(Image: Private Media)

Boy oh boy, the honeymoon sure is over, ain’t it? Remember those delicious weeks at Surfers after the election, Laborists and progressives and radicals in an ocean-view suite, banging one another, then getting an ice cream, then banging again, the waves crashing in the distance. We didn’t even get out to see the Elvis show at the casino.

Now look at us. Back in the new flat, back at work, we’re starting to learn each other’s habits — Labor stinks out the bathroom, progressives want to keep telling you how their goddamn day went. (Gendered? You’re gendered). Despite promises made, Labor has ordered that 30-episode series on WWII it said it wouldn’t, and progressives are talking about going back to finish their master’s in dance. All of these items have an exact analogue and I could go on. We still love each other — but three years? Living together? You don’t get that for selling meth… well, under a certain weight.

But, hey, this is what we wanted, right? Labor said it would make our dreams come true, now it makes that clicking noise with its mouth every time we buy a bottle of wine. And another thi-

OK, OK, we always knew this was coming. Labor wilfully boxed itself in during the election, with a commitment to no new taxes, to debt reduction, and with the wobbly element being the actual promises to do stuff.

Very wobbly indeed. The new global situation is coming on faster than many imagined, or were willing to recognise. With interest rates rising, Labor doesn’t have the option of extending debt any further. Then, the memory of how profligate the Coalition was will be instantly wiped, and the old judgments — Labor can’t handle money — will be reasserted. But at the same time, we’ve crossed a redline in capitalist history with COVID, and a new level of involvement of the state in propping up market demand. If Labor thought it could just put its stern face on and withdraw COVID isolation payments without pushback, it was surprised by the reaction. It will have a lot more of that to come.

The inevitable political recourse will be to sell out on commitments made on the environment and on the leftish side of social issues, and then blame the Greens for pushing them. This allows Labor to be the party of the suburbs while simultaneously presiding over a decline in their conditions. If this is a marriage, it’s Dita Von Teese and Marilyn Manson.

That would create a sort of permanent dissatisfaction, in which government perpetually fails to deliver what people want but gives pleasure by visibly denying to progressives what they really want, thus creating an identity-defining political split and affirmation.

This puts the Greens in a position where there can be no grand strategic plan possible — merely a series of strategic and tactical initiatives, based on their Senate position. Labor’s support, especially among youth, will collapse towards the Greens, but the Greens would lose some of their increased support gained in the election if they launch an immediate attack on the 43% cutoff. For the Greens, it’s not an attractive prospect: as the party that represents both the coming ruling class, and the necessary ethical demands on future action that we all know to be necessary, they are the ones everyone gets to hate. The abstract ethic that underlies Green politics is directly in opposition to the more concrete ethic that Labor wants to connect itself to.

The Greens can only really respond to that by doing on a national level what the Queensland Greens did at a state level: join a very visible and real activism to their electoral role. Senators and MHRs need to be seen at protests, need to be organising them, skirting the very edge of illegality. The Greens did this once; they could do so again.

Would that lose them some of the new voters they’ve gained? I don’t think so. They’re more likely to be irritated by political obstructionism than by political determination.

The dilemma for Labor is that while the economic crunch is coming at it fast, so is increased ethical demand in regards to new coal and gas projects, and the increasing refusal to give them consent. Labor has a blindspot regarding the emergence of this politics — even as it sees its vote falling, while Greens and teals rise, it still can’t quite believe that such commitments are real, and lived. In the end, it always believes it’s virtue signalling. So it always thinks it will drift away before elections.

Labor’s smartest, boldest move would be to announce that things are much worse than it was led to believe, and that it will need to introduce a federal mining superprofits levy to deal with deficit, debt and social obligations. If Labor were to do that, the marriage would be saved. But it won’t, and unless something spectacular and unusual happens, we’ll be in for a scrappy and frustrating political time. The honeymoon is over, baby, it’s never gonna be that way again.