After snaring three new lower house seats at the federal election and seizing the balance of power in the Senate,the Australian Greens find themselves wielding more power and influence than ever before.
Voters have given the party,along with climate-friendly teal and independent candidates,an effective mandate to help deliver real action on climate change and prod the new Labor government to go further than it has promised in cutting emissions in this parliamentary term.
However,a month after the poll,few people seem to be talking about the Greens and the environment in the same breath. Instead,internal ructions within the party are getting far more attention.
When Greens leader Adam Bandt refused to stand in front of the national flag at a press conference on Monday,it spoke volumes about the challenges his party still faces on its journey towards being a genuine alternative to the majors and a force for change.
Whether “flag-gate” was a deliberate stunt,as some claimed,or a long-standing practice that had hitherto gone unnoticed,was immaterial. What mattered was that the episode made headlines for the Greens around the country for all the wrong reasons,helped in no small measure by Bandt’s defence that “for many Australians,this flag represents dispossession and the lingering pains of colonisation”.
Firebrand Greens senator Lidia Thorpe subsequently seized the opportunity to amplify Bandt’s comments to anybody who would listen,claiming the flag “represents dispossession,massacre and genocide”,called the Queen a “coloniser” and declaring she was only in parliament to “infiltrate” the “colonial project”.
It was all a bit undergraduate:deliberately divisive and the sort of dogma you’d expect to hear at a student council meeting. It was inappropriate for a party with aspirations of one day governing this country and that holds the balance of power in the upper house.
Unsurprisingly,Bandt and Thorpe were pilloried by commentators across the political spectrum.
Loading
The question,though,is whether this week’s kerfuffle was an isolated incident,a slight diversion off-piste,or if it signals a seismic shift by the Greens from being “greenies” – environmentalists first and foremost – into an ever-growing panoply of activist causes and their attendant ideologies.