labor brand has never been more bipolar. It is hard for her to talk convincingly about sensible policies aimed at middle Australia when she has shown little conviction in that direction.

It's made harder when Labor's Left flank remains stubbornly in sync with Green policies, from onshore processing of asylum-seekers to maintaining the ban on selling uranium to India.

Every ALP leader since Hawke has been hopelessly wedged by Labor's internal battle between Left and Right.

Attacking the Greens is a cheap and easy sport. Labor's lingering problem is best described by Paul Keating, when he said recently that there are too many people within Labor who don't much like the aspirational class championed by Hawke.