Labor Academy on Dealing with the Greens

DEALING with the GREENS Tips for campaigners

The Greens Party certainly don't like Labor. They want to replace us. They know they are better than we are in every way. And they feel entitled to change the world from the cross bench, solve global conflicts from the suburbs, and define the identities and private lives of other people.

On the campaign doorstep, they can be a problem. They trade in scare campaigns and slurs. They tell public housing tenants that they are to lose their homes and rights. They tell Muslims that Labor hates them. They tell young people that Anthony Albanese could end the housing crisis tomorrow with the flick of an email. Above all, they have a better answer for everything. Nothing Labor proposes goes 'far enough'. They always know better.

Except, when they have any power, they stuff up. If they had supported the Rudd Government's CPRS, we would have prevented another decade of carbon emissions and probably even the rise of Tony Abbott. If they had supported the Malaysian Solution, many Rohingya lives would have been saved both in camps and on the sea. Again and again they delay, obfuscate and hamper Labor governments from delivering on their promises.

In local government they succumb to NIMBYISM on social housing, they fail to collect the rubbish, they ignore community needs for sporting facilities, they abandon the homeless, they obstruct necessary public housing renewal.

EMMA DAWSON of Per Capita, watched the Greens in action during the Rudd Gillard governments as a staffer, and will comment on policy.

CHANGES TO SPEAKERS: 

LOUISE CRAWFORD, LEAN Convenor for Victoria, Port Phillip Council, deputy Mayor

BEN DAVISON, former ACTU, now one half of the Week on Wednesday