Are the Greens headed for an electoral disaster?
It hasn’t been easy being Green recently. Everything seems to be going wrong.
The long-time civil war between outright Marxists and the
merely moderately insane in New South Wales has recently broken out into the
open with accused sex pest MP Jeremy
Buckingham declaring the extremists to have taken effective control before
publicly and dramatically quitting the party late last year. Party founder Bob
Brown has declared his dismay that the NSW branch of the Greens is now so
extreme that they won’t even accept him anymore.
An old internal dispute in Victoria has raised its ugly head
again with long-time activist and perennial electoral candidate Alex Bhathal leaving
the party in disgust along with what in some reports is about a third of the Victorian
membership joining her in the rush for the door. Allegations and counter
allegations of bullying, intimidation and branch stacking are tearing what were
once some of the healthiest Greens branches in Australia to shreds.
The Victorian election was a disaster for the party with the
Greens vote dropping and Greens seats dwindling to almost nothing. Part of this
was no doubt due to the fact that the Greens had to dis-endorse one of their
candidates in Dominic
Phillips for being an accused rapist while failing to dis-endorse another
candidate who published rap songs describing himself drugging, raping and
beating women. This is on top of the Victorian Greens having to shell out a
hefty compensation pay out to a staffer for the sexually inappropriate
behaviour of Greg Barber the former Victorian Greens leader and current brother
in law of party boss Richard Di Natale.
Instead of addressing these concerns current Victorian party
leader Samantha Ratnam decided to attend a rally organised by a communist
group, then attended another rally organised by the same group a week later where
she made a speech while standing under the Anarcho-communist variant of the
flag of the “Antifa” terrorist group.
This is of course all in addition to the extreme and
disturbing allegations of cover up regarding rape and sexual assault by Greens
members and staffers in NSW and the ACT that were brought up in a shocking ABC
investigation. In some cases the Greens administrators have been accused of
dragging out cases and investigations relating to these allegations for years
while continuing to happily and repeatedly employ men accused of being violent
rapists on multiple election campaigns.
As if things couldn’t get any worse very public and ever so
slightly embarrassing allegations have been made that Greens
members have been writing former Senator and perpetual Stalinist Lee Rhiannon’s
private phone number on the walls of Sydney drinking establishments next to
offers for oral sex from the elderly socialist.
To add insult to injury the campaign to change the date of or
abolish Australia Day (a cause the Greens have attempted to make their own)
continues to be horrendously unpopular amongst the general Australian public with
some polls showing over 75% of Aussies firmly against any change.
It must be enough to make the Greens leadership think
nostalgically about the good old days of two years ago when all they had to
worry about was whether their Senators were dual citizens or not.
And now to make matters even worse their polling has dipped
federally in the run up to this year’s election. With less than 100 days before
the poll the Greens who scored 10% of the vote at the last election and a high
of 12% at the 2010 federal election are stalled at a maxiumum of 9% and the
rumours from ALP insiders is that their internal polling shows them in an even
worse state. You can’t blame the Labor party staffers for licking their lips.
Since Adam Bandt won the seat of Melbourne in 2010 the
Laborites have been looking over their shoulders nervously as the demographic
changes in inner Melbourne and Sydney seemed to be making once firmly red seats
into marginals. Conventional wisdom had it that soon not just the seat of Melbourne,
but the similar inner-city seats of Batman, Sydney and Grayndler would switch
to the Greens and stay there.
That may still happen of course, demographics is destiny
after all and the Greens upper middle class hipster base continues to
congregate in in ever greater clumps in the same inner urban constituencies,
but it looks ever more likely that it won’t be happening in this year’s
election.
And judging from the ever more nervous noises coming from Greens
HQ the watermelons may be in for a bit of a beating. Which should make the rest
of us smile.
