I met Australian Greens Leader Richard Di Natale at an Italian seniors’ lunch in Saint Joseph the Worker in the heart of old northern migrant burbs of Reservoir North. The smell of homemade lasagne, table flasks of red wine and plates adorned with prosciutto and antipasto made my hunger a gnawing pain as I waited for Di Natale as Sky, ABC and others applied the pressure on him.
Di Natale was on home turf; this is where he comes from, a Catholic Parade College alumnus, the son of Italian immigrants with a big heart and suburban political grit. “Mi dispiace nonna,” he smiles and says to an Italian grandmother who grabs him by the elbow to say something to him. “Sto per fare un’intervista.”
I ask him how he feels when he sees so many of his Italian and Greek aspirational peers who once voted left now voting for the conservatives. Those people, to paraphrase former PM Paul Keating, who ‘the ALP help shift from the Holden to the Audi, but now vote Liberal instead of Labor’.
“That may be true for some, but certainly not for all,” Di Natale says. “This is my part of the world, I grew up here, I am of Italian background, I am here now, I was born and raised with my people, and here I can guarantee you that people are concerned about the foundations of a decent society,” he says emphatically.
“Funding for schools and hospitals, having an aged care system that takes care of them when they have worked all their lives is not alien to these people,” Di Natale points to the aged Italians having lunch.
If you live in the traditional Labor seat of Batman in Victoria, you’d be in no doubt that the Greens are providing a real contest to the incumbent Labor MP David Feeney. Feeney is fighting a pitched battle to defend the marginal inner-city Melbourne seat against the Greens, whose candidate, Alex Bhathal, may turn this traditional red seat to green in Saturday’s poll.
Feeney has become an embarrassment to Labor, particularly after revelations in the second week of the election campaign that he had failed to declare a $2.3m house, purchased in 2013, on his register of parliamentary interests. Like the 2010 Victorian elections, the Liberals have placed Greens last on the how to vote card, and given their Labor rivals second preference, but Di Natale is not presenting any anxiety.
“In the 2010 Baillieu elections, what we saw, despite the fact that the Liberals decided to preference Labor, was the Greens’ vote continue to increase, and in state parliament, regardless of the Liberals continuing to preference against us, are two Green lower house members, one in Prahran and one in Melbourne. Di Natale underscores that Adam Bandt in the last federal election, where the Liberals preferenced Labor, “was re-elected and increased his margin”.
To Di Natale, Labor and the Coalition are a “cosy duopoly, the Coles and Woolworths of politics” whose “deals generate a real backlash against them”.
Imbued with an urge rarely seen in mainstream politicians today, Di Natale says “people are desperate for a different perspective, a new voice representing their community” and is confident that a Greens MP, Alex Bhathal, will be “joining Adam Bandt”.
The Green mix of equity, innovation, environmental polices, universal education and health, support for diversity, the humane treatment of asylum seekers, respect for the UN are politics that were not distant from the Labor or Liberal parties 20 years ago.
“The Greens do have something in common with social democratic politics of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but we also have some significant differences.
“We are a party that believes sustainability is at the heart of all we do. We are a party that understands that the biggest challenge of this generation is global warming, and we need to do something about that,” Di Natale says.
He does agree, though, that “over the years the Labor and Liberal parties have shifted to the right,” and points to “the complete failure to recognise the huge environmental challenges that lie before us”. Di Natale wants the “Greens to represent progressive mainstream values” and to do so he presents his “economic credentials”.
“We are leading the economic debate,” says Di Natale, spruiking his mainstream values.
“We spoke about negative gearing and capital gains reform before anyone else and we gave legitimacy to a national public debate on that issue, and now you’ve seen the Labor Party adopt that policy,” he says with rapid clarity.
He breathlessly reels off the Green economic agenda.
“We’ve been talking for years about the massive super tax concessions on superannuation, and we had Tony Abbott saying ‘never ever’ and the Labor Party saying nothing, now here we are in an election and superannuation is part of the national agenda.
“Multinational tax avoidance; we set up the enquiry that led to CEOs being brought before Senate Committees and being forced to tell the world that they arenot paying their tax, that was a Greens-initiated enquiry.”
Di Natale’s neo-Keynesian narrative sees as “false” the economic premises in the Labor and Liberal agendas.
“Achieving a surplus by an artificial deadline has become synonymous with good economic management, yet as a wealthy nation with an infrastructure deficit, we need to recognise that there is such a thing as good debt, if debt is there to fund productive industry, infrastructure and capital works, it will bring a return on that investment,” Di Natale says.
He maintains that the Greens “are following common sense advice of economists”, who are “saying, when there is debt for productive infrastructure that should be treated differently as debt for recurrent spending”.
The low immigration policies of the Bob Brown Greens had undermined the Greens as a mainstream party in the minds of many immigrant Australians. The new mainstream leader of the Greens makes a distinction.
“Migration has always been part of the Australian story; my story is one of migration, we need to recognise that we’ll always have migration and it is a good thing for Australia.”
But in an attempt not to alienate the left-of-field treehuggers from the new urban demography vital to any long-term Greens’ success, he adds: “If we want to maintain confidence in migration we need to have investment in infrastructure.
“We should be recognising the contribution that people make not only through the skilled migration program, but also through the skilled refugee program – that is why we have a skilled refugee program,” Di Natale says.
The Greens’ humane asylum seeker policy distinguishes them from Labor and the Liberals who lost their humanity years ago and tug the forelock to bigotry and xenophobia. Australians have one of the most inhumane asylum seeker policies in the western world; policies which many liberals, leftists, and conservatives find abhorrent.
“At the heart of the response to asylum seekers is the simple proposition that we will take innocent people fleeing persecution and we lock them up and we will harm them to send a message to others,” says Di Natale.
This is “a line that civilised society should never cross”, and yet Labor and the Liberals have been complicit in creating an “indecent and cruel system”. He acknowledges “it’s a complex and difficult issue” but believes “there is a middle ground that is not cruel and that can still stop deaths at sea”.
Di Natale’s greatest challenge will be making the Greens’ foreign policy mainstream, trying to avoid the extreme and irresponsible positions taken by senators like Lee Rhiannon.
Green anaemia in foreign policy is evident when asked about the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia unilaterally deciding to name itself ‘Macedonia’.
“Currently we are reviewing our position.”
When pushed on what the party is actually reviewing he said “broadly we will be supportive of a resolution”, and asked about occupied northern Cyprus, he simply said “we do not have a position on that, but we look to the UN at being arbiters on that issue”.
We end the discussion with Di Natale saying emphatically that the “Greek community has played an incredible role in the development of this nation, economically, politically, culturally and socially, and we, the Greens, would be doing all we can to support them.”
If the Greens no longer look like radical outliers it is because of Di Natale’s assured leadership and because the two main parties have whored themselves to xenophobia.