An Apology for Coming at Labor from the Progressive Left
The definition of insanity is expecting Labor to do anything other than let you down again.
A media release from Bob Brown dropped into my inbox on Saturday afternoon, calling for the Tasmanian Greens to go “open ticket” instead of preferencing Labor above Liberal at the impending federal election.
“I’d like the Tasmanian Greens to consider leaving it for our voters to make up their own minds about which of the old parties to put last,” the former leader said, in response to the revelation that Labor would not preference the Greens above Peter Dutton’s Liberals in the inner city marginal seat of Macnamara.
That news, broken exclusively by Australian Jewish News, is a direct result of Macnamara MP Josh Burns, a Jewish man, responding to pressure to put distance between himself and the Greens on Gaza or face a backlash from his heavily Jewish electorate.
Bob, understandably, is also pretty exercised about the recent decision by Albanese to extinguish the endemic Maugean skate after 40 million years in a Tasmanian inlet in order to buy a few more years (and a few more votes) for the toxic, necrotic Tasmanian salmon industry and its multinational corporate beneficiaries.
“Tasmanians have a right to ask where the difference is on the environment. Both Labor and Liberal back more native forest logging, more polluting industrial fish farms, more coal mines and gas fracking and so more coral bleaching, storms, bushfires and extinctions of Australian wildlife,” Brown said.
On the face of it, his position is not new. As far back as the 2016 election, Brown was arguing to ditch all preference deals and leave it up to voters to decide how best to cast their vote, which he pitched as more democratic (duh) and liable to make Labor have to work harder rather than relying on trickle down progressive preferences.
But it’s noteworthy now because it’s a clear departure from the prevailing wisdom of the current Greens leader. Until the betrayal in Macnamara hit so close to home that it prompted Adam Bandt to come out and condemn it as a “dirty deal” between the major parties, the 2025 Greens have been more muted in their critique of Labor in spite of its manifold moral failings. This isn’t what Penny Wong meant when she said the Greens were “no longer the party of Bob Brown.”
The Greens campaign has instead been dominated by the danger of Dutton. As far back as January, Bandt announced that “keeping Dutton out” was their primary strategic priority this election, while more vaguely also aspiring to “get Labor to act on the things that matter.”
Just this weekend, Bandt was back at it with a post that repeated “Keep Dutton Out” four times in all caps in case anyone was concerned the Greens might be widening their focus. “Dutton is treating Trump’s election playbook as a how-to guide” ran the caption. No he’s not — Trump won.
It is increasingly apparent that the main factor that will keep Dutton out is the Australian electorate. YouGov gives the Libs a 2% chance of forming majority government, and the polls have widened further since they ran the modelling last week. In recent weeks, it’s been one-way traffic as Australia reveals itself not quite ready for Dutton’s off-brand proto-fascism — witness his backflip on binning Canberra bureaucrats after the Liberals misread the country’s immersion in swamp-draining readiness. It’s one thing to blame nerdy little bureaucrats for delaying fossil fuel projects but distrust in our institutions isn’t yet at a point that we’re ready to sack the entire civil service apparatus.
The ongoing preoccupation with Dutton and commitment to a strategy that may have made sense months ago is now letting Labor off the hook. Another Greens heavyweight I spoke to this week said it was insanity for the Greens to continue preferencing Labor over progressive alternatives in the current context. On the environment, my source went as far as to say that they often preferred the Coalition, because at least they're honest about what they're about to do, whereas Labor promise the world and then vote to wreck it.
Dutton would obviously be a disaster for everything environmentalists have been campaigning on for years. But, such as with the fate of the skate, on the major issues it is too often impossible to separate the major parties. Labor slit the throat of their own nature law reforms, which they won the 2022 election promising, and then offset their recent EPBC collapse by promising they’d redo Nature Positive if re-elected. The politics of this barely plausible double backflip (giving fuel to industry if they want it while reminding progressives of the original broken promise) matches the idiocy of Dutton’s pre-emptive promise about Woodside’s North West Shelf extension. Yet even on WA gas, while Labor have pushed the NWS decision out until after the election, it is extremely obvious that the only thing standing in the way of them approving it is a hung Parliament which will leverage it as a bargaining chip - something the Greens have been outspoken about.
But if — as I am contending — the Greens are out of step with the wider electorate, they are at least jockeying for a seat at the cabinet table in a hung Parliament. It is far less clear what crumbs the broader NGO-led climate movement is hoping to be swept after the election in exchange for their much deeper silence about Labor’s failures. I am not privy to any of these discussions, but it is clear that they have transpired, and the consequence is a campaign of unusual insipidness.
Another former Greens leader Christine Milne, while critical of her party’s approach in this election, reserves her greatest opprobrium for the climate movement at large. “By becoming politically partisan and allowing Labor to dictate what is and what is not possible in addressing global heating, the climate movement has undermined itself,” she tells The Last Place on Earth.
Starting after the last election, Milne says the climate movement undermined the Greens position in negotiations over Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target and later the Safeguard Mechanism (for which Bob Brown famously resigned his honorary life membership of the Australian Conservation Foundation).
“Instead of condemning the Government for its lack of climate integrity and calling for the Greens to defeat it and work with the climate movement to secure a higher target, the movement fell into line with Labor and urged the Independents and Greens to ‘just pass it”, she says. “Game, set and match to the Labor Government and the fossil fuel industry.”
Now, during a campaign where more is on the table in the form of a likely hung Parliament than at any recent election, the movement refuses to hold the government over a barrel. Tactical silence on North West Shelf is nothing compared to the strategic silence about gas in general — this extends not just to almost no one acknowledging the sense in Dutton’s domestic gas reservation policy but also a refusal to hold the government to account for its enthusiastic embrace of increased gas expansion, especially in WA.
Instead, movement gatekeepers insist on invoking a nuclear threat that is simply not landing outside the bubble. Whether positive or negative, the electorate is not getting charged up about nuclear, which Dutton has acknowledged by shutting up about it. And yet the big national green groups persist in trying to hang nuclear around his neck instead of yoking the two major parties together on their lockstep on gas. While young activists are yelling at both Liberal and Labor leaders about their reliance on fossil fuel approval, the big orgs are actively suppressing grass roots outrage in a short-term exchange of the future of climate activism for uncertain political deals.
If you need an illustration of this, compare the two party’s respective campaign launches yesterday afternoon. Greenpeace activists crashed the Liberals launch wearing hazmat suits - but the gas masks were a protest about Dutton’s nuclear policy, not gas. Meanwhile, Albanese went entirely unmolested at his own launch in Perth, despite Labor’s Future Gas Strategy locking in more emissions until 2050 and Albo’s own comments on Friday about the 2070 expansion of Woodside’s Burrup Hub being compatible with ancient rock art facing destruction. Through messaging that speaks to almost no one except a handful of Canberra stakeholders, the environmental movement is becoming the handmaiden of a government that is itself the lapdog of industry.
It’s unclear what they’ve been promised, or why they think it’s any more credible than the last round of Labor promises after the 2022 “climate election” swiftly subsided as soon as ScoMo was out the door, but they’re missing a trick here. Hung Parliament offers major opportunities to extract major concessions from the major parties. Why anyone, whether green or Greens, would believe that Labor will do anything they’re not forced to is beyond me. On fossil fuels, on nature, on housing — now is the hour to act and ensure Labor are bound to act throughout their next term.
Blithely insisting that the gloves come off once Labor is re-elected wilfully misunderstands how electoral politics operates. And banging on about Dutton and nuclear after the threat has worn off misreads the national mood. The only thing that can save us from more of the same right now is as many crossbenchers as possible negotiating every last concession they can, with every ounce of pressure they can muster. And that is not helped by helping Labor get re-elected. As Bob Brown said, you’ve got to make them work for it.
Oh, and the “apology” in the title of this piece was meant in the archaic sense of a “defense”, as of a heresy, or as employed by the Greens heavyweight who told me this weekend that “the climate movement has become a Labor apologist outfit”. Sorry not sorry.
On the podcast: Dr Sue Chapman, Independent for Forrest
Last week, community independent candidate for Forrest dropped by to talk big money in politics, energy debates in the South West and more:
Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Links below:
Gerard Mazza
