The Australian Political discussion

[Guy Smiley]

We’ve got this. Let ‘er rip.

[Guy Smiley]

I know some of you frothing green left types will want to sour the morning coffee with endless rants about what is wrong with the status quo and offer nothing in the way of constructive comment, so with the interests of fair play at heart I offer a leg up to the grown ups discussion for you with this opening piece presented for your viewing pleasure and debating skills...

link

Spoiler

Show

Adam Bandt should be at the Greenbushes lithium mine in Western Australia. The visit was scheduled as part of a tour to launch his nascent leadership of the Australian Greens and his new approach to selling the party’s policies – reaching out to workers, building “a coalition of the anxious”.

His message on this tour would have been “the best job for a coalminer is another mining job”. He wanted not to alienate but to signal a way forward.

But all that has been cancelled.

Instead he is in his electorate office, in the heart of hipster Melbourne. It is March 19. He has been federal leader of the Greens for just six weeks, following the resignation of Richard Di Natale. The Fitzroy cafes are quiet, but still open. His staff are in the office, not at home, and the ritual of hand sanitiser on entry is performed with a hint of self-conscious irony – not yet routine.

The world is shutting down due to the coronavirus, about to drop off a precipice. A week before, the federal government had announced its first stimulus package, to be dwarfed within the fortnight. The day before, Australia had declared a human biosecurity emergency.

On this morning, Bandt and his wife, Claudia Perkins, had a hard conversation with his parents, who were visiting from Western Australia and intending an extended stay to connect with their grandchildren. Bandt told them he thought they should go home. It wasn’t safe, and soon the states would begin to close their borders.



The cancelled tour, the sudden emergency, might have cruelled his chance to sell a political message. But at another level, Adam Bandt has spent a lot of time preparing for this, and thinking about emergencies.

Not many people know that he has a PhD. So far as I can determine, he has never used the honorific – Doctor – to which he is entitled. The only mainstream media attention his scholarship received was a supposed exposé in the Murdoch tabloids, revealing that Bandt had written – shock horror – a Marxist analysis of the foundations of the law.

In 2009 he published an academic paper arising out of that thesis, with the subtitle “Reconsidering Emergency”. He wrote about how the concept had been used – in the global financial crisis and the war on terrorism – to undermine basic rights, while the real emergency of climate change had been ignored. In later articles, he included the “budget emergency” declared by the Tony Abbott–led Opposition as another example of fake emergency.

“At the risk of being glib, climate change has arrived at the wrong time,” he wrote in 2009.

Had it come in the 1940s, there may have been a response similar to the war effort … Now, however, it comes on the scene in a world saturated by markets, where even political imagination can’t think beyond “carbon trading schemes” which will give those responsible for the financial crisis yet another financial instrument to play with.
He wrote that “rule by emergency” had become a “technique” of “the strong state of neoliberalism” – a term he used to assert that for all the talk of shrinking government, the past few decades have left us with a mighty and more oppressive state.

So what, on this anxious day, does Adam Bandt make of the COVID-19 emergency? Is he thinking, as his planned tour and campaign falls apart, that it might be best not to waste a good crisis?

If he is nettled by the suggestion he might be so cynical, he doesn’t show it. He is quick to make the obvious point.

“If we get through the coronavirus crisis in reasonably good shape,” he says, “it will be because of public institutions acting for the public good, and government being prepared to put the preservation of life at the highest priority. These are all things that economic orthodoxy has railed against for the last 30 years. Now it will be things like a strong public healthcare system and governments acting on independent scientific advice that are going to minimise the loss of life and steer us through.”

He hopes that by the time the virus is defeated we might have learnt about the important and unique role governments should play. And he pivots neatly to the “The Green New Deal” – his reframing of longstanding Green policies as a program of investment by government to build a better society.

Meanwhile, given the Coalition government’s record of “trashing science and independent advice”, he says that “there’s a question mark about whether these are the right people to be leading us through this particular crisis”.

Bandt has been prominent in the Greens for 13 years – since he first unsuccessfully contested the federal electorate of Melbourne in 2007. He has been a potential leader since at least 2013, when, he admits, he considered running against Christine Milne for the leadership after a disappointing federal election result. He decided against it then, and says he has no regrets.

Bandt had been on the edges of the Greens for some years, handing out how-to-vote cards and generally volunteering, before he decided to join the party in 2004. He had been disgusted at the preference deal by which Labor and the Democrats inadvertently aided Family First’s Steven Fielding to gain a Senate seat on a tiny vote, at the expense of the Greens’ David Risstrom.

At first, he admits, he was more concerned with social justice than climate change. That changed quickly.

“Climate change had been one of those issues that was on my radar, and that I knew people were working on,” he recalls. “And I just felt like, ‘Well, I’m sure it’s a significant issue, and I’m sure people have got it under control.’ I thought other people would focus on it and I would focus on my issues.”

Then he began to read books and scientific papers, and realised that it was not just another issue but the issue. “Looking at the bare brute maths of it all, I realised that we were getting to the point of having only a few short years to turn the ship around. And that is what prompted me to ultimately decide that I was going to leave Slater and Gordon and start running in elections for the Greens.”

But even before that, Bandt had made a very particular decision. He had gone part-time at Slaters, in order to complete a PhD.

His principal supervisor was the cultural theorist and literary critic Professor Andrew Milner of Monash University. He remembers Bandt as one of the strongest candidates he has ever supervised. For the most part, Bandt was conscientious, delivering work regularly and on time, but when there was a political campaign on – first in 2007 for the seat of Melbourne, and the next year an unsuccessful run for mayor of Melbourne – Bandt would simply disappear. Milner remembers Bandt promising to deliver a chapter “before he entered parliament”. It was a joke. Neither of them thought it likely. Milner thought Bandt could have had a stellar academic career. The examiners for the thesis – renowned international scholars – were very impressed with his work, Milner recalls.

Bandt’s thesis was not the kind of study usually undertaken by aspiring politicians. It was the reverse of instrumental – dense and highly theoretical.

Bandt describes his motivation as the need to scratch an itch: “There was a question that had been nagging in the back of my mind since I finished my undergraduate degree.” He wanted to understand “the connection, in the era of globalisation, between the slow eroding of the rule of law and the suspension of basic rights”.

He was asking the question in the context of the new industrial laws introduced by the Howard government, but also the erosion of civil liberties in the War on Terror and the establishment of Guantánamo Bay. He felt there was a connection between the two. It was “the beginning of reclassifying people as less than people, so you didn’t have to accord them a full set of rights … I felt there was a connection between the economy and the law, and that surely Marxist scholars must have something to say about that.”

Bandt read Marx and Hegel in the original German, and engaged deeply with the work of British socialist and science fiction/fantasy writer China Miéville, and the 20th-century Russian legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis. Miéville had argued that the law was best understood as arising from a commodity-based society, as protecting the interests of capital.

Bandt argued that Miéville was largely wrong. “I felt the Marxist scholars didn’t have the complete picture.” His thinking brought him back to industrial relations law. He argued that the law was best understood as a means by which the state exercised power over labour.

Asked whether Bandt can be described as a Marxist, Andrew Milner concurs, though hastily adds, “I mean in a scholarly sense, not in the sense the word would be used by Andrew Bolt.”

Bandt himself disagrees. “I have no desire to be called that, and I don’t think it’s accurate either.”

Marxist analysis, he says, deals with “fundamental questions about the nature of work and what capitalism is like now … They’re interesting and important questions, but I don’t think those are the fundamental political questions of our times.”

Rather, he says, “The fundamental question at the moment is not socialism versus capitalism. It’s democracy versus barbarism.”

What’s needed is not so much “a Bolshevik party, but more a 19th-century Whiggish party”.

The aim is “to try to usher in new forms of economy that aren’t based on wrecking the world”, he says.

“That’s not a left-versus-right question … What is at stake is democracy and the rule of law and individual rights.

“I would rather my daughters live a long life under Green capitalism than a short, nasty, brutish life facing climate collapse. And yes, there will be people from a socialist perspective who get involved in the climate movements, and that is great. But there will also be people who want to run large businesses making wind turbines – and that’s great too.”

Bandt is nothing if not pragmatic – driven by a perception of the politically achievable at a time of climate emergency. Whether or not he would once have favoured a more fundamental restructure of society, he seems to suggest we don’t have the time for a revolution. Action depends on “building a broad-based coalition of people from across classes, across demographics, across the country to tackle it”.

But a reading of his academic work alongside his more political speeches and pamphlets leaves little doubt about the roots of his thinking.

In his academic work, he talks about putting labour – in the Marxist sense – back into the centre of understanding of neoliberalism. In his political statements, the same ideas are there – but the word “labour” is substituted with “people”.

In a political pamphlet written at about the same time as his thesis, he talked about how people were increasingly referred to as “customers”:

“In neoliberal Australia … Government now forces people to participate in the market. But it is a double blow: people are now forced to think about the fundamentals of their own lives in the terms of the entrepreneur, the speculator, the competitor.”

The space for the Greens, he wrote, was to counter “the neoliberalism division and separation from above, and reconnect from below”.

In an interview for Paddy Manning’s history of the Greens, Bandt said that neoliberalism was about the government separating people from each other and turning them into competitors. This, he said, was not the “natural human condition”.

It is a modern recasting of one of the foundations of Marx’s thought: the concept of alienation, or the idea that capitalism estranges people from their Gattungswesen, their “species essence”.

The scholarship informs a politics he judges fit for the times.

It had been suggested to me that Adam Bandt could be thin-skinned – that he might find increased media scrutiny difficult.

I put it to the test by pressing him on a subject that is a festering sore for Labor and the Greens.

I bring to this a perspective gained from interviewing leading Labor figures for the biography I wrote of Penny Wong. It was Wong, as climate-change minister in the Rudd government, who negotiated the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) package that went to parliament in 2009.

The package had bipartisan support, until Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party. As a result, the Labor government needed Steve Fielding, independent Nick Xenophon and the Greens to vote with them if it was to pass in the Senate. Fielding and Xenophon voted against it, but two Liberal senators crossed the floor. Everything hung on the Greens – who voted it down.

In Labor’s narrative, this was evidence of the Greens cynically taking political advantage – depicting themselves as more pure than Labor so they could bleed left-wing votes. This is the gap between Greens rhetoric and the reality of their record, Labor people suggest. They were making the perfect the enemy of the good. Senior Labor figures have said to me that they will never again trust the Greens.

Had the CPRS legislation passed in 2009, so the Labor narrative goes, it would have been so firmly in place that Abbott would not have been able to dismantle it on taking power in 2013. Indeed, Abbott may never have been prime minister, because Rudd would not have been weakened, Gillard would not have mounted her challenge, and Labor might have won the 2010 election in its own right and even still be in government today.

This is not only a Labor narrative. Ross Garnaut, the economist whose report on climate change was the foundation for Labor’s action, was himself highly critical of the CPRS legislation, but today thinks the country would have been better off if the Greens had voted the other way.

Bandt wasn’t in parliament when all of this happened. I ask him if he thinks voting down the CPRS had been a mistake. Had he been leader then, what would he have done?

He arcs up. The hesitation disappears. He is fully engaged, and annoyed. Not so mild-mannered after all.

“What’s the evidence that that would have happened? What’s the evidence that Abbott wouldn’t have run, in conjunction with Rupert Murdoch and the fossil-fuel industry, an ‘axe the tax’ campaign three years earlier? What’s the evidence that the Labor Right wouldn’t have torn down another prime minister? … There’s this mythological alternative history that’s been built up by a Labor Party that is attempting to throw Julia Gillard under a bus and totally ignore her legacy.”

Bandt is much keener to talk about what he and the other Greens did a year and a half later – working on a cross-party committee with Labor in minority government to negotiate and introduce a price on carbon.

Labor asserts that this package was no better than, and substantially the same as, the CPRS previously voted down. The Greens point to the addition of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Australian Renewable Energy Agency as their achievements – bodies that have stood the test of time.

Now Bandt is fired up. “I think it is significant that you don’t want to talk about what we did under Gillard,” he says, without naming the alleged significance. “Let’s say you agree with every criticism that’s made about the Greens and that we should have compromised and worked with others and passed the legislation [in 2009]. Well, we did it a year and a bit later.”

As a result, he says, Gillard presided over the only time in history that carbon pollution in Australia has fallen. “Julia Gillard is going to be able to hold her head up high because she’s the only one who’s been able to deliver that.”

Andrew Wilkie was one of the independents involved in the minority government. He remembers Bandt as reserved and cautious at first – perhaps wary because Wilkie was a former Green.

But as he watched, he says, he realised that Bandt was not so much interested in holding Gillard to account as working “in a calm, level-headed way” to help the government achieve policy objectives. Bandt, says Wilkie, is “not just a party hack … he’s a very principled man, and he fought the good fight on principle. That sets him apart from a lot of people in the parliament.”

Bandt is also, says Wilkie, very passionate, “an absolute Tory-fighter, to paraphrase Anthony Albanese.”

Wilkie says the Greens remain a “personality-based party” and no leader has yet filled Bob Brown’s large shoes. “Adam is an experiment, really. I don’t know whether the Bandt experiment will succeed or not. I hope it does.”

Meanwhile, minutes after arcing up under questioning, Bandt apologises for being “grumpy”. The suggestion of a slightly thin skin may have some substantiation, but Bandt has shown that he is a better communicator when in combat. His predominantly mild manner obscures his passion, and his anger. He is a fighter.

So would he have voted down the CPRS if he had been leader? One can’t help but suspect he might have taken a different tack – but he isn’t saying so. The CPRS was a terrible package, he says. Christine Milne and Bob Brown were entirely right in voting it down.

Bandt does not talk, as Bob Brown did, of the Greens replacing Labor. Rather, he wants to work with them.

“I am not one of those who thinks there is no difference between Labor and the Liberals,” he says. “I believe that the path towards getting change in this country is for the Greens and Labor and independents to cooperatively work together and share power like we did under Julia Gillard. But I think Labor will only act [on climate change] if the Greens make them act.”

And he doesn’t acknowledge that the passion and resentment over the history – on both Labor’s side and that of the Greens – might stand in the way.

He says he has three goals for the current electoral period: “To turn out the terrible government that we’ve got, to get the Greens into balance of power in both houses of parliament, and to implement a Green New Deal.”

So what, exactly, is the Green New Deal? The work on this new framing of Greens policy is generally seen as Bandt’s, though Christine Milne is quick to say that the ideas had been discussed within the party since at least 2008.

The name references US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s program of public works and financial reforms to spur recovery after the Great Depression. More recently, it has been linked to a resolution introduced in the US Congress by Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey. The term is also prominent in the policies of European Green parties.

Bandt talked about the Green New Deal in his first public statement upon taking the leadership in February. “The two elements of a Green New Deal – government taking the lead to create new jobs and industries, and universal services to ensure no one is left behind – are the values I have been fighting for my whole adult life … With a Green New Deal we can create new jobs by inspiring a manufacturing renaissance and turning Australia into a renewable energy superpower. We can get dental fully covered under Medicare. We can make public schools genuinely free.”

Milne says that she is glad Bandt has adopted the Green New Deal terminology, but adds, perhaps with just a hint of acid, “It’s a bit like Humpty Dumpty. You know, when I use a word it means exactly what I choose it to mean. So I think when it comes down to tin tacks you will see differences between the European Greens and the American Democrats and the Australian Greens. We’ll see.”

Asked to nominate Bandt’s strengths, she mentions his thoughtfulness and his communication skills. Asked for his weaknesses, she says, “He has not got a background of environmental campaigning. So he may have to work hard to bring the broader environmental movement with him.” On the other hand, he has a strong record of persuading some unions to back the Greens.

The differences between Bandt and Di Natale, she asserts, will be more of style than substance.

Some differences are already clear. Between 2016 and 2019, Bandt was the Greens climate-change spokesperson. Rather than alienating mining workers, he reached out to them – touring mining sites, talking up new jobs. He says he sees it as vital not only to criticise but to offer a way forward.

So what does he think of the Bob Brown–led anti-Adani mine convoy before the last federal election, which Labor blames for costing it seats?

He rejects the idea that the convoy cost Labor seats. That was much more to do with Clive Palmer’s aggressive advertising, he says.

But would he lead such a convoy? Was it a good idea? He neatly dodges the question.

“Even if no convoy happens at the next election, you are going to find grandmothers are going to start lying down in front of bulldozers to stop coalmines going ahead. And Labor has to decide where it stands on that … it comes back to that fundamental question of Labor straddling both sides of the fence.”

I put to him that there is an alternative way of reading the current virus-driven emergency. Rather than evidencing the death of neoliberalism, the disruption might instead fuel the rise of the far right – just as Hitler rose after the Great Depression.

He agrees on the risk.

“If there’s one word to describe the sentiment in Australia and in large parts of the world, it’s ‘anxious’ … People are feeling anxious because the basics of life are no longer guaranteed … You can be in a full-time job and still be in poverty. A lot of jobs are highly insecure. If you don’t have a job, then you are really in strife and you’ve got the climate crisis coming in as well, which is making it very difficult for people to think about the future.”

This anxiety, he says, and a Greens-led coalition of the anxious, will transform political alignments.

That is why the Green New Deal is important. It offers a way out of the “terrible strife we are in”, and hope is a bulwark against “barbarism”.

I exit Bandt’s office into the streets of Fitzroy. Unbeknown to either of us, while we were talking 2700 passengers from the Ruby Princess cruise ship were allowed to disembark in Sydney. Some of them are carrying the virus, and they have dispersed, spreading the disease. I later imagine that Bandt might describe it as a failure of the strong state of neoliberalism. Border security not so strong after all.

Then, within days, the government that had been so intent on cuts and surplus in February begins to act almost as though it had been listening to Bandt speak. It delivers the largest package of stimulus measures in Australian history. Wages are to be subsidised. Private hospitals are to be brought into the public system. Childcare is to be free. There is even talk of nationalising airlines.

It is evidence of the transformative effect of emergencies, and their political power. A new deal, if not a Green New Deal. The question is whether the Greens, under Bandt, can steal the moment, or whether they will be left with nowhere to move.

There you go. Just call me the thread starter.

[EnergiseR]

Towny me oul segocia

[npradmin]

Shanky i spoilered that huge long post :)

[Guy Smiley]

Shanky i spoilered that huge long post :)

I note the attack on my freeze peach and expect this Stalinist attack on human rights will be extended to all and sundry sans fear or favour

[Carter's Choice]

So what do people think of the Eden Manaro By-election?

Typically governments don't win seats off the opposition in by-elections, but the current situation is anything but typical. We're in a once in a century pandemic, the economy is in recession and the PM is riding high in the polls off the back of an unprecedented cash splash. Interestingly the last time the govt won a seat of the opposition in a by-election was during the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago. People are scared and uncertain right now, and thus more likely to vote for the govt.

I think the ALP will likely lose this seat, but I don;t expect that will have much of an impact in the broader sense. Scott Morrison will eventually need to start making some tough decisions and that will hurt him politically. It's easy to hand out free money but much harder to stop doing so.

[Guy Smiley]

You’re missing one substantial issue that will influence this bye election...

The summer bushfire crisis and climate change policy. People weren’t just wiped out property wise across this electorate, many were seriously threatened and in fear during the crisis. Locals were filmed yelling abuse at the PM when he showed up trying to force people to shake his hand. Hang on... I mean, some dirty stinking hippies assaulted Scott Morrison and if decent law abiding citizens can keep those rotten undesirables away from polling booths he’ll be fine.

[Kiap]

So what do people think of the Eden Manaro By-election?

That's an old-fashioned spelling of the former bellwether seat, older indeed than the old-skool car ...

[Quade]

Meaningless byelection given the current situation.

Post-September is when it will get interesting. Could easily be 15% unemployment. Suspect we're up for constantly changing governments for the next decade.

[Carter's Choice]

Meaningless byelection given the current situation.

Post-September is when it will get interesting. Could easily be 15% unemployment. Suspect we're up for constantly changing governments for the next decade.

Or changing leaders at the very least. I agree with you though, I don't think the outcome of this election will mean much in a few months either way. We have so far escaped any real pain from COVID-19. Even if you work in tourism or the arts, you have been able to claim JobSeeker unless your partner/spouse earned too much. But that will change soon. The Coalition won't want to drag JobKeeper and the increased JobSeeker out, because they know that politically they are better off getting this bad news done and dusted.

[Thommo]

So what do people think of the Eden Manaro By-election?

That's an old-fashioned spelling of the former bellwether seat, older indeed than the old-skool car ...

Oh gee. Would you look at that.

Beautiful.

[Guy Smiley]

The HQ 2 door Monaros are the best looking cars Holden ever built. The LS with the twin headlights the best of them...

Fight me.

[MungoMan]

So what do people think of the Eden Manaro By-election?

That's an old-fashioned spelling of the former bellwether seat, older indeed than the old-skool car ...

Oh gee. Would you look at that.

Beautiful.

Jeeze. Kiddies and old folk standing nearby would die of oxygen starvation when that blower was at full noise.

[Carter's Choice]

Sorry for mispelling Eden-Monaro fellas. I'm half Samoan, we sometimes struggle with your Western vowel sounds.

[Kiap]

Sorry for mispelling Eden-Monaro fellas. I'm half Samoan, we sometimes struggle with your Western vowel sounds.

All good man, it was actually spelled your way at one time in the past.

As to the significance of the by-election, I'm with Bindi. It's a minor way station for now.

[Quade]

The HQ 2 door Monaros are the best looking cars Holden ever built. The LS with the twin headlights the best of them...

Fight me.

[mat the expat]

It may be minor but the Media will be all over it due to Covid-reporting fatigue.

They want something different to report on.

Q&A was much better last night, they rolled out VIrginia Trioli who handled the Politicians much better than Angus (He's too soft).

[Carter's Choice]

It may be minor but the Media will be all over it due to Covid-reporting fatigue.

They want something different to report on.

Q&A was much better last night, they rolled out VIrginia Trioli who handled the Politicians much better than Angus (He's too soft).

Trioli is awesome. In fact her the the bloke her co-host on ABC News breakfast are two of the best, toughest journalists in the country.

[Guy Smiley]

Brings a Prius to a knife fight

‘Kin Queenslanders.

[Guy Smiley]

It may be minor but the Media will be all over it due to Covid-reporting fatigue.

They want something different to report on.

Q&A was much better last night, they rolled out VIrginia Trioli who handled the Politicians much better than Angus (He's too soft).

Trioli is awesome. In fact her the the bloke her co-host on ABC News breakfast are two of the best, toughest journalists in the country.

She’s also hot. Like Kristina Kenneally hot.

[MungoMan]

I know some of you frothing green left types will want to sour the morning coffee with endless rants about what is wrong with the status quo and offer nothing in the way of constructive comment, so with the interests of fair play at heart I offer a leg up to the grown ups discussion for you with this opening piece presented for your viewing pleasure and debating skills...

link

Spoiler

Show

Adam Bandt should be at the Greenbushes lithium mine in Western Australia. The visit was scheduled as part of a tour to launch his nascent leadership of the Australian Greens and his new approach to selling the party’s policies – reaching out to workers, building “a coalition of the anxious”.

His message on this tour would have been “the best job for a coalminer is another mining job”. He wanted not to alienate but to signal a way forward.

But all that has been cancelled.

Instead he is in his electorate office, in the heart of hipster Melbourne. It is March 19. He has been federal leader of the Greens for just six weeks, following the resignation of Richard Di Natale. The Fitzroy cafes are quiet, but still open. His staff are in the office, not at home, and the ritual of hand sanitiser on entry is performed with a hint of self-conscious irony – not yet routine.

The world is shutting down due to the coronavirus, about to drop off a precipice. A week before, the federal government had announced its first stimulus package, to be dwarfed within the fortnight. The day before, Australia had declared a human biosecurity emergency.

On this morning, Bandt and his wife, Claudia Perkins, had a hard conversation with his parents, who were visiting from Western Australia and intending an extended stay to connect with their grandchildren. Bandt told them he thought they should go home. It wasn’t safe, and soon the states would begin to close their borders.



The cancelled tour, the sudden emergency, might have cruelled his chance to sell a political message. But at another level, Adam Bandt has spent a lot of time preparing for this, and thinking about emergencies.

Not many people know that he has a PhD. So far as I can determine, he has never used the honorific – Doctor – to which he is entitled. The only mainstream media attention his scholarship received was a supposed exposé in the Murdoch tabloids, revealing that Bandt had written – shock horror – a Marxist analysis of the foundations of the law.

In 2009 he published an academic paper arising out of that thesis, with the subtitle “Reconsidering Emergency”. He wrote about how the concept had been used – in the global financial crisis and the war on terrorism – to undermine basic rights, while the real emergency of climate change had been ignored. In later articles, he included the “budget emergency” declared by the Tony Abbott–led Opposition as another example of fake emergency.

“At the risk of being glib, climate change has arrived at the wrong time,” he wrote in 2009.

Had it come in the 1940s, there may have been a response similar to the war effort … Now, however, it comes on the scene in a world saturated by markets, where even political imagination can’t think beyond “carbon trading schemes” which will give those responsible for the financial crisis yet another financial instrument to play with.
He wrote that “rule by emergency” had become a “technique” of “the strong state of neoliberalism” – a term he used to assert that for all the talk of shrinking government, the past few decades have left us with a mighty and more oppressive state.

So what, on this anxious day, does Adam Bandt make of the COVID-19 emergency? Is he thinking, as his planned tour and campaign falls apart, that it might be best not to waste a good crisis?

If he is nettled by the suggestion he might be so cynical, he doesn’t show it. He is quick to make the obvious point.

“If we get through the coronavirus crisis in reasonably good shape,” he says, “it will be because of public institutions acting for the public good, and government being prepared to put the preservation of life at the highest priority. These are all things that economic orthodoxy has railed against for the last 30 years. Now it will be things like a strong public healthcare system and governments acting on independent scientific advice that are going to minimise the loss of life and steer us through.”

He hopes that by the time the virus is defeated we might have learnt about the important and unique role governments should play. And he pivots neatly to the “The Green New Deal” – his reframing of longstanding Green policies as a program of investment by government to build a better society.

Meanwhile, given the Coalition government’s record of “trashing science and independent advice”, he says that “there’s a question mark about whether these are the right people to be leading us through this particular crisis”.

Bandt has been prominent in the Greens for 13 years – since he first unsuccessfully contested the federal electorate of Melbourne in 2007. He has been a potential leader since at least 2013, when, he admits, he considered running against Christine Milne for the leadership after a disappointing federal election result. He decided against it then, and says he has no regrets.

Bandt had been on the edges of the Greens for some years, handing out how-to-vote cards and generally volunteering, before he decided to join the party in 2004. He had been disgusted at the preference deal by which Labor and the Democrats inadvertently aided Family First’s Steven Fielding to gain a Senate seat on a tiny vote, at the expense of the Greens’ David Risstrom.

At first, he admits, he was more concerned with social justice than climate change. That changed quickly.

“Climate change had been one of those issues that was on my radar, and that I knew people were working on,” he recalls. “And I just felt like, ‘Well, I’m sure it’s a significant issue, and I’m sure people have got it under control.’ I thought other people would focus on it and I would focus on my issues.”

Then he began to read books and scientific papers, and realised that it was not just another issue but the issue. “Looking at the bare brute maths of it all, I realised that we were getting to the point of having only a few short years to turn the ship around. And that is what prompted me to ultimately decide that I was going to leave Slater and Gordon and start running in elections for the Greens.”

But even before that, Bandt had made a very particular decision. He had gone part-time at Slaters, in order to complete a PhD.

His principal supervisor was the cultural theorist and literary critic Professor Andrew Milner of Monash University. He remembers Bandt as one of the strongest candidates he has ever supervised. For the most part, Bandt was conscientious, delivering work regularly and on time, but when there was a political campaign on – first in 2007 for the seat of Melbourne, and the next year an unsuccessful run for mayor of Melbourne – Bandt would simply disappear. Milner remembers Bandt promising to deliver a chapter “before he entered parliament”. It was a joke. Neither of them thought it likely. Milner thought Bandt could have had a stellar academic career. The examiners for the thesis – renowned international scholars – were very impressed with his work, Milner recalls.

Bandt’s thesis was not the kind of study usually undertaken by aspiring politicians. It was the reverse of instrumental – dense and highly theoretical.

Bandt describes his motivation as the need to scratch an itch: “There was a question that had been nagging in the back of my mind since I finished my undergraduate degree.” He wanted to understand “the connection, in the era of globalisation, between the slow eroding of the rule of law and the suspension of basic rights”.

He was asking the question in the context of the new industrial laws introduced by the Howard government, but also the erosion of civil liberties in the War on Terror and the establishment of Guantánamo Bay. He felt there was a connection between the two. It was “the beginning of reclassifying people as less than people, so you didn’t have to accord them a full set of rights … I felt there was a connection between the economy and the law, and that surely Marxist scholars must have something to say about that.”

Bandt read Marx and Hegel in the original German, and engaged deeply with the work of British socialist and science fiction/fantasy writer China Miéville, and the 20th-century Russian legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis. Miéville had argued that the law was best understood as arising from a commodity-based society, as protecting the interests of capital.

Bandt argued that Miéville was largely wrong. “I felt the Marxist scholars didn’t have the complete picture.” His thinking brought him back to industrial relations law. He argued that the law was best understood as a means by which the state exercised power over labour.

Asked whether Bandt can be described as a Marxist, Andrew Milner concurs, though hastily adds, “I mean in a scholarly sense, not in the sense the word would be used by Andrew Bolt.”

Bandt himself disagrees. “I have no desire to be called that, and I don’t think it’s accurate either.”

Marxist analysis, he says, deals with “fundamental questions about the nature of work and what capitalism is like now … They’re interesting and important questions, but I don’t think those are the fundamental political questions of our times.”

Rather, he says, “The fundamental question at the moment is not socialism versus capitalism. It’s democracy versus barbarism.”

What’s needed is not so much “a Bolshevik party, but more a 19th-century Whiggish party”.

The aim is “to try to usher in new forms of economy that aren’t based on wrecking the world”, he says.

“That’s not a left-versus-right question … What is at stake is democracy and the rule of law and individual rights.

“I would rather my daughters live a long life under Green capitalism than a short, nasty, brutish life facing climate collapse. And yes, there will be people from a socialist perspective who get involved in the climate movements, and that is great. But there will also be people who want to run large businesses making wind turbines – and that’s great too.”

Bandt is nothing if not pragmatic – driven by a perception of the politically achievable at a time of climate emergency. Whether or not he would once have favoured a more fundamental restructure of society, he seems to suggest we don’t have the time for a revolution. Action depends on “building a broad-based coalition of people from across classes, across demographics, across the country to tackle it”.

But a reading of his academic work alongside his more political speeches and pamphlets leaves little doubt about the roots of his thinking.

In his academic work, he talks about putting labour – in the Marxist sense – back into the centre of understanding of neoliberalism. In his political statements, the same ideas are there – but the word “labour” is substituted with “people”.

In a political pamphlet written at about the same time as his thesis, he talked about how people were increasingly referred to as “customers”:

“In neoliberal Australia … Government now forces people to participate in the market. But it is a double blow: people are now forced to think about the fundamentals of their own lives in the terms of the entrepreneur, the speculator, the competitor.”

The space for the Greens, he wrote, was to counter “the neoliberalism division and separation from above, and reconnect from below”.

In an interview for Paddy Manning’s history of the Greens, Bandt said that neoliberalism was about the government separating people from each other and turning them into competitors. This, he said, was not the “natural human condition”.

It is a modern recasting of one of the foundations of Marx’s thought: the concept of alienation, or the idea that capitalism estranges people from their Gattungswesen, their “species essence”.

The scholarship informs a politics he judges fit for the times.

It had been suggested to me that Adam Bandt could be thin-skinned – that he might find increased media scrutiny difficult.

I put it to the test by pressing him on a subject that is a festering sore for Labor and the Greens.

I bring to this a perspective gained from interviewing leading Labor figures for the biography I wrote of Penny Wong. It was Wong, as climate-change minister in the Rudd government, who negotiated the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) package that went to parliament in 2009.

The package had bipartisan support, until Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party. As a result, the Labor government needed Steve Fielding, independent Nick Xenophon and the Greens to vote with them if it was to pass in the Senate. Fielding and Xenophon voted against it, but two Liberal senators crossed the floor. Everything hung on the Greens – who voted it down.

In Labor’s narrative, this was evidence of the Greens cynically taking political advantage – depicting themselves as more pure than Labor so they could bleed left-wing votes. This is the gap between Greens rhetoric and the reality of their record, Labor people suggest. They were making the perfect the enemy of the good. Senior Labor figures have said to me that they will never again trust the Greens.

Had the CPRS legislation passed in 2009, so the Labor narrative goes, it would have been so firmly in place that Abbott would not have been able to dismantle it on taking power in 2013. Indeed, Abbott may never have been prime minister, because Rudd would not have been weakened, Gillard would not have mounted her challenge, and Labor might have won the 2010 election in its own right and even still be in government today.

This is not only a Labor narrative. Ross Garnaut, the economist whose report on climate change was the foundation for Labor’s action, was himself highly critical of the CPRS legislation, but today thinks the country would have been better off if the Greens had voted the other way.

Bandt wasn’t in parliament when all of this happened. I ask him if he thinks voting down the CPRS had been a mistake. Had he been leader then, what would he have done?

He arcs up. The hesitation disappears. He is fully engaged, and annoyed. Not so mild-mannered after all.

“What’s the evidence that that would have happened? What’s the evidence that Abbott wouldn’t have run, in conjunction with Rupert Murdoch and the fossil-fuel industry, an ‘axe the tax’ campaign three years earlier? What’s the evidence that the Labor Right wouldn’t have torn down another prime minister? … There’s this mythological alternative history that’s been built up by a Labor Party that is attempting to throw Julia Gillard under a bus and totally ignore her legacy.”

Bandt is much keener to talk about what he and the other Greens did a year and a half later – working on a cross-party committee with Labor in minority government to negotiate and introduce a price on carbon.

Labor asserts that this package was no better than, and substantially the same as, the CPRS previously voted down. The Greens point to the addition of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Australian Renewable Energy Agency as their achievements – bodies that have stood the test of time.

Now Bandt is fired up. “I think it is significant that you don’t want to talk about what we did under Gillard,” he says, without naming the alleged significance. “Let’s say you agree with every criticism that’s made about the Greens and that we should have compromised and worked with others and passed the legislation [in 2009]. Well, we did it a year and a bit later.”

As a result, he says, Gillard presided over the only time in history that carbon pollution in Australia has fallen. “Julia Gillard is going to be able to hold her head up high because she’s the only one who’s been able to deliver that.”

Andrew Wilkie was one of the independents involved in the minority government. He remembers Bandt as reserved and cautious at first – perhaps wary because Wilkie was a former Green.

But as he watched, he says, he realised that Bandt was not so much interested in holding Gillard to account as working “in a calm, level-headed way” to help the government achieve policy objectives. Bandt, says Wilkie, is “not just a party hack … he’s a very principled man, and he fought the good fight on principle. That sets him apart from a lot of people in the parliament.”

Bandt is also, says Wilkie, very passionate, “an absolute Tory-fighter, to paraphrase Anthony Albanese.”

Wilkie says the Greens remain a “personality-based party” and no leader has yet filled Bob Brown’s large shoes. “Adam is an experiment, really. I don’t know whether the Bandt experiment will succeed or not. I hope it does.”

Meanwhile, minutes after arcing up under questioning, Bandt apologises for being “grumpy”. The suggestion of a slightly thin skin may have some substantiation, but Bandt has shown that he is a better communicator when in combat. His predominantly mild manner obscures his passion, and his anger. He is a fighter.

So would he have voted down the CPRS if he had been leader? One can’t help but suspect he might have taken a different tack – but he isn’t saying so. The CPRS was a terrible package, he says. Christine Milne and Bob Brown were entirely right in voting it down.

Bandt does not talk, as Bob Brown did, of the Greens replacing Labor. Rather, he wants to work with them.

“I am not one of those who thinks there is no difference between Labor and the Liberals,” he says. “I believe that the path towards getting change in this country is for the Greens and Labor and independents to cooperatively work together and share power like we did under Julia Gillard. But I think Labor will only act [on climate change] if the Greens make them act.”

And he doesn’t acknowledge that the passion and resentment over the history – on both Labor’s side and that of the Greens – might stand in the way.

He says he has three goals for the current electoral period: “To turn out the terrible government that we’ve got, to get the Greens into balance of power in both houses of parliament, and to implement a Green New Deal.”

So what, exactly, is the Green New Deal? The work on this new framing of Greens policy is generally seen as Bandt’s, though Christine Milne is quick to say that the ideas had been discussed within the party since at least 2008.

The name references US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s program of public works and financial reforms to spur recovery after the Great Depression. More recently, it has been linked to a resolution introduced in the US Congress by Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey. The term is also prominent in the policies of European Green parties.

Bandt talked about the Green New Deal in his first public statement upon taking the leadership in February. “The two elements of a Green New Deal – government taking the lead to create new jobs and industries, and universal services to ensure no one is left behind – are the values I have been fighting for my whole adult life … With a Green New Deal we can create new jobs by inspiring a manufacturing renaissance and turning Australia into a renewable energy superpower. We can get dental fully covered under Medicare. We can make public schools genuinely free.”

Milne says that she is glad Bandt has adopted the Green New Deal terminology, but adds, perhaps with just a hint of acid, “It’s a bit like Humpty Dumpty. You know, when I use a word it means exactly what I choose it to mean. So I think when it comes down to tin tacks you will see differences between the European Greens and the American Democrats and the Australian Greens. We’ll see.”

Asked to nominate Bandt’s strengths, she mentions his thoughtfulness and his communication skills. Asked for his weaknesses, she says, “He has not got a background of environmental campaigning. So he may have to work hard to bring the broader environmental movement with him.” On the other hand, he has a strong record of persuading some unions to back the Greens.

The differences between Bandt and Di Natale, she asserts, will be more of style than substance.

Some differences are already clear. Between 2016 and 2019, Bandt was the Greens climate-change spokesperson. Rather than alienating mining workers, he reached out to them – touring mining sites, talking up new jobs. He says he sees it as vital not only to criticise but to offer a way forward.

So what does he think of the Bob Brown–led anti-Adani mine convoy before the last federal election, which Labor blames for costing it seats?

He rejects the idea that the convoy cost Labor seats. That was much more to do with Clive Palmer’s aggressive advertising, he says.

But would he lead such a convoy? Was it a good idea? He neatly dodges the question.

“Even if no convoy happens at the next election, you are going to find grandmothers are going to start lying down in front of bulldozers to stop coalmines going ahead. And Labor has to decide where it stands on that … it comes back to that fundamental question of Labor straddling both sides of the fence.”

I put to him that there is an alternative way of reading the current virus-driven emergency. Rather than evidencing the death of neoliberalism, the disruption might instead fuel the rise of the far right – just as Hitler rose after the Great Depression.

He agrees on the risk.

“If there’s one word to describe the sentiment in Australia and in large parts of the world, it’s ‘anxious’ … People are feeling anxious because the basics of life are no longer guaranteed … You can be in a full-time job and still be in poverty. A lot of jobs are highly insecure. If you don’t have a job, then you are really in strife and you’ve got the climate crisis coming in as well, which is making it very difficult for people to think about the future.”

This anxiety, he says, and a Greens-led coalition of the anxious, will transform political alignments.

That is why the Green New Deal is important. It offers a way out of the “terrible strife we are in”, and hope is a bulwark against “barbarism”.

I exit Bandt’s office into the streets of Fitzroy. Unbeknown to either of us, while we were talking 2700 passengers from the Ruby Princess cruise ship were allowed to disembark in Sydney. Some of them are carrying the virus, and they have dispersed, spreading the disease. I later imagine that Bandt might describe it as a failure of the strong state of neoliberalism. Border security not so strong after all.

Then, within days, the government that had been so intent on cuts and surplus in February begins to act almost as though it had been listening to Bandt speak. It delivers the largest package of stimulus measures in Australian history. Wages are to be subsidised. Private hospitals are to be brought into the public system. Childcare is to be free. There is even talk of nationalising airlines.

It is evidence of the transformative effect of emergencies, and their political power. A new deal, if not a Green New Deal. The question is whether the Greens, under Bandt, can steal the moment, or whether they will be left with nowhere to move.

There you go. Just call me the thread starter.

Clearly this is the place to go for the Bandtz

[mat the expat]

It may be minor but the Media will be all over it due to Covid-reporting fatigue.

They want something different to report on.

Q&A was much better last night, they rolled out VIrginia Trioli who handled the Politicians much better than Angus (He's too soft).

Trioli is awesome. In fact her the the bloke her co-host on ABC News breakfast are two of the best, toughest journalists in the country.

She’s also hot. Like Kristina Kenneally hot.

I'm more of Julia Baird from the Drum kind of guy

[Carter's Choice]

So having spent weeks demanding for all state borders to be re-opened, Scott Morrison has come out today and demanded that Dan Andrews lockdown swathes of Melbourne to contain their recent COVID-19 outbreak. Scott Morrison loves claiming credit when things are going well, but is the first to blame the state Premiers when things start going badly. Absolute dickhead.

[Caley_Red]

So having spent weeks demanding for all state borders to be re-opened, Scott Morrison has come out today and demanded that Dan Andrews lockdown swathes of Melbourne to contain their recent COVID-19 outbreak. Scott Morrison loves claiming credit when things are going well, but is the first to blame the state Premiers when things start going badly. Absolute dickhead.

I think that's a little unfair: the situation in Melbourne has deteriorated significantly in the last week and therefore a revision of policy view is in order, in my view.

On the bright side, Queensland is back which means Whitsunday Island and Northern QLD holiday is on!

[Ellafan]

And now in the official colour:

[Guy Smiley]

Just imagine Kristina draped across the passenger seat in that.

I know paint technology has come a long way but there’s something special about the colours manufacturers used back in the 70s. That purple is outrageously good. Chrysler used lime green and bright orange. Fleetwood Mac were on the wireless and skateboards were made of wood, it was always summer. For the whole decade. Just summer... let’s just have the 70s again.

[Carter's Choice]

Things are getting messy in Victoria. 10 postcodes in the greater Melbourne metropolitan area are having partical lockdowns imposed on them, with the only valid reason for people to leave their homes being;

• Going to work or school
• Care or care giving
• Daily exercise
• Buying food and other essentials

I just don't know how the state govt can effectively lockdown individual suburbs. The statewide lockdowns in March and April were hard enough to police, and that was when everyone was locked down under the same rules. I just don;t see how this is practical and therefore I see the spread of COVID-19 in Victoria getting worse, not better. In saying that the actual figures are still low and people in the UK, US or Europe would love to have Melbourne's infection rates right now.

Scott Morrison meanwhile is doing his usual thing and bagging the State Premiers for wanting to keep their citizens safe, taunting the QLD Premier for closing her border to Victoria, and demanding that she "get some perspective".

https://www.theage.com.au/national/vict ... 557q4.html

[Guy Smiley]

Public complacency was always going to lead to outbreaks... in this case perhaps down to poor communication of guidelines with suggestions no govt instructions were translated into languages of origin until too late.

I think the states have made a fair fist of managing the overall pandemic response. Canberra just sits around with its thumb up its date blaming everyone else.

[Carter's Choice]

Public complacency was always going to lead to outbreaks... in this case perhaps down to poor communication of guidelines with suggestions no govt instructions were translated into languages of origin until too late.

I think the states have made a fair fist of managing the overall pandemic response. Canberra just sits around with its thumb up its date blaming everyone else.

Yup, Morrison demands to be given the credit when things are going well, but immediately shifts all responsibility to the states when things are going badly.

The vertical fiscal imbalance of the Commonwealth really needs to be looked at. The state do all the provision of services, and ultimately have responsibility for everything, but the Feds have all the money due to their taxation rights. This is not sustainable.

[Guy Smiley]

Public complacency was always going to lead to outbreaks... in this case perhaps down to poor communication of guidelines with suggestions no govt instructions were translated into languages of origin until too late.

I think the states have made a fair fist of managing the overall pandemic response. Canberra just sits around with its thumb up its date blaming everyone else.

Yup, Morrison demands to be given the credit when things are going well, but immediately shifts all responsibility to the states when things are going badly.

The vertical fiscal imbalance of the Commonwealth really needs to be looked at. The state do all the provision of services, and ultimately have responsibility for everything, but the Feds have all the money due to their taxation rights. This is not sustainable.

It’s been quite a revealing aspect of the pandemic response in Australia to see the degree of power the States actually retain under Federation. Morrison has made various directions and almost threats at stages but the states continue to direct their own policy. The National Cabinet appears to be a successful replacement for COAG with the only worrying aspect being that it doesn’t fall under the same FOI requirements.

[mat the expat]

The National Cabinet appears to be a successful replacement for COAG with the only worrying aspect being that it doesn’t fall under the same FOI requirements.

It should also have an Opposition representative also for contingency as well

[Carter's Choice]

Sky News have called the Eden Monaro by-election for the Coalition, and their political editor Andrew Clennell has also said this will cost Anthony Albanese his job as leader of the ALP. Sky commentators are joyous about this declaration, but questioning whether Morrison should have surrendered this by election to the ALP so that Albanese would have been assured to lead the ALP to the next election. So sure are they they Morrison has Albanese's measure.

Scott Morrison is a dishonest turd. And the Coalition only enjoy a 51-49 lead in the 2PP, despite spending billions on stimulus over the past few months. This stimulus will eventually cease, thousands of people of Jobkeeper and JobSeeker will feel a massive financial squeeze, and then we will see how popular Morrison is. It's easy to be popular when you are giving everyone between $1100 and $1500 AUD a fortnight.

[Ellafan]

Is the thread going to be a labour party branch meeting back slappathon like the old one, or will actual political debate be encouraged?

[Carter's Choice]

Is the thread going to be a labour party branch meeting back slappathon like the old one, or will actual political debate be encouraged?

Dumb post given there were fewer ALP voters on the last thread than there were Green and Coalition voters.

[Guy Smiley]

Is the thread going to be a labour party branch meeting back slappathon like the old one, or will actual political debate be encouraged?

Suck all the conservative cock you like, you don’t have to ask anyone for permission.

[The Taipan]

This thread is already an absolute shit show

Full of Rose drinkers and people who were bullied at school

Close it down.

[Guy Smiley]

Well to be fair, we’re waiting for a four termer or two to show up and really spread some bullshit.

[Muttonbird]

Is the thread going to be a labour party branch meeting back slappathon like the old one, or will actual political debate be encouraged?

Suck all the conservative cock you like, you don’t have to ask anyone for permission.

Oh look. It's Shanky and the other Shanky, Sluggy, thinking anyone else cares.

[The Taipan]

Well to be fair, we’re waiting for a four termer or two to show up and really spread some bullshit.

Let's have a look at the Green's contribution to the debate

Adam Bandt
@AdamBandt
·
18m
The Chinese Government’s passage of Hong Kong's so-called national security law makes a mockery of the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’.

That agreement was supposed to last 50 years - but today is just its 23rd anniversary.

Nice work Adam Obvious

[Guy Smiley]

Four term Tony