So far this week, the phrase “Greens political party” has been heard in Parliament five times. In turn, it was uttered by the prime minister, the treasurer, the early childhood education minister, and a pair of government backbenchers.
Now largely a piece of Labor Party rhetoric, the misnomer for the Australian Greens was first used in Parliament by Liberal Party Senator Ian Macdonald in 2004. During a debate on invasive species, the then minister for fisheries, forestry and conservation used the phrase eight times in the same speech. Macdonald clearly meant to disparage the Greens, which he described as having “left-wing, pro-Saddam, anti-American policies” that would appeal to voters who “would normally vote for the old Communist Party”.
The phrase has remained a mainstay of critical floor speeches since then, having been used on 980 occasions, but it’s really taken off in the current Parliament.
In the five years since its first use in Parliament, the phrase was uttered 53 times. Since Anthony Albanese’s Labor government came into office, it’s been used 350 times.
Greens Senate staffer Pat Caruana, who has mocked the use of the phrase on Twitter, told Crikey he viewed it as a way to “smear” the Greens by reminding voters the party is part of the political process.
“Labor wants people to think we’re just like them, to drag us down to their level, down in the mud just like they are,” he said. “Some of their attacks can be effective, but this is just such a clunky expression. And it’s funny because the attack only gets you so far: Labor is also a political party. If you follow the logic of it as an attack line, it doesn’t really get you anywhere.”
Crikey understands some Labor staffers view it as a way to remind people the Greens is a political party and not an activist group. The phrase is partly used in response to the Greens self-describing as a “movement … [powered] by a network of grassroots supporters”.
Deliberately misnaming your political opponents is an old, tried and true tactic — just look at the US, where Republicans have ridiculed the Democratic Party with the moniker the “Democrat Party” since the nineteenth century, with an increasingly negative connotation since the 1940s.
Tim Moore, a retired associate professor of linguistics formerly at Swinburne University, said the use of the phrase “Greens political party” by the two major parties was a “clear rhetorical strategy”.
“I would think the insistence on the ‘political party’ moniker is to undermine perceptions of the organisation as a broad grassroots movement — one guided by members’ passionately held principles and beliefs about the country — and to paint them as just another party, one that just plays ‘political’ games for the purpose of advancing their own interests,” he told Crikey.
“It seems an act of cynicism that the best epithet the ALP and LNP can come up with is a term that refers precisely to what they are — ‘parties’.”
