The Greens’ phoney history of the last minority government

Looking through the Greens’ social media in recent weeks, you find many posts referring positively to the minority government the party formed with Labor PM Julia Gillard between 2010 and 2013. “The best parliaments are hung!” says one post featuring Sydney candidate Luc Velez. Gillard’s government was “one of the most productive parliaments in Australian history”, glows another published on the Australian Greens page.

In a January interview with the Guardian, party leader Adam Bandt went so far as to argue that a new Labor-Greens coalition government could usher in “a golden era of progressive reform”. What better way to substantiate his claim than to recount the last time it happened? But was the Gillard experience really that wonderful? What did this “most productive” parliament deliver?

Gillard took an even more rightward course than her predecessor, Kevin Rudd. One of her first moves was to placate the mining industry by scrapping Rudd’s super-profits tax in favour of a watered-down Minerals Resource Rent Tax. Figures from the Parliamentary Budget Office from 2021 show that Gillard’s capitulation cost the government—and saved the mining industry—a whopping $33 billion between 2012 and 2020. Gina Rinehart’s newest Pilbara project was approved to sweeten the deal.

Cuts to services were another hallmark of the Gillard era. Despite its purported feminist credentials, the government slashed $700 million in welfare for single parents in 2012, lowering payments by $56 per week when children turned eight. This mainly affected impoverished single mothers. Despite announcing an “education revolution” ahead of the 2010 election, university funding suffered two rounds of cuts under Gillard: $1 billion in 2012 and a further $2.3 billion the following year.

Even the NDIS, the flagship social program established by the Gillard government, has been riddled with problems. For one, it is a for-profit system based on private providers underwritten by tens of billions in government funding. Predictably, it has been a free money button for business owners wanting to make a buck off some of society’s most vulnerable.

Also, Gillard was thoroughly conservative on social questions. Despite having majority support, she continued Labor’s opposition to marriage equality, arguing in a 2011 television interview that “for our culture, for our heritage, the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status”. The following year, she voted down a private members’ bill on the issue, sparking significant protests at Labor’s 2013 national conference.

Refugees perhaps suffered the most under Gillard. Soon after assuming the prime ministership, she announced the so-called East Timor solution—a plan to reopen mandatory offshore detention for refugees who arrive by boat. Refugee rights activists widely viewed the move as a return to the Howard-era “Pacific Solution”.

This is the real record of the last Labor-Greens minority government. It was hardly a progressive paradise.

What did the Greens win in exchange for propping up Gillard? Mostly, a series of commissions, committees, inquiries and some changes to parliamentary procedure. A suite of bureaucratic and non-binding measures that enabled Labor to do what it does best: talk about problems in a back room, commission a detailed report about them, and never have to act. The only substantial gain was dental being included in Medicare for under-18s, who today enjoy only partial coverage.

It’s a real reform. So it’s worth asking whether it was worth the compromise. Our society faces overlapping crises—climate, housing and cost of living, to name a few. Can we afford to limit our ambition to horse-trading on one issue for inaction on the others? Can the left win the radical change we need through a strategy premised on weighing up which oppressed group we can accept being thrown to the dogs in exchange for minor reforms somewhere else? Are these the heights we should aspire to?

While they were not the architects of Gillard’s crimes, the Greens provided political support for them in government. Even when the Greens eventually decided to pull their backing for the increasingly unpopular Labor government in 2013, they still agreed to back supply and confidence, rendering the move functionally meaningless. Now, they are arguing for a repeat of the formula based on phoney receipts.

Rather than facing up to the facts, the Australian Greens Instagram page talks up Gillard’s “mining tax legislation” and apparently “world-leading climate laws”. These are the same policies that saved extractive industries $33 billion in taxes. This sort of honest accounting complicates things if you want to convince progressive people to repeat the drama all over again.

Today, the Greens are approaching minority government with a shopping list of demands to negotiate with Labor. One social media post by WA Senator Jordon Steele-John spells it out. “It’s time to make way for a minority government where Greens hold the balance of power”, he writes. Only that way will we get dental into Medicare, proper funding of the NDIS, affordable housing, climate action, rent caps and other things.

The Greens also entered 2010 with lofty ambitions—climate action, marriage equality, better treatment of refugees—and ended up reduced to the wagging tail of the Gillard government. We need to learn the lesson, not commit to repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, there’s no indication that the same compromises won’t come along with another minority government this time around. The Greens have already waved the white flag on housing and climate policy under Albanese.

Resurrecting the corpse of the Gillard government has gone hand in hand with a quiet backpedalling on Gaza. As David Speers pointed out in a recent cross-examination of Bandt on the ABC’s Insiders, the Greens leader now avoids calling Albanese complicit in Israel’s massacre in Gaza. He is complicit. But it would be an awkward look for Bandt to accuse the man he wants to form a government with of being an accessory to genocide.

It would also be awkward for The Greens to claim they will have significant housing policy wins by shacking up with the party that Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather described in 2023 as “the political arm of the property industry”.

This is one of the disagreements socialists have with the way the Greens go about politics. For all the accurate criticisms they may make of Labor, the Greens accept that the parameters for change are set by what a coalition with that same rotten party could achieve. Sadly, it’s the sort of politics that leads not just to one compromise, but to habitual compromise and, now, attempts to dress up, justify and replicate those compromises. This is precisely what the Greens are doing by peddling revisionist narratives about the Gillard years.

Socialists campaigning in the federal election want to do things differently. We want to untether the left’s strategy from what a thoroughly right-wing Labor government is willing to agree to. We want to plant the flag for radical solutions to society’s problems—not as a bargaining chip to be traded in, but as a goal to fight for.

Unless we build an alternative that is willing to stick to its guns, the left will constantly be pulled back into the orbit of what is tolerable to Labor.