A coup in Canberra as the Greens become the real opposition

Yesterday, on the 50th anniversary of the CIA-backed Pinochet coup in Chile, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and the government issued strong condemnations of political violence and the cult of the strong man. All through it, they probably had in mind Max Chandler-Mather, the Greens housing spokesman, who has been the public face, and driver of, the party’s campaign to get a better deal on housing out of Labor.

Yesterday they got it, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committing, through clenched teeth, to another billion — or, in Albo-speak, “another one beeyo* for housing”, a figure like the Hindi “crore”, equal to our “billion”, suddenly appearing in global discourse — to be spent this year. Were Labor figures thinking all the while: “Jeez, I’d like to drop that guy out of a helicopter”? 

That would be understandable. The Greens have shellacked Labor on housing and made visible the nature of the Albanese government as one contained within the commitment to national militarism and service to capital. The government committed to, for US forward defence, an alleged $368 billion (it will blow out to a trillion, sorry, a treeyo, and while it might be discontinued in a decade, it will drain many beeyos in the interim) but its response to the housing crisis was what was claimed to be a $10 beeyo housing fund, the HAFF.

It’s nothing of the kind, of course, that’s merely the capital used to possibly earn an entirely speculative $500 million, sorry $500 meeyo — I’ll back out of this joke now — a year, and possibly none at all. The figure of 30,000 homes over 10 years was an utter fiction, double or triple what was more likely to get built, but for a while it was repeated faithfully by all media, including the ABC, without a skerrick of interrogation. 

The Greens — the Greens Political Party! — went on the attack, and kept it up for months. Labor thought it would be easily shown up on that. Indeed, the politics was a feature of the whole design of its housing fund, a policy proposal in part reverse-engineered from the imperative of jamming the Greens up, forcing them to ask for a little and then capitulate, or simply knuckle under, muttering. Instead the Greens went the old “demand the impossible” route, pushing for actual money for public housing, championing a rent freeze — and, in Victoria, campaigning for Barak Beacon, a public housing community wantonly destroyed by the Andrews government. 

The Greens Political Party™ took the government by surprise with the relentlessness and toughness of its campaign, by the public support it gained, especially among the young, and by the anger and then hatred directed at Labor as it stuck to its nonsense claims about the HAFF — a plan that, even if it goes well, would not have delivered a single house in the term of this government. 

Labor stuck to its plan for months, despite the ample evidence that the party had been busted. Part of this wasn’t strategically rational; it was an expression of the leadership’s protective narcissism, maintaining the residual belief that Labor was the party of the battlers, and the Greens were a bunch of nine-pronouned tree tories. Labor hadn’t fully sussed the Greens’ move into a more material politics under the Bandt leadership, or believed that the party could extricate itself from some of its wilder cultural shenanigans, such as the Victorian gender politics civil war. But the strong focus on housing has been both about shifting public perceptions of the Greens, and cutting through to a wider section of youf who might back them as generational differences in condition begin to acquire class characteristics.

With the “National Left” leadership of Labor keen to project unquestioning fealty to the US “alliance” at the same time, its room to manoeuvre on right-left politics was sharply curtailed. With the Coalition increasingly consumed by the demands of hard-right forces, the housing stoush was the event by which Albanese Labor became firmly situated as the mainstream political right, and the Greens the opposition from the left. 

Labor is now going out of its way to present as pro-business. On RN breakfast a week or so ago, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher praised Jennifer Westacott’s “outstanding” leadership of the Business Council of Australia, a gutless celebration of anti-worker forces if ever there was one. Meanwhile the various disputes around labour protection moves are understood as disputes between friends. Business knows that the union movement is now a funds management outfit with an attached employee management service — called the ACTU — as demonstrated by yesterday’s announcement that the “big eight” industry super funds will form a new peak body group to lobby “both sides of politics”. 

The Greens have thus been rewarded for their political courage in holding out on the housing bill, suffering the calumny of voting with the Coalition. In the Senate, they showed up independent David Pocock as inexperienced and weak. Pocock voted for the initial HAFF, and then had to scramble to get on the Greens’ side when the party won the first two billion of actual money for the fund. Having then urged the Greens to vote for the bill after that, he will now have to adjust his position again to welcome the next billion they got. Thelma and Louise over at Team Lambie went over the cliff with Labor right at the start. But Jacqui Lambie has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to do something of any scale to tackle the Tasmanian housing crisis. 

The Greens have used their swing position in the Senate to become the de facto opposition, at a certain “level” of politics at least. This was strengthened by Senator Jordon Steele-John’s — what a given name that is! It’s like something from the Marvel Universe, Senator King Big Iron Man or something — opening up a feint on Labor’s refusal to release thousands of documents relating to ASIS involvement in the US-CIA fomenting of the violent coup against the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile 50 years ago.

The Whitlam government had fully withdrawn ASIS cooperation with coup planning, it’s said (and I hope to God it is). ASIS may well have kept right on couping, since its operatives in Santiago had not yet been pinged by Allende’s security service, as CIA agents had. The move was another factor in the rapid entry of the Whitlam government onto the Nixon administration’s shit list. When Whitlam sacked the head of ASIS in 1975 for repeating its unsanctioned covert action — this time in newly independent Timor-Leste — ex-CIA man John Kerr was said to have taken “a very great interest”. 

So even though revelations about 1973 might reflect well on Labor, and badly on the Coalition, they are unwilling to release the files. That’s in part because of an unspoken bipartisan agreement not to let out the potentially really dark stuff on either side, but also because Labor now wants to project itself as the natural heir of the US alliance, the stable centre. The opportunity for that has presented itself as the Coalition becomes increasingly taken over by an extra-party right that has some noble expressions — defending Julian Assange — and a lot of cooker conspiratorial crackpottery.

The National Left leadership is a prisoner of the Labor Right on this. But the whole party is also a prisoner of the permanent security establishment. Mostly willing, it’s got a political BDSM slant. But, well, some of them were actual leftists once, and who knows what ASIO and ASIS have actually got in those files? I presume no-one in power now was at the notorious Sydney Uni union lesson on pipe-bomb making in the early 1980s — at which one participant realised, with sudden alarm, that actual explosives were being used — but, y’know, there may be stuff. Some of them are from Adelaide. Say no more. 

So the Greens are the opposition at a certain level. And the teals have utterly missed their moment, foolishly failing to project a greater unity of purpose and a common program, instead going hard solo and squandering the possibility to project power in the House. But the Greens de facto opposition is, as said, only at a certain level.

It’s clear from today’s revelations about the Advance No campaign, and from the action of outfits such as the local government “My Place” push, that the extra-parliamentary right is getting its act together, and has a great deal of mass resentment at progressive dominance to draw on. This will include the new political set-up, a Labor v Greens political mainstream, which has shifted the political centre of Australia to the left. But we’re not a million miles from it shifting again. Sorry, meeyo.

*Yes, I know there’s a class aspect to this. But the class difference in pronouncing “billions” amounts to a slight softening of the “ll” in people who went to a school without a rowing team. Albo’s doing something entirely more and different.

Do you see the Greens as the true opposition? Do you agree Labor is now the “mainstream political right”? And what of the Teals? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.