CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The Queensland Greens are making headlines right across the country today, as startled columnists begin using terms like ‘horse shoe theory’ and ‘Trumpism’ to describe the minor party’s pivot towards class politics.
While Peter Dutton’s Opposition remains a shambles of far-right conspiracy nuts and racist Pentecostals, the most immediate threat to Australia’s centrist Labor government is the once harmless tree huggers.
Because they’re not just barricading forests and waterways anymore. They’ve also started doing what Labor used to do.
While the Greens head office remains in the city of Melbourne, the party has found great success in the North, with Brisbane’s Max Chandler-Mather MP making a point of saying the quiet bit loud.
His reputation as an emerging figure in class politics was only confirmed by a surprise appearance on stage with the country’s most powerful Trade Union on Tuesday, during nationwide rallies in protest against the government’s decision to place the CFMEU and it’s 120,000 members into administration over Channel Nine’s accusations of alleged bikie links within the Melbourne branch.
It seems the Greens, and particularly the Queensland Greens, are no longer the basket-weaving boomers who first entered Australian politics as an anti-war/pro-environment protest vote.
They’ve become a force to be reckoned with in left-wing politics, and both the government and their reluctant allies in the Australian media are shitting themselves.
In fact, until the 2022 Federal Election, the Greens presence in the House Of Representatives was limited to just Adam Bandt – an MP who was always viewed as more of a progressive independent.
However, that has all changed at the last election. The Greens are now a major player with four MPs, and for some fucken reason – their heartland is 2000 kilometres north of the only other seat they’ve held since the party was founded in Melbourne.
With at least three more renter-heavy Brisbane seats held by Labor and the Liberals for the taking, and a couple of regional seats on the NSW North Coast, the media and government are this week rushing to crush this momentum as quick as they can to protect the interests of property investors and supermarket giants.
However, given the fact that the Greens only been spring-boarded by similar attempts to also crush the trade unions – it seems that labelling them as opportunistic radicals might not be that effective during a radical cost-of-living crisis caused by opportunistic corporate vultures.
