All of your thoughts on the Greens are interesting, though pretty consistent with how most people our age seem to view.
If there is no 2PP swing to either Liberal or Labor (i.e. neither outperforms the other), I wouldn’t be surprised if the Greens actually manage the balance of power. With Jane Garrett gone in Brunswick, it is very possible that it could go to the Greens for the first time. Likewise Richmond could also fall to the Greens. Should expect them to hold on to Northcote (which they recently won at a by-election), Melbourne and Prahran (this almost certainly won’t go back to the liberals since they’ve moved ever further right).
A lot of what the Greens campaign on is inherently misleading. Nearly all of the issues you’ve cited @PF are federal issues, which state Labor or indeed the Greens can do nothing about. Adani, for example, is in Queensland. The policy of the Victorian labor party is not to build new coal mines nor indeed coal or gas fired power plants; they’re also paying families to install solar panels. Likewise, children in detention is a federal issue and something against which Dan Andrews’ Labor left faction is actually opposed.
The Greens have been pretty effective at campaigning away on federal issues, which is a pity because the Labor party in Victoria is delivering a lot of the things Greens voters care about. Legalisation of euthanasia and medical marijuana, the safe injecting facility in Richmond, the single largest investment in public transport in Australian history in the 50 billion dollar rail loop, not to mention the metro tunnel and the level crossing removals, the introduction of the safe schools programme, making TAFE courses free, the reintroduction of tech schools, the first explicit campaign by a government in support of public schools in decades, raising standards for teaching courses in Victoria (now need at least a 70 ATAR), record investment in hospitals.
The reality is that we’ve already got a very progressive left wing government in Victoria. Having the Greens in the balance of power will only force them to find things to wedge the government on from the truly crazy left of policy ideas, tbh.
Obviously implicit in all of that is a fairly firm distaste of the Greens on my part. I really dislike that their policy output is really ill thought out and that they often will put ideological purity ahead of practical outcomes. Take two examples of this: the Greens held the balance of power in the senate during the first Rudd government and used their balance of power to vote against the emissions trading scheme, because they wanted something that was more stringent. At that point we were poised to be the major economy in the world with the most ambitious climate change policy, one that would almost certainly still be in place (unlike the carbon tax it had widespread support in the community), and would have served as a template for other countries to follow, but the Greens killed it because their political existence relies on them outdoing labor on climate change and they didn’t want the issue to go away by legislating, which frankly is morally vacuous.
Other example is refugee policy. Effectively the Greens policy is to take anyone who arrives by boat and massively increase the quota. No real practical concerns with the latter, but the former provides some issues. The reality of accepting boat arrivals is that it encourages more people to get on boats in the first place. As distasteful as the debate has become, the available evidence makes that conclusion unavoidable. The problem in this is, therefore, that more people get on boats to come to Australia and, consequently, more people die trying to come here. Sadly it’s not just fear-mongering on behalf of the liberals, literally 1000s of people died last time we had an influx of boats.
I’m not seriously suggesting that the current policy is acceptable—it’s not. It borders on a crime against humanity what we’re doing at the moment. But the Greens policy of accepting everyone is one that, whilst warm and fuzzy, is also one that would lead to the deaths of 1000s of vulnerable people. Again, the Greens would be aware of the evidence, but they choose to ignore it in advancing a policy position that is most palatable to their members and yet would so clearly lead to the deaths of refugees. In truth I think that’s just as bad if not worse than what’s currrently happening.
Home
Help
Search
Login
