The Greens

The biggest reader reaction I have ever had to a column involved a fight with the power company AGL, which had hit me with a baffling bill which had jumped by $700 in just one quarter.

The column examined the question of actual meter readings versus estimated readings, and the issuing of so-called “catch-up” bills by power companies which for whatever reason had undercooked an earlier bill, leaving them with no choice but to whack the consumer with a kind of one-off bill which would force you to sell one of your kidneys.

In researching the piece I was snowed with some largely (and possibly deliberately) confusing explanations from power providers as to how the meters were read by a different company which was at arms length from their business. Both the power providers and the meter readers seemed more than happy to blame each other for all the confusion, and the subsequent one-off impost.

Continue reading "The shocking truth about the Greens and power" »

Blinky Bill, Caramello and Sam the Thirsty Koala would be well satisfied this week.

Thanks largely to The Greens, koalas will be better protected in three states. Their status is now officially “threatened”, which is one rung below endangered on the uh-oh ladder, but several rungs above “fend for yourself, buddy”.

The Greens don’t get an enormous amount of love on this website. That’s mostly because the writers and commenters who set the tone of our dialogue largely believe that The Greens should stick to saving bits of the environment we can actually see and touch and interact with.

Continue reading "Greens stand up for the stoned and indolent" »

Since the huge news of Bob Brown’s retirement last week, new leader Christine Milne has emerged as a leader just as canny as her predecessor, crafting her own stamp on the party leadership rather than walking in anyone’s shadow.

Despite her somewhat school matronly exterior, the new leader is emerging as a tough, razor sharp and sophisticated player in Federal politics.

Bob Brown has left the party in its strongest ever position. The reality facing the Labor Party now is that it can’t survive without the Greens. With the latest polls showing the ALP at 29 percent and the Greens around 14, there are only 15 percentage points now separating the two parties in terms of popularity among voters. The Greens have cemented themselves as the third political party in Australia, and the ALP had better look out the Greens don’t swallow them up.

Continue reading "Who wants to be a Milne heir?" »

With Bob Brown’s resignation as leader of the Greens, Australia has lost its most important left-wing politician.

There was a time when Labor and the coalition were regarded as the Left and Right of Australian politics. Not any more.

In terms of what they stand for, the major parties are almost indistinguishable. The competition between them is about competence, not much else.

Continue reading "Love him or loathe him, a rare man of conviction" »

Fellow Earthians, I formally declare open the inaugural Global Parliament. Before turning to matters of procedure, I will chant the prayer:

“Almighty Gaia, we who exist as mere parts of your living organism, humbly pray to the great spirits of the universe to direct and prosper our deliberations for the welfare and wellbeing of this living planet.”

Let me indicate at the outset that henceforth all representatives are expected to be present and chant the opening prayer with me each session. Conscientious religious objection is abolished and only that great green spiritual leader will be able to articulate Her will and Her will be done on post-anthropogenic earth as it was on pre-anthropogenic earth.

Continue reading "A statement by the President of the Global Parliament" »

My fellow Earthians. The real tragedy of Bob Brown’s wacky speech last week is that he has pretty much left behind forever his credibility as a man concerned first and foremost with saving and preserving the Australian environment, which is exactly what most Greens voters elected him for.

Like a severed finger or a razed old growth forest, credibility doesn’t grow back. And that’s a shame because Australia needs the leader of its environmental party to be un-nutty. The Tassie devils dying of facial tumours need it, the koalas dying of Chlamydia need it, and the 100 year old sea turtles strangled by plastic bags need it.

Urban dwellers and rural dwellers need it too, so that we can all sensibly debate the balance between economic and environmental concerns. So what have we got in Bob Brown? An enviro-cop framing the big Green issues through an obscurist, metaphorical lens of little green men. Excuse the pun, but that approach is just too alienating.

Continue reading "Earth to Bob. Little green men won’t save the world" »

Reading the entrails of the Labor carcass in Queensland will no doubt keep an army of commentators and party strategists occupied for some time. This was not a simple routing, or another “they’ve been there too long” swing. It was something new altogether.

It wasn’t merely a large number of swinging voters deciding they wanted a change of Government. The magnitude of the swing points to a desertion by Labor’s true believers.

While the fact they fled their party is interesting, more interesting perhaps is where those disenchanted dyed-in the-wool Labor folk went.

Continue reading "ALP evacuees have no love for The Greens" »

It looks like Wayne Swan was onto something after all when he started his bad-tempered battering of mining billionaires. Maybe they aren’t like the rest of us. But if Mr Swan was right in theory, it took Clive Palmer to prove it by claiming the President of the United States was using spies to recruit Greens to wreck Australian coal mining.

Mr Palmer, one of the three billionaires the Treasurer has been taking swipes at, has started something that others might find extremely difficult to finish.

If the mining industry was worried the newly-passed Minerals Resources Rental Tax would deter investors, what sort of disincentive would come from an influential magnate claiming undercover agents in the open-cut mines?

Continue reading "CIA conspiracy undermines Clive Palmer’s credibility" »

The federal government’s media inquiry released its long-awaited report today – 469 pages of policy discussion for interested parties to absorb on a Friday afternoon.

Guess they don’t know the end-of-the-week pub habits of journalists too well. Stay tuned to The Punch as we delve through the other 459 pages in the coming days. Here’s what it looks like at this point.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been speculation that the inquiry would propose the establishment of a media ombudsman or a licensing system for journalists. Turns out the inquiry has only ended up making one significant recommendation.

Continue reading "Our first look at the future of Australia’s media" »

Foreign investors have been snapping at the heels of Aussie farms. In spite of Cyclone Yasi, fires, floods, supermarket wars, the carbon tax and the coal seam gas industry, more than $180m worth of blue-chip farming land has been sold in south-eastern Australia since last spring, with continued interest reported from Europe, United States and China.

In other words, the world is hungry. According to the UN, the planet has 80 million new mouths to feed and by 2050, 70 per cent of people will live in urban areas. It’s no big surprise then that everyone wants a bit of Australia.

Aussie farms are a sound investment. Of the 135,996 farms in Australia, 120,941 operate as agricultural producers. The cattle, wheat and milk industries generate 12 per cent of the national GDP, a rate that’s growing. But if we sell it all off to the highest bidder, what will that mean for the future of Australian farming?

Continue reading "Is this the end of the Aussie family farm?" »

Welcome to The Punch’s Biggest Moments of 2011. Each day until the Friday before Christmas, we’ll be counting the events which marked 2011. Our list contains moments from politics, popular culture, tragedy, sport and more. Some are frivolous. Others are deadly serious. These are the moments which had us talking in 2011. More to the point, they’re the moments that had YOU talking.

What happened
Fiona Byrne, the mayor of Marrickville in inner Sydney, backed a motion to support the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. This basically meant that no Israeli products would be sold within the boundaries of Marrickville Council. Tough luck, bagel-lovers. Good news for Vietnamese pork roll sellers.

What happened next
All hell broke loose. Some argued that councils should stick to local services like rubbish collection. Others pointed out that in a region which has nearly 200 ethnicities living cheek to jowl, there were plenty of evil repressive regimes much more worthy of attention than a democratic state fighting for its right to exist – even considering the ongoing claims for Palestinian statehood.

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #23 Marrickville invades Israel" »

Here’s the real problem with the climate change debate. It’s not that the deniers have hijacked the overwhelming scientific consensus, sneakily turning a huge body of evidence into what many now perceive to be a 50/50 proposition.

Neither is the problem the fact that the carbon tax will bankrupt us (which it won’t) or that Bob Brown has become our de facto prime minister (which he hasn’t) or that we’re pissing some perfectly good industries down the drain in the search for new clean jobs (which we aren’t).

The problem with the climate change debate is that this whole endless shouting match is supposedly about saving the environment, yet no one is actually talking about the environment.

Continue reading "Climate change debate is the enemy of environmentalism" »

The COAG reform agenda, having stalled long ago under Labor’s chaotic governing style, is showing about the same signs of life as the US housing market, if the latest performance reports are anything to by.

The 2009-10 performance reports released in recent days did not make for pleasant reading. Almost two years after the deadline for Kevin Rudd’s promise to take over the hospital system if the states did not lift their game, we are still no closer to a solution.

Elective surgery waiting times rose nationally while “financial barriers” caused one million Australians to put off seeing a GP. No doubt these financial barriers will only worsen as the inflationary effects of Labor’s stimulus spending come home to roost through higher taxes and interest rate hikes.

Continue reading "Reform agenda has slowly COAGulated" »

In music, “polyphony” is when a composition has more than one melody playing at the same time. This term should be adapted for the political sphere. So, all and sundry, I hereby declare the label ‘polliephony’ be applied to those times when pollies try and win both sides of the argument - in other words, when they try to walk both sides of the street.

Polliephony is unfortunately a technique that is pervasive in almost all Australian political debates. However, for purposes of “programmatic specificity”, I’ll focus on its use in the asylum seeker debate.  This is because the asylum seeker debate is ripe for the use of polliephony, as it has two distinct sides of the street to walk on: one ‘tough’ and the other ‘humane’. 

Which brings us to one of the more remarkable and indelible uses of polliephony in modern Australian politics. Kevin “Bonhoeffer” Rudd’s notorious “tough but humane” approach to border protection.

Continue reading "Phony pollies and polyphony on asylum seekers" »

I never thought I would fail to cast a vote in a Federal election, and I never thought I’d be relieved that I didn’t. But I did, and I am.

In my defence, I was somewhere in the boondocks of Turkey when the election was under way, and had pretty much dropped the ball on sorting out my postal vote.

It may or may not say something about the administration of our electoral system that I’ve never been queried on this failure to exercise my franchise, but I’ve got to say, not having to make a decision has relieved me of the burden of responsibility for doing so.

Continue reading "I can’t believe I almost voted for The Greens" »

The jostling and lobbying amongst the Greens over who is to replace Brown has quietly continued on in earnest. Tasmanian Christine Milne is Brown’s first choice.

Seen as less of a firebrand than her younger colleagues, Brown hopes that Milne will maintain the camouflage of the Greens radical socialist agenda. A camouflage that has been the secret to the Greens’ electoral success to date.

Milne, however will be more aggressive than Brown in pursuing policies that put Australian jobs at risk. Milne would close down mines, make manufacturing unsustainable, and force farmers off their land.

Continue reading "No green pastures ahead in post-Bob Brown era" »

In May this year, the venerable old man of the left, Bob Brown will address the National Press Club.

He will use the live broadcast to outline his party’s vision for that historic moment on July 1, when his party holds the exclusive balance of power in the Senate.

With four senators to add to the five already in Canberra and a House of Representatives MP thrown in for good measure, the enviro-activist turned ground-breaking politician, sits atop a growing party widely considered the legitimate third force in Australian politics.

Continue reading "Green slip shows they’re no compulsory third party" »

To adapt the slogan of the NRA: Labor voters don’t elect Greens; Liberals elect Greens.

The Green ambitions in the NSW election were massively frustrated last night because the Liberals did not direct their second-choice votes to them.

Without that vital second tier support from their unlikely ballot buddies the Liberals, the Greens did worse than they hoped in the vulnerable inner-city Labor seats of Marrickville and Balmain.

Continue reading "Greens will die on the vine without Liberal help" »

There was a telling first line from Professor Ross Garnaut during the launch of his latest carbon trading paper: “Well, here we are again.”

It was the release of what is now Garnaut’s sixth paper, and his tomes are beginning to take on the appearance of some tragic existentialist in terms of both their size and themes. “We are living through an awful contest of knowledge versus ignorance,” was one of his more memorable lines.

Like Garnaut’s previous presentations it was worthy, intelligent and held a message that the Government itself has been unable to articulate: that a price on carbon won’t raise your cost of living. Putting aside some problems with that theory, the real problem for Garnaut’s latest volume lies in the political realities it exists in.

Continue reading "It’s deja vu all over again for Garnaut’s carbon price" »

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been confronted by concerned members of the Labor Right over legislation that would restrict the ability of the Commonwealth to overturn territory laws.

Their fear is that it would allow the territories to introduce their own laws on same-sex marriage and euthanasia, and the Prime Minister has been forced to delay her support for the bill.  Wayne Swan this morning has said the concerns are “legitimate.”  It’s a statement of the obvious that Julia Gillard is squeezed from the left by her coalition with the Greens, and from the right by the Labor party’s right wing concerned it will lose touch with increasingly angry base.

Perhaps what is less clear is what the territories’ legislation will actually allow.  Legally it doesn’t actually allow gay marriage or euthanasia, but there is a divergence between legal and political realities which would open up the door to their legalisation.

Continue reading "Gillard’s gay marriage and euthanasia minefield" »

Julia Gillard has staked the future of her Government on a costly, complex, and probably unpopular climate change policy.

And she had to break an election commitment to do it.

Call it brave or perhaps crazy-brave but Ms Gillard is nothing if not a quick study. She plans to move fast and get it done this year. Not for her the glacial pace, the bloated timelines, and reams of ponderous reports favoured by Kevin Rudd.

Continue reading "Last man standing will be winner on carbon tax" »

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced today that she intends to introduce a fixed cost for carbon emissions by July 1 2012, with the introduction of a cap and trade emissions trading scheme within three to five years after that.

We’ve all known it was coming, but for a carbon price to move out of the abstract and back into the real world is a massive jolt to the political system. This announcement is a big one: for households, for business, for the environment and for Julia Gillard’s future as Prime Minister.

As my colleague Samantha Maiden at the Sunday Telegraph tweeted this afternoon: “My considered if profane opinion on carbon price: Gillard is best when in combat mode. She’s just called on biggest s***tfight of her career.” True dat.

Continue reading "Gillard’s make or break carbon price plan" »

I have lived in Tully and Innisfail and survived cyclones when I resided there. I was evacuated in the recent Brisbane floods for five days but fortunately the water surrounding my house stopped just before it entered. I am currently in North America and been bombarded with weather warnings about the “Snow storm of the century”

I admit that during the time that Cyclone Yasi was crossing the North Queensland coast I was listening to ABC radio here in North America on the internet as I was concerned for the welfare of friends and relatives living there.

The aim of a severe weather warning is to prevent a weather hazard from becoming a disaster. I am amazed however at the national extent of the weather hysteria devoted by the media and politicians both here and in Australia when accurate and credible warnings for potentially affected areas are all that are required.

Continue reading "How much weather porn can we watch?" »

The shock defeat of the Brumby state government last weekend has unleashed the usual muttering within the ALP about how to shore-up a crumbling base.

Already, some Labor MPs - let’s call them the GOM or “grumpy old men’’ - reckon they have it pegged. Too much focus on the inner-city elites at the expense of the majority, the ordinary folk in middle and outer-suburbs. That’s their message: Labor should concern itself exclusively with bread and butter issues such as relieving cost of living pressures for ``ordinary’’ families. Nothing else.

Analytically speaking, this ‘government-out-of-touch’ critique is a soft target. Self evidently, if you lose, you were not in tune with voters. But it is rarely that simple and ignores the fact that in this instance that Labor was asking for another four years to add to its existing eleven in office. History shows this is almost always a bridge too far.

Continue reading "The big headaches are just starting for Julia" »

And so now we’re selling uranium to the Russians.  Juggling the morning madness of kids, breakfast, dogs and work, the news item relayed via my tinny trannie was easy to miss and at first didn’t register.  And then the irony of it all hit me like a shovel between the eyes.

It is very, very, hard to convey to Gen Y what it was like coming of age in the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties - before we were called Gen X, before mobile phones and before the internet.

It’s hard to make them understand what it was like living everyday thinking that it could be your last, thinking you were seconds away from being annihilated in atomic cataclysm launched by those Godless Soviets.

Continue reading "Longing for a more innocent time of nuclear apocalypse" »

The Gillard Government’s love nest with a fragmented bunch of Greens and independents has been barely consummated before it faces its first big lovers’ row.

The dispute over the recognition of gay marriage is not an easy issue to handle for a Government trying to project unity and conciliation.

Contrary to the post-election happy snaps of MPs giving each other group hugs, vowing to show a spirit of respect and solidarity, there’s nothing unifying about gay marriage.

Continue reading "Online nation divided over gay marriage" »

There is a certain weathered look to the Greens today. The deep rich hue that has characterised that lovely new t-shirt in recent months has been slightly dulled by political reality.

The decision by the Victorian Liberals to preference the Labor party ahead of the Greens in the upcoming state election is a kick in the guts to the minor party’s chances of, not only holding the balance of power in the new parliament, but getting any seats at all in the lower house.

It’s important decision not only in the context of the Victorian election but the emerging story of the Greens as a real third force in Australian politics.

Continue reading "Liberals’ decision will change the new Green paradigm" »

Sitting around in a café the other day, one of my former colleagues bemoaned the fact that young people where not as active as him when he was studying. He raised his frustration that each generation is getting more politically lethargic and ranted about the generational changes we are seeing.

Apart from reminding him that ‘his generation’ had not done such a bang up job in solving the world’s problems, and actually delivering some new ones, the whole area of ‘generational research’ is one that is deeply flawed. That is, to clearly define a population’s attributes based on their ‘generational status’ tends to homogenise a population by their age – despite there always being significant differences within each cluster.

Despite this, we see books and papers about Boomers, X-ers and Y’s – all presented as if this is the missing ingredient in understanding the way of the world and what is going on with our society. So is this the case?

Continue reading "Looking to generational divides tell us nothing" »

A utilities representative recently came to my front door offering a better deal on our gas and electricity prices if we changed to a different supplier. He was offering a larger discount than the existing supplier.

The visit prompted me to look back at the cost of electricity over the past few years. The results were startling. Last year, the costs were more than 50 per cent higher than five years ago. Our usage was about the same.

The price increases are being felt by households across Australia.  According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, power bills increased by 50 per cent. In the same period, total expenses only increased by 16 per cent. Since Labor has been in government, the prices have risen by more than 42 per cent.

Continue reading "Think energy costs now, just wait for the carbon tax" »

On Wednesday Bob Brown said two odd things that either proved he is some kind of political genius, or was the kind of rhetoric that sets the Greens up for a big fall in the future. My guess is it’s the former now but will be the latter later.

The first was his apparent objection to the proposed merger of the Australian Stock Exchange with the Singaporean Exchange.

The crux of his opposition was that Singapore had executed the young Australian Van Nguyen for drug trafficking in 2005, and this was a militaristic non-democratic state that we should be careful about handing over our stock exchange to.

Continue reading "If the Greens want to play the majors they need to grow up" »

Labor hard man Graham Richardson noted yesterday that courage was a defining quality in a leader. He was speaking about Peter Costello’s unwillingness to do the hard graft of gathering the numbers for a challenge which of course, never came. That tawdry clash of egos which bedevilled the last Coalition governemnt will re-surface this week when John Howard’s memoirs, ``Lasarus Rising’’ hits the bookshelves.

Courage remains important in the contemporary political context too because it is not just seizing power that takes guts, exercising it fully also requires steely determination in the face of resistance.

Even Julia Gillard’s political enemies concede she has passed the first of these tests. Blasting Kevin Rudd from the leadership took a lot of sand.

Continue reading "Sometimes only a hard decision will do" »

With the beginning of a parliamentary debate into the war in Afghanistan this week, the more localised conflict between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott of trips to the warzone came to a periodic truce.

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But the outbreak of the highly politicised PR war between the leaders over who was supporting the troops in Afghanistan more does bring us to an interesting question: what is the point of politicians hanging in war zones?

Earlier in the week the Greens Senator Bob Brown was asked by the 7:30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien why, as the leader of a party pushing for troop withdrawal from the war, he had not visited Afghanistan.

Continue reading "The growth industry of pollies in war zones" »

The Government’s new climate change committee has made a definitive decision after its first meeting: dump Julia Gillard’s proposed Citizens Assembly on climate change.

Think of it as a bureaucratic take on scissors, paper, rock: multi-party climate change committee beats citizens assembly everytime. So while the Gillard Government may have no climate change policy, it has managed to kill off the last one with the help of its brand new committee.

This is no surprise given the Citizens Assembly was a dog from day one and was treated as such by the media and the public. It was possibly the worst policy bungle of the Gillard’s in the entire election campaign (although the Indonesian judge awarded that honour to the East Timor solution).

Continue reading "The Assembly is dead. Long live the Committee" »

After all the scorn and criticism surrounding the much talked of, somewhat derided, plan for a Citizen’s Assembly Gillard has just announced a new plan to tackle climate change, in the form of a multi-party climate change committee; investigating and deliberating over the best way to implement a price on carbon.

Gillard’s definitely singing a different tune to her pre-election decisiveness that she had “ruled out” the possibility of a carbon tax under any government she lead.

Now, after a lot of somewhat hysterical party shuffling, repositioning, negotiating and endless demands and speeches. Gillard is most certainly leading her misshapen, conglomerate government, and the possibility of a carbon tax is most certainly back on the table.

Continue reading "Climate committee is no citizens assembly, thank God" »

If the Australian people were faced with the prospect of this weekend’s AFL grand final not going ahead because neither team could agree on the umpire, this nation could be faced with a level of social unrest that could force East Timor to come to our aid. Fortunately this crisis only goes to whether our Parliament can sit or not so it will be fine.

With the decision by Tony Abbott not to honour parts an agreement on parliamentary reform we are still faced with a speakerless House of Representatives, and now the awkward question of whether we’ll return for Parliament next week or not.

There are a couple of things to consider about Abbott’s decision and Gillard’s reaction to it. Needless to say it’s all about concern for political hides rather than anything to do with parliamentary reform. 

Continue reading "So should we call Parliament off next Tuesday?" »

The drama of the 2010 federal election came to an end as the independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor threw their support behind Labor. This has an immediate impact on Australian climate policy.

A Gillard minority government promises a new cross-party Climate Change Committee to spearhead carbon-pricing legislation in the next term of government. This agenda will face stiff opposition, but with the right design, it can help move Australia towards a low-carbon economy.

Both Labor and the Greens support the notion of carbon pricing but have not yet agreed on the specific mechanism for doing so. (Labor attempted to pass an emissions-trading bill in its last term, however the Senate twice rejected the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The Coalition opposed the CPRS because it was too onerous, and Greens because it was too weak. As a stopgap measure, the Greens proposed an ‘interim carbon price’ of $20 per tonne for two years, but Rudd and Gillard dismissed the idea.)

Continue reading "What we still need to know about a carbon price" »

The Greens are now officially the far-left faction of the Australian Labor Party.  They have been signed, sealed and delivered by a Prime Minister desperate to cling to power and their own party leader who is clearly desperate to be part of the “big game” he has always decried.

Those people who voted Green because they would “stand up to” the major parties must be bewildered and disappointed by the indecent haste with which they have got into bed with the Labor Party.

The Greens can no longer claim to be an “alternative” to the major parties, because they are now a formalised wing of Labor.  Rather than being a third political force, they’re just Labor’s appendage.

Continue reading "Introducing Labor’s new faction – the Greens" »

The Australian Greens is a political party that comes to wreck and to not build.

Their grand plan is to turn Australia, the fourteenth largest economy in the world into Tasmania writ large.

Modern Tasmania lives off the redistributionist largesse of Commonwealth subsidies and public service salaries. Two thirds of the island State is locked up in national parks and its population growth has been historically anaemic for many decades. Through the Hare-Clarke system, development and entrepreneurialism is gridlocked – a happy outcome if you are an advocate of zero population growth and genteel poverty.

Continue reading "The Greens plan for Australia: A big Tasmania" »

I was at a pub a couple of weeks ago and a friend asked my prediction about the election. Not much into making predictions I speculated that Abbott would do better than anyone expected and the ALP were running a campaign that could ruin them. One of my other friends jumped in and said, ‘it’s the tax, the mining tax, the idiots should never tax the one thing that makes us rich’.

An interesting debate followed that only ended when someone reminded me that it was ‘my shout’. Being a Saturday night and with the footy on the big screen, I think we simultaneously decided that this discussions about tax do not make for an ideal night out.

While the country remains in political limbo and the power brokers are cutting deals, the mining tax is one of those issues that seem to be bubbling below the service.

Continue reading "Why the Independents should dig the mining tax" »

There are a couple of reasons why Tony Abbott rebuffed the independents demands to have Treasury and finance cost their policies: they probably are a bit dodgy, he doesn’t trust treasury not to leak it and it’s an attempt at a show of strength from someone who’ll probably end up on top in the seat count.

During the campaign Abbott refused to submit his policies to Treasury under the Charter of Budget Honesty because he couldn’t trust treasury, or more specifically the Treasurer’s office, not to leak the findings.

Abbott appeared to refine his argument for not releasing the costings down to this reason this morning on ABC radio, calling a leak during the campaign from Treasury on Coalition costings: “an act of political bastardry”.

Continue reading "What could Abbott be thinking?" »

The 2010 election result may not yet be clear, and we may be far from certain just who will be Prime Minister in a week or a fortnight’s time, but there is one thing we do know after the events of Saturday night.

The Australian people have chosen the Greens to play a much greater role in our new Parliament, and a much greater role in our decision-making.

Aside from the fact that we are looking at the first hung parliament since 1940, we have seen an historic vote for the Greens, with a record share of the national vote for a third party, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate. That is in addition to the success of Adam Bandt , the first Green to win a lower house seat at a Federal election.

Continue reading "Democracy will benefit from a healthy shade of Green" »

Whoever loses tomorrow, one thing is certain – this election will not be a victory for any major political party’s true believers. Coalition and Labor partisans have spent the last month gulping down political-DNA-corroding Kool-Aid in their increasingly desperate attempts to pimp themselves out to disengaged bogans address the legitimate concerns of those salt-of-the-earth, hearts-of-gold, marginal-seat-dwelling, mainstream Australians who embody all that is pure and noble in this great nation.

How many inner-city ALP activists letterboxing on cold winter nights have been haunted by that image of the PM and Member for Lindsay scanning the horizon on a navy vessel off Darwin, looking as if they might at any moment rush to a gun turret to strafe an incoming boat packed to the gunwales with queue-jumping reffos? And how many small-business owners brooding about a recalcitrant employee have spluttered on their Penfolds Grange at a Liberal fundraising dinner, pondering how the party of capital lost its bottle when it came to smashing the unions?

But let’s also spare a thought for the Greens’ disillusioned libertarian voters. It was always a somewhat awkward embrace, but for years those bridling at the interference of church and state into who they marry, what they watch, how they choose to get intoxicated, or when they die felt the Greens had their backs.

Continue reading "Slim pickings for libertarians" »

I sent a rather indignant email to Bob Brown the other day. I followed it up with an equally frustrated voicemail.

Essentially, I berated him for not being the inspirational and credible figurehead that he has been for the environmental movement for decades. I questioned his lack of visibility in an election that arguably presents one of the most monumental and significant chances the Greens have had of becoming a very powerful political force.

Senator Christine Milne’s media spokesperson Tim Hollo replied to my accusations (charitably also acknowledging that he understood my frustrations) with the simple question: “Why is the media complaining about the fluff and nonsense and policy vacuum of this election campaign, talking about the Greens having the potential to hold balance of power but completely ignoring the Greens’ policy launches?”

Continue reading "Where’s Bob Brown? He’s campaigning, just on the web" »

Signs in the window of an adventure tours store on Scotchmer Street in North Fitzroy urge passersby to do two things: climb Mount Everest, and put a member of the Greens in the House of Representatives.

In most electorates these tasks would be of roughly equal difficulty. But not here in the federal seat of Melbourne, where Greens candidate Adam Bandt is the firm bookies’ favourite to win on August 21. With a well-organised campaign and an established electorate profile, Bandt’s challenge looks less like climbing a mountain and more like a sprint down Swanston Street.

“Make history Melbourne” is the campaign slogan, with the general buzz being about making Bandt the first Green elected to the House of Representatives – which would be truly historic, except that it rests on the following qualifying technicality. He would only be the first Green to win in a general election.

Continue reading "Looking for history-makers on Melbourne’s Green streets" »

Senator Bob Brown has his cranky pants on because the Greens are not included in the leaders’ debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. According to Brown, the Greens should get a go on Sunday as the potential balance of powerpuffs in the Senate.

Acknowledging he has more chance of contesting the MasterChef final than the debate, Brown thinks the major parties are running scared. “Julia and Tony don’t want the Greens there showing them up on issues like Afghanistan, like [e]quality in marriage, like greening the economy, like a carbon price, like better funding for public education and for health”.

Yet for all their grandstanding, do the Greens really deserve a turn with the worm? One of the great untold stories of federal politics in recent months is the under-performance of the Greens.

Continue reading "Grandstanding Greens aren’t ready for the big league" »