Why the establishment hates the Greens
The entire political establishment has united in a smug, self-serving tirade against the Greens following the federal election. The indirect target is anyone who wants a more egalitarian country.
The ABC’s Laura Tingle, who gets far too much credit from progressives, started the onslaught with her initial election summary, arguing that voters had “comprehensively rejected” the Greens’ “grievance politics”. This was despite the party’s national vote being more or less the same as three years ago.
Sydney Morning Herald chief political correspondent David Crowe blamed party leader Adam Bandt’s loss on his “hyperbolic and offensive” comments about the genocide in Gaza and his opposition (in rhetoric, rather than votes) to Labor’s (rubbish) environment and housing policies. Crowe also charged the Greens with backing “public protests that became platforms for antisemitism”, despite there being not a shred of evidence linking the mass Palestine solidarity campaign to antisemitism.
In the Australian Financial Review, former ALP adviser and speechwriter Nick Dyrenfurth asserted without evidence that “voters came to associate Adam Bandt’s federal and state outfit with the corrosion of social cohesion and an explosion of antisemitism” and that the party’s vote (which, again, didn’t change substantially from the last election) “reflects a broader collapse of public trust in a party that increasingly prioritises performative activism over genuine progressive outcomes”.
The Guardian published an opinion piece by Griffith University lecturer Paul Williams, who argued: “the Greens may need to temper some of its post-material aspirations with material economic relief”. This is despite the party running on a moderate social democratic program, which included wealth redistribution from rich to poor, more social services and an end to the rampant expansion of, and tax breaks for, the fossil fuel industry and other big capitalists. Williams cited the Greens’ support for Palestine as one of these “post-material aspirations”, as though electoral considerations ought to determine whether to oppose genocide.
Politicians joined the pile-on. Anthony Albanese clearly loathes the Greens more than his actual parliamentary opposition, the Liberal Party. The prime minister celebrated Max Chandler-Mather’s and Bandt’s seat losses more than Peter Dutton’s. Penny Wong also chimed in, arguing: “Australians rejected the politics of conflict and the politics of grievance”.
The establishment’s hatred of the Greens came together neatly on the ABC’s election night panel, when Queensland LNP Senator James Mcgrath embarked on an unhinged rant:
“The Greens are a nasty, horrible, racist antisemitic party ... they are just horrible people. I’d happily take the Labor Party and, with all due respect, union thugs any day of the week compared to the Greens. They’re horrible people ... the ugly side of politics in Australia. They are a horrible political movement.”
Journalists Sarah Ferguson, David Speers, Annabel Crabb, Laura Tingle and Patricia Karvelas, and Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers sat quietly through the tirade without any pushback, apart from Crabb’s “there have been allegations on all sides about rival parties tearing down corflutes”.
Imagine if Chalmers had called the Liberals a “nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party”. He would’ve been countered with outraged calls to maintain a “respectful dialogue” and been roundly denounced across media outlets for resorting to name calling. (As an aside, McGrath was sacked as an adviser to Boris Johnson in the UK after making racist remarks about the West Indian immigrant community.)
Among all detractors, the objective is the same: to present the Greens as out-of-touch fringe radicals. Yet the Greens’ most prominent policies are generally popular. Last year, Essential Research found that four in five Australians support dental costs being covered by Medicare—a core Greens policy. A 2023 Guardian Essential poll found that three in four believed rent increases should be capped to inflation or frozen until economic conditions improved.
Also in 2023, two-thirds of the population supported a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry, and 59 percent supported a levy on fossil fuel exports to fund efforts to prepare for the consequences of climate change, according to the Australia Institute. A standards-meeting Lonergan Research poll commissioned by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi found that a clear majority think universities and TAFE should be free and fully funded by the government.
This gets to the heart of the matter: the ruling class in Australia is united in opposition to the idea that the government should improve the living standards of the majority at the expense of the increasingly wealthy minority. And the political establishment of the ALP and the Liberal Party, along with their supporters in the media, is united in slavish service of the capitalists.
So, to the extent that the Greens tap into some of the broader social sentiments for wealth redistribution and curbs on unfettered markets, and question some of the ruling foreign policy priorities, the entire political and economic establishment is united against the party.
The ruling class, through its political apparatchiks, spent the better part of two decades smashing the Labor left—from Gough Whitlam’s intervention into the ALP’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 to the ALP-ACTU Accords in the 1980s and early 1990s to crush militancy in the trade unions and introduce neoliberalism. The goal was to make Labor a more reliable “partner” of the bosses by eradicating any nagging internal opposition while making Australian capitalism more friendly to big business.
It was a highly successful endeavour. As Rodney Cavalier, a former NSW state Labor minister, noted fifteen years ago in his book Power Crisis: “No force describable as a ‘left’ has engaged in active contest within the ALP over ideas, policies or a framework to respond to unfolding issues, since the mid-1980s”.
With the left faction’s degeneration into a club with no purpose other than dividing the spoils of office among its parliamentary representatives, there was pretty much zero organised opposition within the ALP as government-run services were privatised, company taxes were lowered and housing became a lucrative means through which property investors made millions. The union movement was smashed with the complicity of the left officials, paving the way for a sharp rise in inequality.
Yet in recent years, the Greens have grown in influence and shifted to the left, particularly in the lead-up to and after their 2022 lower house breakthrough. The party’s overt campaign message this year was that it would basically be a revived Labor left, summed up in the campaign slogan “Keep Dutton out and get Labor to act”. That is: make us part of a minority government so that we can force Labor to govern more like the olden days of social democracy. This is almost identical logic to the old Labor left argument that, to get a left-wing Labor government, you have to elect more left-aligned delegates to the national conference, get more left-aligned MPs, and thereby drag the whole party to the left.
No-one was more upset at the prospect of such a role for the Greens than the nominal Labor left—whose uselessness is exposed by the existence of a party with more left-social democratic policies than the ALP—and the broader establishment that it now serves. The message was clear: we worked long and hard to establish untrammelled capitalist rule, to dampen working-class expectations, to make Labor utterly subservient and to get rid of this niggling parliamentary left. There is no going back; we won’t cop a new left opposition after 40 years of neoliberalism.
That’s the political basis on which the major parties preferenced each other over Bandt’s party and on which a Liberal senator could say on national television that he prefers the ALP and “union thugs” to the Greens. There isn’t any serious opposition from Labor and the (mostly Labor-aligned) union leaders to the status quo. So the Liberals often do get along with them just fine.
Viewed in this light, the attacks on the Greens represent something much broader than hostility to one party. They show that the ruling class and its political and media servants won’t countenance the slightest shift to a more equal, less dog-eat-dog society.
