It’s hard not to admire Dr Brown. In the 1970s, when he was a doctor in Launceston, he led the campaigns to save Lake Pedder and the Franklin River from being drowned by hydro-electric schemes. He campaigned against the destruction of Tasmania’s native forests. And as a member of the Tasmanian Parliament from 1983, he was among the first Australian politicians to come out as openly gay.
But in the mid-1980s Brown made a fundamental mistake. He chose to turn the environmental movement, or at least part of it, into a political party, the Australian Greens. The Greens were successful in winning seats in the Tasmanian Parliament, and then in the Senate, where Brown won a seat in 1996. Why was this a mistake? Because within the Australian electoral system, creating a party of the far left meant that the Greens could only achieve success by winning votes and seats from the Labor Party, then and now a centre-left party. This meant the Greens and Labor were from then on a collision course.
The labour movement and the environment movement should be allies. The greatest victory ever won by environmentalists in Australia, saving the Franklin River, was won by effective co-operation between environmental activists, the trade unions and the Labor Party. The campaign to save the Franklin helped Labor win the 1983 election, and the Hawke government then used the foreign affairs power in the Constitution to block the damming of the river.
The collapse of the Labor-Greens alliance: A decade-long setback for climate action
The formation of the Greens as a political party competing with Labor wrecked that alliance. That competition led to the greatest setback for Australian environmentalists – the defeat of the Rudd Labor government’s climate legislation in 2008. The government’s bills were defeated in the Senate when Bob Brown and the Greens voted with Tony Abbott’s opposition. They did that so that they could pose at the next election as the only party that cared about climate change. In fact, they set back the fight against climate change by a decade. Only with the election of the Albanese government in 2022 did Australia once again take effective action on climate.
At least under Bob Brown, and his successor Christine Milne, the Greens were a party primarily campaigning on the environment, even if they did more harm than good through their political opportunism. Since 2015, when Richard di Natale became Greens Leader, and even more so under the extreme leadership of Adam Bandt since 2020, the Greens have changed, a lot.
The Greens’ Radical Shift: From Environmental Advocacy to Political Extremism
They have now become a party of the extreme left, with eleven Senators. They elected Lee Rhiannon, an unrepentant former communist, to the Senate from NSW. Her successor, Mehreen Faruqi, has described Australia as “a disgusting country.” They are now a grab bag of disaffected Trotskyites, Anarchists, Socialist Alternative, far left extremists.
The Greens don’t talk much about the environment anymore, hardly about climate change, the greatest threat to Australia’s future prosperity. They spend most of their time campaigning against Australia’s security interests. They campaign for Julian Assange, the man who stole huge amounts of classified documents then released them to help Donald Trump get elected, to the benefit of Valdimir Putin’s fascist regime in Russia. They make excuses for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, blaming all the world’s troubles on the US and NATO.
At the moment the Greens are campaigning mainly on the conflict in Gaza. When the Islamist fascists of Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October last year, murdering 1,200 people, the Greens immediately leapt to Hamas’s defence, blaming Israel for the conflict. The Greens have allied themselves with the most extreme and violent elements of the anti-Israel campaign, supporting the genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea” and effectively calling for Israel’s destruction.
Greeks beware -Greens sing the tune of Erdogan
Voters in the Greek community might note that this is the same tune being sung by the Islamist regime under Erdogan in Turkey, which has been illegally occupying Northern Cyprus for 50 years. Now the Greens are running in the current round of local government elections in Victoria. Their dreadful record on Yarra Council – where they spend most of their time fighting with each other and wasting the Council’s time on irrelevant issues, should be a warning. Their squeeze on Merri-bek Council, has the same harmful effect and it will be worse if they win enough seats. The Greens are a secretive, faction-ridden party of political extremists.
The Greens are the far left’s version of what One Nation is in the far right – sowing the seeds of disharmony and division in the community for their own political interests rather than bringing people together for a common purpose and in Australia’s national interest.
The Greek community is a proud one, a tolerant one and a community that gives so much to everyone, not just ourselves and I’m sure Victorian voters of Greek heritage have enough sense not to be fooled by them.
Philip Dalidakis is the former Victorian minister for Minister for innovation and the digital economy, small business, trade and investment, and small business, innovation and trade.
