What about the Greens?

Fed up with the two-party duopoly—and with Labor’s attacks on workers and the oppressed—many see in the Greens a real alternative. Moreso than their European namesakes, the Australian Greens adopt the populist posture of a progressive, social-democratic challenge to the neoliberal consensus of Labor and the Coalition. They call to “tax the billionaires” and invest in public housing, oppose AUKUS and call for defence of Palestinians. On occasion they’ll even denounce union-busting attacks on the workers movement, such as those against the CFMEU.

But behind all this posturing is a fundamentally liberal middle-class outfit, with a political strategy doomed to collapse. The Greens are no vehicle for the advancement of working-class and anti-militarist politics, let alone a socialist and anti-imperialist one. While layers of (especially young) left-wing workers back them, their political and ideological basis is rooted in the “progressive-minded” layers of the inner-city petty bourgeoisie. Committed to upholding the capitalist system but with some tweaks, it’s no surprise then that the whole Greens strategy is to play the game of capitalist politics in hopes of finagling a deal with a minority Labor government.

We need to sink AUKUS, but we can’t do this without a program that challenges the fundamental interests of Australian capitalism. In spite of their grandstanding, the Greens uphold the US alliance, simply wanting to “renegotiate Australia’s position in the ANZUS treaty” on more favourable terms. As part of this, they want to build more missiles and drones at home as a “credible Plan B” to AUKUS. The dream of an “independent” militarised Australia, firing homegrown missiles as a more equitable partner to US imperialism, is a nationalist liberal fantasy. More importantly, it implicitly acquiesces to the role of junior partner to US imperialism which underpins Australian capitalist rule. The same goes for defending Palestine. As we wrote last year: “to really fight for Palestinian liberation means fighting to break the chain that ties Australia to the U.S. empire, an issue the Greens are not about to touch” (Red Battler No. 1, Autumn 2024).

The ultimate problem with the Greens is that liberal environmentalism, middle-class discomfort with poverty “in a rich country like Australia,” and pacifist anti-militarism is totally counterposed (and a hindrance) to rebuilding the working-class politics and organisation that is desperately demanded by the coming period of world crises. As economic instability and the drive to war increasingly put the squeeze on the whole of Australian society, escalating social tensions will only erode the social base for middle-class liberal progressivism and shatter its illusions.

Three decades of stability under US imperialist hegemony—and of global liberal triumphalism—provided ground for the Greens to step in as a non-socialist progressive third party. As this era quickly slips away, the politics of impotent Greenie liberal moralising, in spite of populist pretensions, can only engender greater reaction and hostility among working-class people—as it already does for many. The principal task today is the building of a credible and genuinely oppositional working-class alternative to Laborism and the bourgeois status quo. The path to this does not lead through the Greens.