After winning three new seats in the lower house in the federal election and seizing the balance of power in the Senate, the Australian Greens are finding themselves with more power and influence than ever before.
Voters have given the party, along with independent and green environmental candidates, an effective mandate to help take real action on climate change and push the new Labor government to go beyond what it has promised by reducing emissions in this legislature.
However, a month after the survey, it seems that few people talk about Greens and the environment at the same time. In contrast, internal conflicts within the party receive much more attention.
When Greens leader Adam Bandt refused to stand in front of the national flag at a news conference on Monday, he talked a lot about the challenges his party still faces on its way to being a genuine alternative to the majors and a force for change.
Whether “the flag gate” was a deliberate stunt, as some claimed, or a long-standing practice that had hitherto gone unnoticed, was irrelevant. What mattered is that the episode was headlined by greens across the country for all the wrong reasons, greatly helped by Bandt’s defense that “for many Australians, this flag represents the dispossession and persistent pains of the colonization “.
Firebrand Greens Sen. Lidia Thorpe took the opportunity to extend Bandt’s comments to anyone who listened to her, alleging that the flag “represents dispossession, massacre and genocide,” the queen described as “colonizer” and declared that she was only in parliament to “infiltrate” the queen. “Colonial project.”
It was all a bit of undergraduate: deliberately divisive and the kind of dogma you’d expect to hear at a student council meeting. It was unsuitable for a party with aspirations to one day rule this country and that holds the balance of power in the upper house.
Surprisingly, Bandt and Thorpe were deceived by commentators across the political spectrum.
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The question, however, is whether this week’s kerfuffle was an isolated incident, a slight off-track fun, or whether it indicates a seismic shift from the Greens from being “green” – environmentalists in the first place – to a panoply every growing number of activist causes and their associated ideologies.