It's time to cut the Greens cancer
WHAT'S the difference between a Labor leader and a conservative of the Murdoch hate media?
Answer: a decade. Let me show you.
Guess which of the following attacks on the Greens was by a nasty conservative and which by a respected Labor leader.
Statement A: " ... the inflexibility, the arrogance, the self-indulgence of the Greens."
Statement B: "Fops, moral poseurs, New Age quacks, budding totalitarians."
All right, too easy. Victorian Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews (statement A) lacks a little zip in his prose, but he did still express last week the opinions I put with rather more vim in 2004.
Try again.
Statement A: "The Greens are to the Left what Pauline Hanson and One Nation are to the Right... (Labor) should consider placing them last."
Statement B: "In many ways, (the Greens are) the One Nation of the middle class ... Labor must belatedly do to the Greens what John Howard did to One Nation."
I must have been off my game that day, because I've forgotten which was me and which was Labor's NSW secretary Sam Dastyari last weekend.
But the point is that attacking the Greens, which once damned you as a knuckle-dragging reactionary, is suddenly fashionable in Labor circles. Even urgent.
Yesterday, Australian Workers' Union boss Paul Howes, who helped install Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, lashed the Greens as "extremists who threaten our democracy".
In Victoria, Labor is giving its preferences in the July 21 by-election in Melbourne to the ultra-conservative Family First rather than the Greens.
Meanwhile, Dastyari wants NSW Labor to consider putting the Greens last on how-to-vote cards, arguing it "has been giving the Greens a free pass".
Dawning on Labor's hard heads is that their party has been eaten alive by the Greens, who have lunched first on its heart, and now its brains.
All this was predicted by those of us who saw in the Greens an anti-rational movement of the pampered and the adolescent, who'd rather strike a lazy pose in a mirror than get something done and be judged on the results. All protest, no build.
But Labor indulged what it should fight.
In 1983, it gave the Greens its first big win, saving Tasmania's Franklin River from a dam.
And in 1990, Labor stole an election by swapping Tasmanian forests for Greens preferences.
In doing so, Labor subcontracted its idealism to the Greens. The Greens dictated its moral agenda, leaving Labor with the but-but-but details.
Nowhere has that deal proved more disastrous than in Canberra.
Only the Greens promised a carbon tax at the last election. And Labor gave it to them, despite promising voters it wouldn't.
That deal wasn't just because the Greens would in exchange make Gillard Prime Minister. It would have backed her anyway.
Labor was also intimidated by Greens preaching on global warming, so even pragmatic ministers didn't dare oppose a tax they knew would hurt the country without helping the climate.
Greens moralising also helped spook Labor into dismantling border laws that had worked, thus luring record numbers of boat people, some 800 of whom drowned.
Neither the carbon tax nor the weak border laws reflect traditional Labor values. They reflect instead Greens ones - and these two surrenders remain the Government's most disastrous mistakes.
The Greens got the credit for the moral gesture, and Labor got the vilification for the betrayal and the failures.
Gillard, I suspect, understands some of this.
In last year's Whitlam oration she tried to distance herself from the Greens with a crude attack, not since repeated.
"The Greens will never embrace Labor's delight at sharing the values of everyday Australians, in our cities, suburbs, towns and bush, who day after day, do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation," Gillard blustered, in what seemed a cheap shot at then Greens leader Bob Browns homosexuality.
Wildly off target. Labor instead must fight the Greens main claim to fame - that it is moral.
What Labor must argue is that the Greens are in fact the most immoral party in Parliament.
There is no morality in posing as kind while promoting border policies that kill.
There is no morality in promising that the jobs you're destroying will be replaced by green ones that don't exist.
There is no morality in demanding cuts in emissions that would beggar the country without affecting global warming.
The Greens are immoral. It is immoral to deceive, make false promises and ignore the damage you are doing.
Labor must find again the virtues of pragmatic politics. It must take joy again in the art of just getting good things done.
And the first of those things will be to cut this Greens cancer from the Labor body.
.............here come the Olympics
