The end of the political year is often the occasion for hijinks, farces and debacles, usually on the Senate side of the building. Even without the now legendary corridor parties, governments trying to cram legislation through and senator confusion over what they should be voting for or against is enough to create a circus atmosphere. Add in the coming election and the pressure is redoubled.
The first backflip was served up yesterday. After two recent electoral rebukes in the Queensland state election and Victorian local government elections, the Greens, or at least the left-wing Melbourne claque running them at the moment, have clearly decided to make themselves a smaller target, and reversed their long opposition to Labor’s Build to Rent and Help to Buy schemes.
The Greens had been particularly savage about Build to Rent, which they insisted was pro-developer, would would drive gentrification, and would push rents up to benefit “corporate landlords” (if landlords are the villains of the Greens worldview, corporate landlords as boss-level baddies). Nonetheless, the Greens say they will now “wave through” such terrible legislation. Developers and gentrifiers everywhere must be popping the bubbly.
Nonetheless, by stymieing much of Labor’s housing agenda for the past two years, the Greens can rightly feel it’s Mission Accomplished. Their goal, like it or not, has been to delay or prevent the government from doing anything noticeable to address housing affordability, such as encouraging the construction of more housing or reducing migration, enabling the Greens to campaign against Labor at the election for failing on housing. You can object to the ruthlessness of the Greens’ tactic, but not the electoral calculation behind it, or its success. A last-minute backflip to allow two relatively modest additions to the policy suite on housing won’t do anything to change those political dynamics. Labor will continue to denounce the “Greens political party” (drink!) as obstructionist and “the party of protest”, but there’s no denying the Greens’ success in preventing reform on housing.
To be fair, Adam Bandt might have pushed the whole charade a bit too far, though, when he declared he would “take the fight to the next election, where we’ll keep Peter Dutton out and then push Labor to act on unlimited rent rises and tax handouts to wealthy property investors”.
Keep Peter Dutton out? The Greens? Consider the seats the Bandt has explicitly said the Greens will target at the next election: Sydney, Macnamara, Wills, Cooper, Richmond. All Labor seats. The Greens will keep Dutton out by… taking seats off Labor. Makes sense. The entire Greens project is to take seats off Labor, understandably. The extent to which a hard-left party cannibalises the vote of a notionally left party, however, matters little to the electability of a right-wing party, beyond the extent to which it makes it easier for the right-wing party to become the largest grouping in Parliament and thus best-placed to form government.
Which currently looks to be the most likely outcome after the electoral shenanigans have ended next year.
If this is truly the last week of this parliamentary term, good riddance. It has lacked the sickening scandals and blatant corruption of the previous term under the Coalition, true, but this has been an ordinary parliament led by a decidedly ordinary Labor government. Between a weak, ineffectual Albanese administration, a right-wing Trump mimic who thinks, possibly correctly, that he only has to demonise foreigners loudly enough to win, and a far-left third party obsessed with identity politics, Australians have been poorly served. Only the independent MPs and David Pocock have offered a rational, centrist approach to policy.
As of now, the danger is not that we’ll have an independent-supported government of either stripe after the next election — probably the only way we’ll see a decent government anytime soon — but that Labor, “helped” by the Greens, will lose so badly as to install Dutton and his unprepared, talent-free frontbench in majority government. That’s the next most likely outcome.
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