Whose side will Labor take?

“Labor needs the leper vote … and desperately.”

By Gary Scarrabelotti*

Probably only Paul Kelly can get away with telling the ALP the truth: that the problem confronting Labor is not just its leadership but the party itself.  (“It’s not just the leaders, it’s the party,” The Australian, 7 September 2011.)

For lesser mortals the punishment for speaking the truth about Labor would be banishment from “Israel” to live among the lepers.

But things are now so bad for Labor that perhaps even those might be heard who have long-since ceased to share Kelly’s romance with the ALP.  Labor needs the leper vote … and desperately.

I say “leper vote” because Labor does not need the Greens, or hard-Green voters, who will always remain, electorally speaking, part of the Labor household.  Labor needs most the people it has rejected.  These are the ordinary patriotic Australians who form families – or who aspire to – and who hope for a socially well-ordered and more-or-less culturally harmonious society in which they can work and save and see their children’s’ children.

In Kelly’s great, statesman-like article he makes a number of recommendations to Labor.  The one that stands out is that the ALP must “break the alliance with the Greens”.

Why?

The answer is provided in an excellent little book published by a successful small Melbourne publisher, Connor Court.

The book is The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences and is edited by Andrew McIntyre.

The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences; edited by Andrew McIntyre; Connor Court, Melbourne, 2011; pp.150; $22.95

The Greens is a series of essays by well-known and credible people on different aspects of Green policy.  In 21 short chapters the writers identify official Green policies and then analyse them for their consequences — mostly terrible — for Australia. The work is without exception thorough, nuanced, calm and understated.

For all this we can be grateful to Connor Court and Andrew McIntyre and to their team of authors.  The book is a first and of great service to Australia.

What I particularly like about The Greens is that it leaves plenty of room for one to draw one’s own conclusions.

The book opens with a fine piece by James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University, on the Greens approach to the Constitution.  This is followed by two very useful, if conventional, articles by Sinclair Davidson and Alan Oxley on the Green economic policies.

For my part, however, I thought the most enlightening contributions to The Greens were those on education by Greg Melleuish and Kevin Donnelly, that on industrial relations by Ken Phillips, and the one on refugees by Mirko Bargaric and Peter Faris QC.

Education

What these chapters speak of is a radically anti-religious party that, had it the opportunity, would deny all parents the right and responsibility to educate their own children in their own values and would mandate a new curriculum of Green-certified values and pseudo-scientific doctrines. This has been the policy of revolutionaries and totalitarians since 1789.  The Nazis and the Communists followed a course already long set.

Industrial Relations

This chapter is illuminating.  Its author is a nightmare figure for many Labor people, especially union officials.  He is Ken Phillips co-founder and executive director of Independent Contractors of Australia.  His piece is calm, politically well-briefed and astute.

First, he points out that a significant share of Green political funding since 2007 has come from Australia’s three key left-wing unions: the CFMEU, the ETU, and the AMWU.

This relationship between sections of the union movement and the Greens poses some intriguing historical questions yet to be fully explored. These are about the collapse of the old Moscow-line communist party in Australia, about what happened to its not inconsiderable funds, and about the way the green movement rose as the communists sank.

Secondly, the payoff for the three unions for setting the Greens IR agenda and for funding their successful Senate campaign will be to share with the Greens the balance-of-power in the Senate.  With the three unions also commanding the votes of a group of Labor MPs and Senators within the Federal Parliament, Phillips argues that the CFMEU-ETU-AMWU alliance has positioned itself to be the most important political player in our hung Federal Parliament.

Will a weak Julia Gillard be driven further left on IR?

How can she avoid it except by taking Kelly’s advice and repudiating her alliance with the Greens?

Refugees

The fascinating thing about the refugee article is what it does not address. Given that Bagaric and Faris QC criticise  the Greens for supporting what the authors claim to be a “cruel, discriminatory and unjust” 1951 UN Convention on refugees, their article raises the question:

What are the Greens really up to on immigration policy?

The answer might lie in a remark often made by a close friend and old press gallery hand who understands from personal experience what it means to bell the Green cat.

“The Greens,” he regularly reminds me, “are not interested in the environment.”

What emerges, unintended perhaps, from the Bagaric-Faris article is that the Greens don’t care about refugees either.

Like all parties with totalitarian and revolutionary instincts, the immediate political purpose of the Greens is to fish in troubled waters. The Greens, therefore, will keep supporting a bad UN Convention on refugees because it creates terrible problems for liberal-democratic political parties too soft in the head and too tender in the heart to rescind Australia’s ratification of the Convention.  The misery of the illegal refugees lingering in detention camps, and the woes visited upon governments as they grapple with illegals, all work a treat for the Greens.

Gramsci

I have used the terms “totalitarian” and “revolutionary”.  These are not terms employed in The Greens nor, I think, in any way intended by the authors.  I take the liberty, however, of drawing out the implications of an argument which the native restraint of Australian political discourse often inhibits us from articulating.

In any case, the Greens are not revolutionaries in a Bolshevik, Trotskyite or Maoist sense.  They are revolutionaries in a Gramscian sense.  They are all about “the long march through the institutions” of society – about revolutionising them (often by indirection) through ideological change from within.

So what do the Greens really want?

The person who got closest to it was not a contributor to this book, but he is quoted in Andrew McIntyre’s pithy introduction.

Writing in The Spectator on 2 April this year in “Lament of a Labor Voter”, Scott Monk put it this way:

“The Greens give the impression they would be a lot happier if we, the whole stinking, belching, meat-eating human race, became extinct.”

Hold that idea.

^* This is an edited version of an article originally published on HenryThornton.com on 12 September 2011.