Well, as Crikey predicted, there was a Thursday slam for the Greens in Batman, with a top-of-the-website (for about three hours this morning) story in The Age by Noel Towell, and headlined “The rage inside the Greens machine“. A news drop, too! Towell claims a Greens staffer snarled down the phone at him:
“You’re fucking finished … I’m going to tear you to fucking pieces.”
Which, yeah, um, OK. That was it for news. The rest was rehash and less than fully accurate. Towell argues:
The fault lines in Batman are familiar: Bhathal’s foes are long-term party stalwarts, fellow members of the Darebin branch, aghast at some of the people surrounding the candidate, who they say are newcomers to the party with a ‘whatever-it-takes’ approach to their politics.
No, this is simply wrong. There are “old Greens” and “new Greens” on both sides. Bhathal and her supporters are left-shifted members, the core of whom have been in the Greens for 20 years, and built the party in Victoria. The newer members are those they’ve recruited in that process. The leakers and saboteurs group have a handful of long-standing members, but they are principally newer recruits from the lumpen knowledge class, without a left political background.
Nor does Towell’s claim of a means-v-ends, whatever-it-takes-approach split stack up. The Northcote campaign was run against a right-wing factional candidate, aligned to the dissident-SDA-derived Adem Somyurek group. The campaign simply pointed out her association with anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage, etc, forces. Forthright politics, but no smear.
And the Batman campaign has been run with an emphasis on the positive pro-Greens message, and no slating of Labor candidate Ged Kearney’s personal political record at all. It’s Labor’s overall policy on Adani and refugees that’s being targeted. Indeed, Bhathal’s media adviser has expressed reservations about the methods in the Northcote campaign.
This is not the first time Towell has been tangled up in a bad Thursday splash. In 2012, we reported that, while at The Canberra Times, he had run with a big story alleging that a last-minute poll showed Labor would retain power. They were shellacked, and psephologist Antony Green criticised the lack of scrutiny the paper had applied to the poll’s sample, and the manner in which it was written up.
To be fair, there’s nothing that says such a misinterpretation helps Labor (indeed the poll missed the Greens’ shellacking there, too). But more recently, Towell had a reckless splash in the Northcote byelection, running a story about Wills Labor MP Peter Khalil, who claimed he couldn’t afford a house in Brunswick on his $200,000 p.a. salary. The story was a month out from the November Northcote poll, in which Labor was running on housing affordability.
What wasn’t mentioned at all in the story was that Khalil owned a house in Murrumbeena, Victoria, which is listed on his register of interests. It is currently worth as much as $1.23 million, according to Domain. These Labor folks; so unfussed by wealth, they cry poor from million-dollar homes!
Given the manifold familial connections between Labor and the Age newsroom, one would have thought a little more caution was in order. I would reckon a fair chunk of the 70,000-80,000 people who still buy a paper copy are old lefties turned Green voters in the socialist republic of Northcote. Is this part of the paper’s decades-long cunning plan to alienate 100% of its old base?
Or is it just that sometimes you go out to make a splash, and it turns into a bomb?
Disclaimer: This writer … oh, see previous disclaimers.
Correction: Crikey yesterday stated that the house owned by Wills MP Peter Khalil in Murrumbeena is vested in a holding company, owned by his wife. In fact the holding company merely has its registered office there. The article also neglected to mention that the Murrumbeena property was listed on his parliamentary register of interests, and wrongly implied that Khalil had “forgotten” the property existed.
This overt campaigning for a past housemate is getting a little boring.
This. Every article Rundle publishes on this by-election should have a disclaimer to that effect on it if Crikey wants to be taken seriously as a news outlet
It seems that the internal Greens split is between the “left-shifteds” and the “lumpen knowledges”. For some reason, the media avoid detailed profiling of the various key players in Green politics. Whilst many of the differences between Greens supporters often seem to be ones of emphasis or where to draw the line between principle and pragmatism rather than of fundamental philosophy there are some clear divides such as that between practical conservationists and animal libbers. I am left wondering what is at the core of the dispute and whether career politicians are taking hold in the Greens movement.
So it’s in the article that says The Age has familial connections to Labor and should exercise caution that Crikey decides to obscure mentioning the author used to live with The Greens candidate. Uh-huh.
The young GRundle/Bhathal groovy student house is such an onerous concept to have to think about i can’t bear it
It was ruined when lumpen knowledge class members moved into the upstairs bedroom
Wow. At the risk of being told to “read it again” by The Guy, I did, twice… In this post a journalist’s professional reputation is attacked because he is not on side, and the supporters of a Greens faction that GR doesn’t like are called “lumpens”. For of an not as well versed in 60s-style Marxist terminology as Crikey’s correspondent-at-large, that’s not very nice.
Ok, though I do like political analysis which is more dispassionate, I don’t really mind that Crikey is being so partisan in this particular electoral battle. Unlike most who comment here, I don’t particularly care who wins. But if the Greens do, they will have done so because the Libs wanted them to. Isn’t that worthy of some sort of attention from Crikey?
The Libs stood aside here because they wanted to cause maximum mischief to Bill Shorten. They wanted him to be pushed “left” just so they could attack him more successfully for “betraying” workers jobs and being a hypocrite on refugees. They also want further ALP leadership speculation after a Greens win. The Oz wants the Greens to triumph too so that they could snipe at Labor in general, and give themselves more ammunition for their BS culture war against bearded people who live in the inner city
Both got they wanted, and more… Now then… why should the progressive left, Greens or Labor, get any pleasure at all from the Libs being so incredibly successful in Batman? Both parties have been played here.
One thing Labor or the Greens don’t have to worry about is the Libs being “incredibly successful” in Batman. If the Greens have run off the tracks somehow it will be their own fuckup. If Labor pulls it off then you’d have to congratulate Bill Shorten because he really has pulled a beautiful stunt with the Adani thing. The Libs will have nothing to do with it.
I think that the tories win no matter the result simply because of the bloodletting and new bitterness embedded between progressives.
That’s a less for Talcum, does best when he does nothing.
Both your hypotheticals have Labor winning, Hugh. But aren’t the Greens going to? They’re still odds-on last time I looked, and besides, Guy has been telling us for years that their ascension and inevitable victory over Labor was manifest destiny, or something, on account of the rise and rise and rise of something he (and he alone) calls “the knowledge class.”
In this latest missive, we learn this lot has a sub-group, the “lumpens.” I’m going to pass on the implications of that derogatory term of that for now, but in general, this “knowledge class” lot are what we used to call the elite – ie key workers and managers in the dominant industry of the economy. They are well-paid, can afford real estate in the most expensive parts of the inner cities of our major cities, run luxury SUVs, bicycles, a/c in every room and all the shiny appliances they can find (coal-powered) plugs for. And basically, well, they run the show. Many of them also vote Greens.
So I’m still expecting a Greens win on Saturday. And Bhathal
will go to Canberra because the Libs decided to let her. Hip, hip hooray.
Whether the Greens or Labor win, there is a fight for the leftist voter, and to me that can only be good.
Whether the Greens or Labor win, there is a fight for the leftist voter, and to me that can only be good.
The Libs stood aside because they didn’t want a 5% swing against them, out in the open.