Yesterday, on the 50th anniversary of the CIA-backed Pinochet coup in Chile, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and the government issued strong condemnations of political violence and the cult of the strong man. All through it, they probably had in mind Max Chandler-Mather, the Greens housing spokesman, who has been the public face, and driver of, the party’s campaign to get a better deal on housing out of Labor.
Yesterday they got it, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committing, through clenched teeth, to another billion — or, in Albo-speak, “another one beeyo* for housing”, a figure like the Hindi “crore”, equal to our “billion”, suddenly appearing in global discourse — to be spent this year. Were Labor figures thinking all the while: “Jeez, I’d like to drop that guy out of a helicopter”?
That would be understandable. The Greens have shellacked Labor on housing and made visible the nature of the Albanese government as one contained within the commitment to national militarism and service to capital. The government committed to, for US forward defence, an alleged $368 billion (it will blow out to a trillion, sorry, a treeyo, and while it might be discontinued in a decade, it will drain many beeyos in the interim) but its response to the housing crisis was what was claimed to be a $10 beeyo housing fund, the HAFF.
It’s nothing of the kind, of course, that’s merely the capital used to possibly earn an entirely speculative $500 million, sorry $500 meeyo — I’ll back out of this joke now — a year, and possibly none at all. The figure of 30,000 homes over 10 years was an utter fiction, double or triple what was more likely to get built, but for a while it was repeated faithfully by all media, including the ABC, without a skerrick of interrogation.
The Greens — the Greens Political Party! — went on the attack, and kept it up for months. Labor thought it would be easily shown up on that. Indeed, the politics was a feature of the whole design of its housing fund, a policy proposal in part reverse-engineered from the imperative of jamming the Greens up, forcing them to ask for a little and then capitulate, or simply knuckle under, muttering. Instead the Greens went the old “demand the impossible” route, pushing for actual money for public housing, championing a rent freeze — and, in Victoria, campaigning for Barak Beacon, a public housing community wantonly destroyed by the Andrews government.
The Greens Political Party™ took the government by surprise with the relentlessness and toughness of its campaign, by the public support it gained, especially among the young, and by the anger and then hatred directed at Labor as it stuck to its nonsense claims about the HAFF — a plan that, even if it goes well, would not have delivered a single house in the term of this government.
Labor stuck to its plan for months, despite the ample evidence that the party had been busted. Part of this wasn’t strategically rational; it was an expression of the leadership’s protective narcissism, maintaining the residual belief that Labor was the party of the battlers, and the Greens were a bunch of nine-pronouned tree tories. Labor hadn’t fully sussed the Greens’ move into a more material politics under the Bandt leadership, or believed that the party could extricate itself from some of its wilder cultural shenanigans, such as the Victorian gender politics civil war. But the strong focus on housing has been both about shifting public perceptions of the Greens, and cutting through to a wider section of youf who might back them as generational differences in condition begin to acquire class characteristics.
With the “National Left” leadership of Labor keen to project unquestioning fealty to the US “alliance” at the same time, its room to manoeuvre on right-left politics was sharply curtailed. With the Coalition increasingly consumed by the demands of hard-right forces, the housing stoush was the event by which Albanese Labor became firmly situated as the mainstream political right, and the Greens the opposition from the left.
Labor is now going out of its way to present as pro-business. On RN breakfast a week or so ago, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher praised Jennifer Westacott’s “outstanding” leadership of the Business Council of Australia, a gutless celebration of anti-worker forces if ever there was one. Meanwhile the various disputes around labour protection moves are understood as disputes between friends. Business knows that the union movement is now a funds management outfit with an attached employee management service — called the ACTU — as demonstrated by yesterday’s announcement that the “big eight” industry super funds will form a new peak body group to lobby “both sides of politics”.
The Greens have thus been rewarded for their political courage in holding out on the housing bill, suffering the calumny of voting with the Coalition. In the Senate, they showed up independent David Pocock as inexperienced and weak. Pocock voted for the initial HAFF, and then had to scramble to get on the Greens’ side when the party won the first two billion of actual money for the fund. Having then urged the Greens to vote for the bill after that, he will now have to adjust his position again to welcome the next billion they got. Thelma and Louise over at Team Lambie went over the cliff with Labor right at the start. But Jacqui Lambie has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to do something of any scale to tackle the Tasmanian housing crisis.
The Greens have used their swing position in the Senate to become the de facto opposition, at a certain “level” of politics at least. This was strengthened by Senator Jordon Steele-John’s — what a given name that is! It’s like something from the Marvel Universe, Senator King Big Iron Man or something — opening up a feint on Labor’s refusal to release thousands of documents relating to ASIS involvement in the US-CIA fomenting of the violent coup against the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile 50 years ago.
The Whitlam government had fully withdrawn ASIS cooperation with coup planning, it’s said (and I hope to God it is). ASIS may well have kept right on couping, since its operatives in Santiago had not yet been pinged by Allende’s security service, as CIA agents had. The move was another factor in the rapid entry of the Whitlam government onto the Nixon administration’s shit list. When Whitlam sacked the head of ASIS in 1975 for repeating its unsanctioned covert action — this time in newly independent Timor-Leste — ex-CIA man John Kerr was said to have taken “a very great interest”.
So even though revelations about 1973 might reflect well on Labor, and badly on the Coalition, they are unwilling to release the files. That’s in part because of an unspoken bipartisan agreement not to let out the potentially really dark stuff on either side, but also because Labor now wants to project itself as the natural heir of the US alliance, the stable centre. The opportunity for that has presented itself as the Coalition becomes increasingly taken over by an extra-party right that has some noble expressions — defending Julian Assange — and a lot of cooker conspiratorial crackpottery.
The National Left leadership is a prisoner of the Labor Right on this. But the whole party is also a prisoner of the permanent security establishment. Mostly willing, it’s got a political BDSM slant. But, well, some of them were actual leftists once, and who knows what ASIO and ASIS have actually got in those files? I presume no-one in power now was at the notorious Sydney Uni union lesson on pipe-bomb making in the early 1980s — at which one participant realised, with sudden alarm, that actual explosives were being used — but, y’know, there may be stuff. Some of them are from Adelaide. Say no more.
So the Greens are the opposition at a certain level. And the teals have utterly missed their moment, foolishly failing to project a greater unity of purpose and a common program, instead going hard solo and squandering the possibility to project power in the House. But the Greens de facto opposition is, as said, only at a certain level.
It’s clear from today’s revelations about the Advance No campaign, and from the action of outfits such as the local government “My Place” push, that the extra-parliamentary right is getting its act together, and has a great deal of mass resentment at progressive dominance to draw on. This will include the new political set-up, a Labor v Greens political mainstream, which has shifted the political centre of Australia to the left. But we’re not a million miles from it shifting again. Sorry, meeyo.
*Yes, I know there’s a class aspect to this. But the class difference in pronouncing “billions” amounts to a slight softening of the “ll” in people who went to a school without a rowing team. Albo’s doing something entirely more and different.
Do you see the Greens as the true opposition? Do you agree Labor is now the “mainstream political right”? And what of the Teals? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
The times have forced the Green’s to become the opposition. I believe this will be a positive for the nation, as it will drag us over the decade, further to the left.
The liberals continue to not actually function as an opposition and instead, deal themselves out of every debate of substance, thus making their presence in parliament quite moot.
Ultimately, good on the Greens.
Who else are the younger generation going to vote for than the Greens? Neither of the major parties is serious about housing, Labor is all talk no action on climate change and no-one is talking about tertiary education debt.
Why is there this automatic assumption that people have to have a party to vote for? Political parties are antidemocratic gangs.
True, but it’s very difficult to figure out the political position of many people who present as independents, and political parties do have the advantage of having something of a unified and cohesive agenda.
If I’m going to vote for Jane Bloggs I’ll need to do some research on her actual positions and background to confirm that her stated position is consistent with what se says it is. I mean, the Christian Democratic Party is, so far as I can tell, neither Christian nor democratic, so what can you do with somebody presenting out of nowhere? For an effective democracy we need full and accurate information on how a candidate will vote in parliament, and we never have that information; even for political parties we get at best an approximation.
And those details are frequently just not available. All we get, if we’re lucky, is a statement of position, with no guarantee that that position is consistent with how they’ll vote. And it’s even worse for single-issue candidates and parties.
There’s an argument to be made that a dysfunctional government that finds it difficult to enact policy is a good thing, but if you want to vote for anarchy there’s not much point to having a government at all.
Personally I’ve been voting Greens since the Aussie Democrats went belly-up, since their policies are generally pro-knowledge and broadly left-wing, in a manner that Labor has been avoiding of late. There may be independents who better represent me, but actually finding them on the tablecloth we get when voting for the Senate is way, WAY too much work for the impact my vote actually has. It’s not quite as bad for the House of Reps, but my electorate is at best only occasionally marginal so that choice is largely symbolic.
Bingo. It’s why our found the liberal post-election reflections so amusing as they clearly missed the point that appealing to the 65+ crowd was a doomed approach.
The great lie. Go to uni to get qualified for a good job and good pay.
Teachers in NSW start on $80,000 gross, and then pay HECS before the necessities of life.
The Libs or LNP have relinquished their responsibility as an effective opposition after years of hollowing out branches, policy making and precluded the future in favour of short termism of following US GOP, fossil fueled Koch/IPA, pollsters, nativism, RW MSM cartel and ageing voter demographics; suggests their QLD LNP future is a form of corrupt nativist Christian authoritarianism led by ‘lemmings in suicide vests’ (McCain on Koch’s GOP Freedom Caucus)?
The Libs or LNP have relinquished their responsibility as an effective opposition after years of hollowing out branches, policy making and precluded the future in favour of short termism of following US GOP, fossil fueled Koch/IPA, pollsters, nativism, RW MSM cartel and ageing voter demographics; suggests their QLD LNP future is a form of corrupt nativist Christian authoritarianism led by ‘lemmings in suicide vests’
There are a few nuggets of truth in amongst a sea of waffle………………
Yes, the HAFF is a con-trick. The mandate is for $500 million to be distributed every year………….
…….but with 40% held in cash, this means that the funds will have to be invested in higher risk assets (probably more like aiming for 7% to break even). Add in the “fund managers” rake and the whole exercise makes no sense whatsoever.
This could turn out to be a wildly expensive way of losing $ 10 billion.
(For comparison, the medical equivalent, the MRFF, returns $600 million on an investment of $20 billion, so expecting the HAFF to return $500 million on an investment of $10 billion is bizarre).
At least the Greens managed to screw some ACTUAL money out of the government before they piss it all away.
I’d have to reluctantly agree (having contributed to their campaigns) that the Teals have missed an opportunity to turn themselves into a force, but that was not their intent from the start. We need more Independents, not more Politicians.
The Greens certainly have the opportunity to become at least the authentic opposition (and possibly even the king-makers)…………….
…..whether they can sell the sizzle is something else entirely.
What the Greens have done is force Labor to do what it should have done in the first place. That is what makes them the real opposition.
Their next step should be the destruction of the gambling Funds being used as a means of financing government programs. If we want to go gambling we can head for the poker machines in our own right instead of expecting the government to do it for us.
The REAL problem gamblers in this country?…………….
……….politicians.
They are hooked on the “rivers of gold”.
I’m really surprised that they haven’t legalized hard drugs……………….
……………I hear there’s a pretty good quid to be made there.
I think a great point you made that needs to be pushed: that 10 Bn, which will earn more like 300k pa, fades into absolute insignificance vs the ridiculous AUKUS deal……
Labor misreading a lot of vibe these days…….
I predict the Greens in Brisbane and Melbourne will blitz Labor and not just in the better off inner-cities. The Greens in NSW may get a boost as more old communists that determine their agenda die off but in NSW the Greens best chance is to become a regional party – Byron Bay and the Northern Rivers and North Coast beckons for them. Perhaps they expand their presence around the Shaolhaven, Southern Highlands and South Coast and Illawarra as well but their former strongholds are what has held them back when they should have been going gangbusters. Labor was so on the nose in 2011 State wise and what did the Greens see as their top priority? A BDS against Israel. I hope the AGs are not similarly distracted. I say good on them for doing this. I am impressed. Not much with Labor lately – Qatar, friends with Joyce from QANTAS and lack of concern for renters. This is good result now and hope the results flow.
The rubber will hit the road when building and planning commence. People don’t like social housing in their neighbourhood. Local governments are agin it, not all with bad reason. Housing in general poses issues of a compound nature. The Feds will need to be careful that the funding they give to the States doesn’t provide State and Territory governments with an excuse to reduce their funding to public and social housing programmes.
To HAFF or to HAFF not – that was the question. I’m 70, voted Labor since 1974, and have never been so disappointed.
Albanese signalled his likely performance with Gaffe-gate (and was rescued by Covid and Jason Clare).
He got past the post because Morrison was so handicapped by being Morrison.
I did that HAFF and HAFF-not joke a month ago, and the modbot erased it. I’d swear the IPA own the algorithm to that thing. I voted for Whitlam in ’74, too, and as a renter I’ve never been less impressed by what Labor have become. It’s going to be a long journey for the Greens, but if they can clamp down on the distractions of their land-rights-for-gay-whales crowd then they might become the next serious force in parliament. Of course, as I’ve said before, if they ever rose to power the Libs and Labor will combine to defeat them, but at least we’ll see the enemy’s true colours.
Albanese told us what sort of PM he would be by locking the ALP into supporting Coalition policy while nominally the Opposition.
Saw some polling during the week – apparently the next largest group of voters for the Greens after inner-cities is… regional areas.
Also very popular in the <$80k earnings and TAFE-qualified demographics.
I hope so. Because I can tell you after my experience with them 6-10 years ago, in Sydney they are held back by the presence of old communist stagers who joined them after the Iron Curtain fell, after the Wall came tumbling down and when they found out they could make political capital from airport noise, despite the presence of a curfew for Mascot airport, something that Badgerys Creek won’t have. If the Greens were smart in Sydney, and they aren’t, they would have been a threat to Albo’s and Tanya’s seats long ago.
Another the Greens have failed to do in the large urban centres has been to develop and realistic and comprehensive transport policy. They all have a love of cheap, rubbish trams and hate urban rail ye it is precisely urban rail which is key to moving millions of people around the country’s cities every day and can be a useful tool in planning. The Greens should be looking to take over more votes from suburban areas of Sydney in the way the ‘teals’ have done but I know a thing or 2 about NSW Greens political strategy. It goes something like this. You go after and preference and spend a lot of money and make bespoke policies for the glamour puss inner city Federal electorates of Sydney and Grayndler. You campaign heavily there. Then you preference and spend a bit less money in the several surrounding federal electorates like Kingsford-Smith, Barton, Watson, North Sydney and maybe Wentworth. Then you spend sweet fanny adams on the rest and in some country electorates you get recycled clapped out old hippy Greens member to run for you, who lives in Grayndler and has no intention of living in said country electorate – even if by some miracle they get elected like poor old Kevin Harrold did for Gordon when the Education Minister in the Askin regime didn’t register in time for the 1973 NSW State election. This is the Greens strategy in a nutshell and then you get some tired old bint to run and say how much they are spending time on getting another tired old bint elected to the Senate and how we should all admire them.
The Greens are a 1 trick pony in this State of NSW and the fact they haven’t cracked it federally here should make certain people ask a lot of questions.
Happy to keep voting Green, even with the occasional member going off the Green rails (hai Lidia)
Me too. As for Lidia, she’s a very troubled person, but I don’t think she’s a bad egg, just not very helpful to the political process or to getting our country closer to a treaty.
Not a bad egg? She is a rotten apple which could have spread to the rest of the Greens brand. Unfortunately she is an extremist. It used to be the case that it was only NSW Greens people (or collectively in their case) that went rogue. But Lidia is a bolt from the blue. I can only feel for the Melbourne genuine Greens that helped her get elected as they really took the viper into their bosom when they pre-selected her. Some better candidate vetting methinks is in order more broadly.
An indigenous activist who actually understands that decolonisation cannot happen peacefully and won’t be bought off with pointless symbolism? Rotten apple huh? Bat poop crazy you think? Just come out and say it metal gear: “I like the compliant ones”
Melbourne Greens are a disgrace
Lidia is not an agitator. These people don’t belong in parliament yet this is the only job she can get and it is by deception and by default. You may be right about the Melbourne Greens but they worked long and hard to get her elected. They have a right to feel angry, let down and disappointed by her. And if you mean by “compliant” that she should be more of a team player and conduct herself in public with more decorum then yes. Damn it Yes. I like the compliant ones and won’t listen much less vote for ratbags. You think she wants a race war? It won’t be her side that wins. I only wish my Sydney Greens did to Lee Rhiannon and the more destructive Mehreen Faruqi what the Melbourne lot have dome to Lidia. All the communists I knew, even those in my local branch, were back stabbing Cate Faehrmann. The Sydney Greens tried to destroy Cate Faehrmann and sabotaged her 2013 Senate campaign and tried to block her re-entry and re-enrolment back to the NSW party in 2017. That cost the party a lot of money to pay her in compensation which didn’t need to happen but that is NSW Greens for you. Nasty and bloody minded and it is no wonder they haven’t taken or looked like taking a federal seat in this state federally.
Lidia going off the rails?! She is classically bats–t crazy.
Lidia is great. She represents her community. The lady is entitled to be an agitator, is she not?
I don’t want agitators. I want politicians and if possible statesmen
Metal Guru is enraged at Lidia’s activism, probably hates all activists particularly female activists, and wants them all to be the state’s men. Well, if you are blak and active, you don’t have that choice.
I reckon you and your abusive personal attacks on Ms Thorpe are the problem, not the lady herself.
I’m not abusive. Of anyone. I just think she has a lot of shortcomings. I am a left winger and was glad when she won but her turning was unexpected. I am worried for the Victorian Greens because I have seen what a lot of so-called agitators have done for NSW Greens. I am personally glad she is gone from the Victorian Greens but she has earned her position and money through deception and a fit of pique.
What’s wrong with wanting statesmen? We need more decency and leadership. I am sorry you don’t agree but you really have no right to say I probably hate all female activists. that’s a childish supposition. Some I really love. I just don’t agree with the path she has taken. That’s all
How could Lidia Thorpe from her background and representing her constituency ever have become a states’ man? Wrong gender for a start and wrong colour. This does not mean her position and leadership is not legitimate. The sovereign blak movement is a legitimate political movement and Lidia is just never going to be a man-of-the-state to satisfy your apparent predilection for having middle class white men in leadership roles.
I am really tired of seeing activists like Lidia Thorpe but also activists of all descriptions bashed and abused for being active. Nothing ever change without activists, and I don’t care how you describe yourself, this is what your posts do.