Greens leader Adam Bandt’s vision is a national nightmare

Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt addresses the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday. Picture: Gary Ramage

Adam Bandt’s speech to the National Press Club Wednesday makes it abundantly clear that the Greens are a grave threat to Australian national security.

Their policies, and their outlook, would be catastrophic for Australian security if ever they were implemented. Having to depend on them in government is surely Anthony Albanese’s nightmare. It would be a national nightmare as well.

Three key aspects of Bandt’s commitments would wreak massive damage.

First, he demonises gas, just as much as all other fossil fuels. The world, including Australia, cannot function without gas, whatever Green fantasies hold. Increasingly, mainstream Centre Left parties around the world accept gas as, at the very least, a critical transitional energy source on the road to renewables. Our Greens are extremists.

Ending the Australian gas industry would impoverish Australia. It would also empower Russia and the Gulf Arab dictatorships which are also big gas producers.

Europe, Japan, South Korea and many of our friends and allies don’t have their own gas (in some cases because they refuse to explore) and they cannot switch off gas in the next couple of decades. If the nations which produce gas are anti-Western dictatorships, that’s a strategic disaster for the West.

Here’s a memo for the Greens: a world dominated by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the Iranian mullahs will not be much concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, much less all your other obsessions.

Secondly, Bandt claims that Labor adopting similar tax policies to the coalition would mean the end of social democracy in Australia. That is a ridiculous claim completely at odds with reality. Australia already has a generous welfare state, with massive and increasing transfer payments and a highly progressive tax and welfare system. That is already, in effect, social democracy.

If the Greens cut off gas and all other fossil fuel exports, not to mention their background assault on much of the agricultural industry, they will make it impossible to pay for social democracy.

Social democracy is not cheap. You can’t redistribute wealth which your society doesn’t generate. Australia is wealthy because of the high prices for our commodity exports. We feel even wealthier because of our willingness to incur massive, long-term debt. The Green agenda would kill social democracy in Australia by killing national wealth.

But Bandt’s comments on submarines were his most foolish and demonstrated a seeming complete innocence of what submarines actually do and how.

He opposes the proposed AUKUS nuclear powered submarines, labelling them “floating Chernobyls”. This is absurd and ignores the actual safety record of US and British nuclear submarines.

He also apparently has no understanding of what submarines, including our existing Collins subs, actually do. He says the only purpose in acquiring nuclear powered subs is that they would be able to travel much further from “Australian waters” than the Collins boats and that this would be “escalatory” of tensions with China.

Every single aspect of this formulation is wrong on the facts and profoundly ill-judged strategically.

The Collins boats are already the conventional submarines with among the longest range for conventional boats in the world. They travel a very long way away from “Australian waters”. That’s the very nature of subs. They are an effective asymmetric weapon because the potential enemy never knows where they are. They might indeed be right next door to a potential enemy’s port, or military base or key shipping route.

The difference with the nuclear powered subs is they can stay submerged much longer than the Collins boats. Therefore they can stay on station longer. But the Collins, and indeed any conventional submarine we would ever replace them with, can already travel to any potential target in the region.

So Bandt is wrong on the facts.

But to consider Australian defence spending “escalatory” of tensions with China, and arguing we should try to “de-escalate” tensions by not spending more on defence, is foolish, illogical and inhabits a fantasy world. Tensions with China are not caused by Australian defence spending. Bandt has the order of causality absolutely backwards.

Like so many Green policies, his subs’ do not describe or respond to reality, and would be disastrous if implemented.