In a typically histrionic act for which it refuses to even take responsibility, the Communist Party Greens today ended its alliance with the ALP in name, but not in practice; these fruitcakes may well be free to “advance” their causes, but the charade will change little for Labor and Julia Gillard.
Even so — early in week three of a month in which Gillard and Labor seem hellbent on self-destruction — the announcement by Greens leader Christine Milne that her party was calling time on its alliance with the ALP is probably something Labor could do without.
Yet Milne — a figure utterly devoid of charisma and electoral appeal, and a pious and sanctimonious specimen to boot — characteristically blamed the ALP for the actions of her own party, saying that Labor had “walked away” from the deal.
Painting a bizarre picture in which she was simply announcing the end of the ALP-Greens coalition on behalf of the ALP, Milne claimed Labor had ended its alliance with her party.
“Labor has effectively ended its agreement with the Greens,” she told the National Press Club. “Well, so be it.”
“I thought it was time we just cleared the air, said they’ve walked away and frankly the response from some of them shows they have walked away.”
The Greens would still support supply bills and oppose no-confidence motions, Milne added.
And there’s the devil in the detail: the pompous and portentous announcement made by Milne, in the wider scheme of things, amounts to nothing.
It’s well-known that sections of the ALP have long been unhappy with what they perceived to be a destructive and largely unnecessary formal agreement with the Greens, given lower house MP Adam Bandt had pledged never to support the Liberals, and in light of the fact the Greens’ senators are largely disinclined to vote with the Coalition either.
Today’s announcement shows that, to some extent, similar sentiments have been brewing over at the Greens for a while, too.
I think the Greens saw their agreement with Gillard and Labor — call it a coalition, accord, pact or what you will — as carte blanche to inflict some of the more extreme and less reasonable elements of their agenda on the wider populace.
To some extent, of course, they have succeeded, with sometimes disastrous consequences; the hundreds of drowned asylum seekers are a direct consequence of a soft policy on illegal immigrants that was insisted upon by the Greens as the price for Senate support in abolishing the Howard government’s so-called Pacific Solution.
The fact a carbon price even exists — let alone the fact it is legislated at nearly six times the internationally accepted price — is another case in point; a stoush between the Greens and Labor erupted last year when the Greens wanted the price increased at the very time some ALP MPs were contemplating the prospect of lowering it to bring it more in line with international parameters.
And whinny she may about the mining tax being evidence of Labor’s “support for the mining industry,” but I am certain that had the tax been on track to generate the $4 billion in revenue it was intended to, rather than prove the unprofitable and abject joke it has, Milne would be lining up for her share of the “credit.”
“Credit” for a tax that — whilst raising next to nothing — has nonetheless managed to kill investment and confidence in the minerals and resources sector, destroy profits and jobs, and still hobble the one branch of the economy holding the rest out of recession.
Then again, if you’re Christine Milne and her mad band of dangerous adherents, anything short of a total shutdown of the mining sector is a sellout, a failure, and a national tragedy.
In political terms, today’s development will change nothing; certainly, in the eyes of the voting public the damage has already been done: the Labor Party has been widely and correctly perceived to have yielded to the Greens and their agenda, and any formal separation between the two probably comes too late in the political cycle to remedy that.
And the Greens, whilst rattling on with their usual moral indignation, will always attract the same rump following in the future that they have done at elections past.
Milne has said that her party’s main priorities, moving forward, were a transition to renewable energy, reforming the mining tax, raising the dole, boosting public school funding and implementing the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Those priorities could as easily be represented as driving energy prices higher, inflicting further damage on the country’s main export industry, rewarding indolence, throwing money at an inefficient but critical sector with no emphasis on value for money, and legislating a worthy but unfunded and totally unaffordable initiative.
The list of the Greens’ gripes goes on.
Yet irrespective of the legitimacy or otherwise of those gripes — and frankly, not much of what the Greens obsess over is rooted in any real-world considerations of common sense — today’s announcement will have the psychological effect of letting some of the more extreme elements within Milne’s party off the leash.
Luminaries such as NSW senator Lee Rhiannon — a one-time propaganda writer for the USSR, now a mainstay of the Greens’ extreme Left — have effectively been given the green light to advocate whatever they like.
Truly nasty individuals, such as SA senator Sarah Hanson-Young, will now be free to say whatever they see fit about anyone who disagrees with them, not that they hold back anyway; free to back Palestine and its militants, for example, over Israel, with what I would wager to be no first-hand experience whatsoever of either the issues involved or of the relative contributions made by the Jewish community in Australian society.
And the truly well-meaning (I’m not being sarcastic) but naive members of the Greens’ ranks, such as lovely Larissa Waters from Queensland, can promise endless buckets of money in the name of “social justice” with nary a care about the fact that to pay for their largesse, it’ll be “someone else” — the taxpayer — who foots the bill.
There isn’t a lot of emphasis on responsibility over at the Greens.
But on one level, why would there be? The party scored just 11% of the vote at the 2010 election, and have spent the better part of three years since then seeing to it that the other 89% of the electorate have had large doses inflicted upon them of policies they never voted for, and in all likelihood never would.
So much for the lamentable Christine Milne and her “principled” show of outrage.
Yet the Greens still have the temerity to complain about this, or to take a pot shot at the Labor Party for allowing it to occur?
Far from being let down, the Greens have secured far more from the present government than 11% of the vote could or should have ever entitled them to expect or imagine.
And the rest of us are paying for it — literally.
Still, in an ideal world, the Greens would have us live in a country (and a world) with open borders; no effective military; no cars; higher taxation; limitless public services, especially in healthcare; boycotts on Israel (concurrent with a pandering to Muslim extremists and terrorists, coupled with support for fundamentalist regimes abroad); an end to mining and most agriculture; and a spiral into the ominous, terrifying world of communist Nirvana.
If anyone can spot a word of concern for the environment in that list — or any of the other lunar policies the Greens’ platform advocates — they’re doing better than I can.
The Communist Party Greens is a frightening organisation; the most frightening thing about them, frankly, is that so many of their supporters think they’re parking a harmless protest vote with a group of concerned environmentalists in voting for them, when the Greens are nothing of the sort.
And self-indulgent victim statements, like the one delivered by Christine Milne today, do nothing at all to change that.
Ultimately and regrettably, however, the only winner from today’s proceedings is the Greens; the ALP will wear the opprobrium and political consequences of allowing itself to accede to so many of the Greens’ demands whilst the Greens themselves, quietly, skip off in search of new ways to further their insidious agenda.
