It’s a telling reflection on the Greens’ woeful campaign at last Saturday’s NSW election that the one politician they may have helped elect is the founder of the One Nation Party, Pauline Hanson.
The Greens were meant to cruise into office in the Lower House in New South Wales in at least two seats. Given how badly the former Labor Government had been going, and how strongly the Greens’ primary vote had been standing up in the polls, they could and should have been expected to return more than just a couple of MPs.
Instead, their campaign crashed and burned. And it did so in a way which may have caused enduring acrimony with the Labor Party. Needless to say, with federal Labor having the most precarious grasp on power courtesy of a formal coalition with the Greens, these tensions in our biggest State have the potential to strain this arrangement.
Julia Gillard’s sidekick Bob Brown spent quite a bit of time in Sydney over the past few weeks campaigning for his two most popular candidates, Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne in Marrickville and Leichhardt Mayor Jamie Parker. If this pair weren’t hate figures within the ALP before the NSW election, they are now. The Labor MPs who are in coalition with Bob Brown federally are openly cheering the humiliation of these two Greens in last Saturday’s poll.
Ms Byrne was sitting on a primary vote of 45 per cent a few weeks ago and still managed to lose the seat to the incumbent, former Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt. Counting is continuing in Balmain where Jamie Parker as of today’s deadline was 47 votes behind the incumbent, former Education Minister Verity Firth.
There’s one other person who was directly assisted by the Greens at last Saturday’s poll and it’s Pauline Hanson. To the enduring disgust of the Labor Party, the Greens chose to direct preferences to the One Nation founder ahead of the ALP, and she may now creep into the Upper House courtesy of their support. A cynic (such as this one) would say it’s only appropriate given the overlap between the Greens and One Nation on economic policies, with their stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off hostility to free trade, tariff cuts and globalisation. The ALP sees it more simply as a total dog act. Ask anyone in the NSW ALP and they’ll tell you that it exposed the Greens – that is, their partner in federal government – for the Trots, wreckers and opportunists they truly are. I’m not paraphrasing, these are the exact words they use.
More interesting than the losses by the Greens has been the reaction of the Greens to those losses. It has shown that this party which wants to be regarded as a serious political force will squeal, whine and moan when things don’t go according to plan, cry media conspiracy when contentious policies are questioned or exposed, claim victim status when they have been felled by problems of their own making.
The biggest problem the Greens had with their campaign was the revelation of the policy championed by Fiona Byrne for Marrickville Council to boycott the Jewish State of Israel.
Proving that offensive ideas are rendered more palatable by an innocuous acronym, this policy is known as the BDS campaign. It stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Tellingly, Ms Byrne and her chums aren’t advocating any BDS action against the more psychotic Islamic states of the Middle East, places where no-one gets a vote and where women are denied an education. Instead, the council has been busily advocating that all Israeli goods and services in the Marrickville Council area (such as oranges from Tel Aviv) be identified and then banned.
I wrote a piece a few weeks ago describing this planned identification of businesses with links to the Jewish state as “a polite modern rendering of Kristalnacht.” Some Greens were deeply offended by this. Their indignation at protecting the memory of the Holocaust can be easily dismissed as confected. If they regard this period of history as something we should learn from, surely they would baulk at the idea of creating a black list of businesses with links to the Jewish state. Jewish Labor MP Michael Danby was perfectly happy to place this proposal in its proper historical context, saying Marrickville Council could just start painting the Star of David on offending businesses. If every council in the world adopted this policy, the Israeli state would be destroyed economically. It would cease to exist.
The Greens clearly believe they were damaged by sinister coverage of the policy. They weren’t. They were damaged because the policy is sinister.
The paring back of the Green’s primary vote from what had been forecast in the polls suggested two things. It suggested their policies are out of step with the mainstream, and that the mainstream may also be uneasy with the way the Greens have been behaving in coalition with the federal government.
Neither of those messages has sunk in with the Greens, as evidenced by an interesting interview which Jamie Parker gave this week to the left-oriented opinion website New Matilda. The piece was written by the independent journalist Antony Lowenstein, a strident critic of the Jewish state and the author of My Israel Question.
Lowenstein asked Parker about the reaction of Jewish people in the inner-west to the coverage of the Israel boycott. He also spoke to Parker about the fact that his car had been vandalised and that he had received death threats and letters calling him a Nazi and a Jew-hater.
Parker was quoted as saying the following:
“These Jews provide cover for extreme actions if they occur. If there’s a sniff of you being critical of Israel, such Jews will attack you and cut you loose.”
“Lefty Jews told me that you can’t be surprised if extreme people do extreme things but they wouldn’t come out in public and condemn it.”
Parker’s choice of language in this interview has now been picked up by people in the Jewish community, some of them with links to ALP, as further evidence that the Greens have got a few issues they need to resolve here. “These Jews” now believe Parker went close to claiming the Greens had been a victim of some kind of Jewish conspiracy. As Pauline Hanson might say, Jamie, please explain.
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